On 02/05/07, K P kpbotany@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.