On 2/13/07, Cool Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
You are missing the point and issue. Are you suggesting that we should continue the way we are doing things right now?
Um, yes.
Not a bad argument at all. So if your idea breaks at a point we will end up with hundreds of improperly tagged math related articles. We have over 1,500,000 articles so we better not screw up in mass categorizing them. Cleaning up the mess is very tiresome.
Better is the enemy of good enough. Keep in mind that readers (you know, those people we're actually writing the encyclopedia for) are browsing through categories *right now*. It's nice, of course, to take a few months for an extensive discussion of how a particular category tree should be structured -- WP:MILHIST does this all the time -- but it's important that this not prevent the creation of a flawed, but *good enough for the reader* scheme in the interim.
Rulebooks and experts are not part of my or anyones proposal so far. In fact I am not in any way proposing rules or guidelines. What I am proposing is a discussion of any new categories.
The vast majority of new categories are "duh, obvious". For example, if an editor sees a "Battles involving France" category and a "Battles involving Germany" category, but no "Battles involving Italy" category, they really don't need to discuss the issue beforehand in order to create it; the number of errors you get by simply extending existing schemes to encompass all countries/states/etc. is so low that they can be quite neatly handled after the fact.
Massive reorganizations should, generally speaking, be discussed beforehand; but do people actually undertake them without discussion in practice? I haven't really encountered that sort of thing.
Kirill