Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 4

message: I think that categorys in wikipedia are getting rather confuse, and gets more confuse when you mess it with the lists.
I see many categories like Brazilian Political figures  or French painters of the XIX century. 
A simple way to clear those and make all more usefll would be adding a intersection feature on the categories. For example, i could put van gogh in many differents categories, like famous XX century people, Painters, French guys and Self mutilated nuts. 
then when I go to Category:Painters there would be a automatically generated link like 
Intersections:
*famous XX century people
*French guys 
Then when i click the first I would go to a page, something like
wikipedia.org/category:Painter+XX_century_people
wich would show all articles wich were painters AND XX century. This way, you can categorize wikipedia articles in a way that:
*people could do more things: Someone new to wikipedia could discover any relation on articles
*computers can understand better: i can program a computer to retrieve all information about political leaders from bulgaria even if no one created that topic.
*wikipedians work would be minimized. When you put Che guevara in argentine and comunist and political leader and reolutionary you are in fact making many new categories. He we be side to side with marx in one page, and with maradona in another. You don't need to make a category:argentine_revolutionaries |  category:argentinians | category:comunist_revolutionaries |  category:argentine_famous_asthmatics and etc.
well that's the idea. Comments?
--Alexandre Van de Sande 18:58, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Intersection of categories

message: I started :category:professional associations, but it could equally be named :category:Professional bodies or :category:Professional organizations and perhaps others I haven't considered.  What should be used? --bodnotbod » .....TALKQuietly)</span> 21:49, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)
:Hmmmm. I think the title is OK, but I think that you would be better off having it as the holder for the set of [[:Category:<Nationality> professional associations]] (with :Category:International professional associations in there as well). Noisy 09:15, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Naming help - professional associations

message: So we are having a small dispute on this article's talk page about whether or not same-name articles should be listed outside their same-name category.  I notice that this part of that page is derived verbatim from the top of the main Categorization project page here.  Unfortunately, the "Ohio" example given is no longer accurate.
I agree that sometimes, an article or subcategory needs to be in both a category and its parent, or a category and a sibling.  But for articles with the same name as a category (and which cover the same subject), I think that for ease of maintenance, the article should be assigned only to the same-name category, and the same-name category assigned to other categories.  At least, this seems to be the best solution for :Category:U.S. states.  I'd like to do the same in less crowded categories, too, for consistency.  What do you think? -- Beland 04:49, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article in category and parent-of-category 

message: Or, "the different needs that lists and categories serve."  I have just listed the subcategories of :Category:Books by title on Wikipedia:Categories for deletion—these group together articles on books based on the first letter in their title: :Category:Books starting with A, :Category:Books starting with B, and so on.  While I think alphabetized lists are quite proper, this is a misuse of categories.  Whether or not they start with B is totally arbitrary, and tells you nothing about the individual book nor about comparisons with other books that start with B.  The categories of books by year, by contrast, serves the purpose of grouping articles on books by period, which is a substantial and interesting relationship, and a rational way to classify the article subject as well.  While I believe that someone may read The Brothers Karamazov and be interested in what other books were published in 1880, I seriously doubt that anyone is going to want to next look up other books that start with the letter B.  We need to ensure that these are deleted, and to formulate a policy to deal with similar categorization attempts in the future.  As always, I'm imagining the slippery slope here:  :Category:Science topics that start with P, :Category:Presidents of the U.S. whose middle name starts with J...  If it needs to be done, do it with lists.  Postdlf 04:31, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Categories based on arbitrary relationships

message: [Referring to part of above list]
:*I took a look at :Category:Himalayas and I think I understand what was intended, but perhaps to remove any ambiguity the category name should be changed to :Category:Himalayan states.  Either way, instead of having :Category:India as a subcategory, a new :Category:Himalayan states of India should be created.  This new category would include any parts of India in the Himalayan region (see Himalayan states).  The new category would also be a subcategory of :Category:India, and India would no longer appear as a subcategory for the region.  Sound ok? —Mike 03:15, Sep 9, 2004 (UTC)
:::You got it. :Category:Himalayan states of India fits entirely within both of its parent categories, so there can be no infinite loop. And :Category:Himalayas should certainly have a name change because it refers to territories, not to the mountains. Robin Patterson 22:30, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Subcategories that include more than their parent categories

