[WikiEN-l] bizarre: Women Novelists Wikipedia

[Charles Matthews]

On 26 April 2013 05:19, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
>
>
> Obviously we need to quit arguing and change it. Either a man or a woman
> mystery writer would be in both a gender category and a genre category,
> if we are to have gender categories.
>
>
The German Wikipedia does these things differently, and I once met a German
who thought our approach is plain "wrong". I.e. we should have categories
like Male, Female, and presumably XYY and so on (let's not not be
pedantic). Then, and this is the killer, if you want to research "American
female novelists" all you have to do is intersect the category Female with
the category "American novelists" (or the categories American and Novelist,
who cares, Venn diagrams are good). To do that, run the Catscan 2.0 tool on
the toolserver...

Sadly the toolserver these days is down more often that it should be. But
wait, the cavalry is coming. Real soon now Wikimedia Labs will be available.

I suggest, seriously, that the tech side could be taken into account here
as driving what people can get out of the category system, and so what we
want to put into it. It is part of a research resource, not a place for
attitudes.

Charles