[WikiEN-l] Category destruction

[K P]

On 5/1/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 30/04/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > Marc Riddell wrote
> >
> > > This is what I am asking for in WP. That is why both the main and sub
> > > categories need to be entered into each Article.
> >
> > I recall you saying all this some time ago, a propos your own view of
> what
> > would be convenient. I'm not clear this actually convenient for most
> users
> > of Wikipedia, i.e. to have large chunks of nested categories made
> explicit.
> >
> > Can you not just accept that the system doesn't revolve about your
> needs?
>
> I am going to be blunt and agree here; I don't think "the category
> system is fundamentally broken" can reasonably come from "because it
> doesn't work the way I think it ought". My subtle attempts to intimate
> this don't seem to have worked, and I want to be clear that I think
> we're all barking up the wrong tree. There are flaws in our category
> system, but this is not one of them.
>
> This is the basic issue here. Marc thinks categories should work in a
> way that conforms to his expectations - essentially, an
> undifferentiated list of all things with attribute X. Currently,
> categories are differentiated lists - topics split up into smaller
> sublists with each page hopefully only appearing once in any given
> topic-group.
>
> If we change the current system, things will be convenient for Marc;
> it will be more useful as a database. However, my experience is that
> most of our readers aren't looking for a database - they're looking
> for relatively focused, specific, categorisation for navigational
> purposes, where a tightly topical category of 20-50 articles is
> substantially more useful than a grand supercategory of 2000-5000.
>
> (Yes, we could have the tight topical categories in Marc's model - but
> at the cost of swamping pages with references to a huge number of
> categories which are redundant to one degree or another, and just make
> navigation that much more tricky for the user)
>
> Somewhere down thread, the mystical expertise of librarians was
> invoked. I am one, and I belive that tight categorisation is the way
> to go. I feel that Marc's model, if implemented in the simple
> quick-fix method of "just include parent and child categories in the
> same article" will actually make our categorisation less useful for
> general readers and editors, which in no way justifies the limited
> benefit of being able to do fancy searches on articles by subject
> attributes.
>
> We can get search in other ways; improving the methods we use to
> search, having some pseudo-database functions we can do with
> categories, would go a long way towards the desired effect.
> Categorisation is, however, used by our readers, and we shouldn't
> break it without a very pressing reason.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
> andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk



I personally don't think it's broken *because *it doesn't work the way I
want it to work.  I think it's broken because no-one can explain to me how
it works, and I've received at least two entirely contradictory answers
about how it works every single time I've asked.

>However, my experience is that
>most of our readers aren't looking for a database - they're looking
>for relatively focused, specific, categorisation for navigational
>purposes, where a tightly topical category of 20-50 articles is
>substantially more useful than a grand supercategory of 2000-5000.

A question I've asked a million things, then how do you categorize things
that come in already created categories that have more than 50 members? For
example, plant families can't be categories, because there are too many with
over 50 members, horticultural varieties of a specific species cannot be
categories because you can't have more than 50ish members, the
"substantially useful" size of a category.  Varieties of sage should be
broken up precisely how to conform to the category scheme, and doesn't this
wind up being original research when dealing with organism categories?

I'd be generally fine with any coherent scheme, because it simply could not
be as frustrating as no one knowing how the current scheme works.

KP