[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Andrew Gray]

2009/8/9 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:

> So all the biographies of women could be tagged "woman"? That would
> work, but only if the "woman" tag wasn't applied to other things as
> well. Maybe you would have to have "woman" + "biography"? Even then,
> it might not be exact. And then you would have "adult", "boy", "girl",
> "child", "male", "female".
>
> Tags and categories are different. Ideally, you would have both, or a
> clear of idea of what would be "primary" tags (what we call
> categories) and what are descriptive tags.

This is similar to what de.wp use, I believe:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman

[[Kategorie:Literatur (20. Jahrhundert)]]
[[Kategorie:Literatur (Englisch)]]
[[Kategorie:Autor]]
[[Kategorie:Pulitzer-Preisträger]]
[[Kategorie:Journalist]]
[[Kategorie:Person im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg]]
[[Kategorie:US-Amerikaner]]
[[Kategorie:Geboren 1912]]
[[Kategorie:Gestorben 1989]]
[[Kategorie:Frau]]

Note that in English, we'd consider most of these very high-level
categories, and indeed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman

[[Category:1912 births]]
[[Category:1989 deaths]]
[[Category:American Jews]]
[[Category:American military writers]]
[[Category:Historians of the United States]]
[[Category:German-American Jews]]
[[Category:Jewish American historians]]
[[Category:Morgenthau family|Barbara Tuchman]]
[[Category:Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners]]
[[Category:Radcliffe College alumni]]
[[Category:World War I historians]]

Almost all of those are *much* more specific categories - you wouldn't
get a "Historians of the United States" or "American military writers"
category in German, and you wouldn't get "Authors" or "Women" in
English.

Though, that said, it's very interesting to note that they each
reflect entirely different aspects. In German, being a writer is
emphasised. In English, the writing is dealt with more by subject
matter (...military writers / ...historians), and the Jewish
background is emphasised as much if not more than the nationality. A
German reader finds out about the Spanish Civil War; an English reader
finds out about Radcliffe.

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