[WikiEN-l] Category destruction

[Andrew Gray]

On 01/05/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> on 5/1/07 5:11 PM, Andrew Gray at shimgray at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > Categorisation is, however, used by our readers, and we shouldn't
> > break it without a very pressing reason.
>
> Do you, personally, use the current WP categorization system?

As a reader? Hard to say to what degree; I definitely make a great
deal of use of it as an editor, but the things you need as an editor
are different and it's hard to seperate the two aspects! Most of my
"reader" time is looking for specific facets, drilling straight to
individual articles, not browsing, so I'm not really the category
target audience... I do use it, though, just not as a major
navigational method.

I do, however, get to *see* a lot of people using Wikipedia. The
categories are effectively used as topic lists - indeed, many people
talk of categories *as* lists - in a way which I think bears out my
"keep granular" thesis. Open the cat, glance through the list, pick
the one that sounds right, go there. It would require a lot more
patience to do this for a much broader category.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk