On 3/24/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 24/03/07, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com>
wrote:
In the fullness of time, Wikipedia or some fork
of it will be
properly semantic, with a nice query interface that will let you
ask questions like "what are all the birds native to the Chicago
area?". In the meantime, people interested in such categorization
have little choice but to create these explicit categories and
lists, silly and overspecific though they sometimes seem to be.
I don't see much harm in this, other than the dreadful waste of
time (compared to, say, the time that could be spent implementing
a proper semantic scheme once and for all) and the inevitable
incompleteness and inaccuracy of the explicit lists.
Indeed. Note how a lot of lists were made more or less superfluous by
the category feature. Lists these days need to be of value by order
and/or annotation.
- d.
You're behind the times, it's categories that are superfluous, according to
the few users in CfD who have decreed it so.
The trend now is to remove categories and replace them with lists. Right
now on CfD, without prior consultation of the community of Wikipedia editors
who create and edit articles on biota (at least not through their various
community portals) an editor who is against categories by geography has got
together 2 like-minded editors and is ramming through deletion of biota by
geography categories in a trial run to do away with all of them and replace
them with lists.
I assumed that such a change in overall Wikipedia policy by a few editors
would have been well-thought out and understood and would have been relevant
to the area in which it was being implemented (biota and/or geography), and
asked questions (I have no idea what lists do and categories do, and assumed
that categories were created for a reason, but apparently not). The
questions were not answered, or answered by editors defending the deletion
who had little knowledge of physical geography (relevant to distributions of
biota) or biota. For the latter I offer this closing quote: "Indeed,
animals do not mind human borders, so anything found in one country is
likely also found in the next country over." This essentially means that
there likely nothing endemic to any country, which is purely original
speculation (not OR, as no research was involved in the statement.)
"List of birds native to Chicago area but
not the whole of North America"
Endemic to Chicago is the terminology.
KP