The real people out there want reliable ways of navigating categories. A one week discussion propr to mass categorization is a necesary evil IMHO. I do not believe it is reasonable to suggest otherwise.
Yes. we can't have such discussions because we do not have a median for it. Country categories are generally have been consistent and we do not have a lot of problems there since we have been following a solid and well discussed pattern. There is no rule book, though there is a vague guideline.
As for people categories, we currently have a mountain load of useless categories. And over-all they are a mess. CfD has tens of cases every day.
- Cool Cat
On 2/13/07, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
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
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