[WikiEN-l] Category destruction

[Andrew Gray]

On 02/05/07, K P <kpbotany at gmail.com> wrote:

> >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?

No, no, no, no. "20-50" was an arbitrary number I pulled out of the
air - it's just saying that, from a usability perspective, a category
of a few dozen is better than a category of a few thousand. This is
not an attempt to legislate size!

We shouldn't be *artificially* subdividing categories - we will always
have some unwieldy categories, ones which can't fundamentally be
broken down any easier. There is nothing wrong with having the
occasional overly-large category, as long as there is a reason for
that - the reason here being "it would not be helpful to subdivide
further".

Categorise on the most granular scale that is useful and practical. If
you can't usefully divide a category below a thousand members, then
leave it with a thousand members - but most categories can, and
should, be broken down well before you reach that point.

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