message: I tried an experiment on the :Category:Fundamental; we have both main articles and categories on this (mis-named) page, in the discussion section, as well as the automatically-generated subcategories and the manually-entered categories for the page. The experiment was to substitute, as far as possible, for each wiki-link, the :Category:X in place of the X article which had been there before. I was able to simulate the semantic link which I believed was "currently not implemented in Wikipedia technology". All it takes is a parser which can distinguish sentences or statements (expressions which end in a period "."). This parser could rip through the Wikipedia and extract all statements containing statements like "All X verb Y." and we have a set of automatically generated predicates in a machine-readable/generated form. Not bad for a volunteer effort, eh? Now all we need is such a parser, which is do-able. As gracefool points out, the subcategory trees did not play a role in this experiment; rather the simple inclusion of an object (i.e., article) in a category (i.e., the Category namespace) is the technology which actually allows a form of intelligent semantic link. Ancheta Wis 11:21, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Some progress on [[semantic link]]s 

message: Several users, including myself, are in the support of the idea of categorizing stubs.  We've already created quite a number of categories, many which have now have quite a list of stubs.  However, standing policy noted to avoid self-references policy.  Please see the discussion at Category_talk:Stub_categories#New Stubs to Use. --AllyUnion (Talk) 11:31, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stub Categorization 

message: I've written a speil on why categories should be inclusive, not exclusive, and arbitrary rather than strictly hierarchical: What is a category? ··gracefool |☺ 00:30, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[User:gracefool/What is a category|What is a category?]] 

message: As I understand it, the current policy is that categories with a plural name are for representing is-a relations, in the sense that Lion is in :Category:Cats because, well, a lion is a cat.  Conversely, categories with a singular name are for articles related to a subject.  In a way, you can think of the singular category X as articles related to X.
However, quite a few terms, particularly in mathematics, appear in the plural form only, and there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to deal with that.
In general, it doesn't look as if the plural category idea as described above is being followed, with the possible exception of categorisation of people.  Right now, categories aren't very usable for generating lists (since someone inevitably put some articles in a subcategory, and there doesn't seem to be a way to recursively enumerate a category and all its subcategories, plus the problem of miscategorised articles).
So, to fix the most immediate problem first, are there any good proposals for naming plural categories when the plural name is already used for a singular category?
Prumpf 12:58, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Could you give some examples of category names that you want to use to represent "is-a" relationships (as is usually done with plural names), but that are already used to represent other relationships (as is usually done with singular names)?  —AlanBarrett 19:04, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problems with the Plural Convention 

message: A page devoted to computer-assisted categorization of articles has been created at Wikipedia:Auto-categorization.  The first target is counties and municipalities in the United States. -- Beland 10:16, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Auto-categorization work 

message: It is, of course, possible to link to a category within the body of an article by preceding the "Category:" tag with a colon.  However, what are folks' opinions of this practice?  I think it's useful.  For example, I believe that the article Ford Motor Company should contain * :Category:Ford vehicles under See Also.  Otherwise, a reader might not know that this other category existed.  It would be foolish (and destructive of the category heirarchy) to insist that articles desiring to reference a category be a member of that category.  And it is unlikely that a user would discover a category, especially if it is seemingly unrelated.  Thoughts? --SFoskett 20:04, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)
:Depends. If the category is essentially the same as a list article that would be appropriate as a Related Article, then I see no problem with including the category as you describe. However, if there already is a list article that is more than a simple alphabetical listing--then I don't think it it necessary to add the category as well. In your specific example, there already is list of Ford vehicles, so I'd say no, don't add the category. older≠wiser 20:11, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Links to categories 

message: I tried posting this question over a month ago (Aug 20) at Category talk:Culture by country, but since I got no response there, I'm trying here, maybe someone can explain:
:I'm not sure I understand this category. Does this mean that if a culture doesn't have a nation-state, it doesn't get included at this level? What happens to, for example, Catalan culture, Gypsy culture, Jewish culture (most of which is an entirely other matter than Israeli culture), the cultures of various Native American nations? -- Jmabel 01:12, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)
::I don't see why not. Maurreen 02:52, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category:Culture by country 

message: Has the general idea of categories reached consensus? If so, where would be a good place to suggest that people put new articles into categories, and categories into larger categories? Maurreen 02:52, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Categories or not?

message: There are 20165 categories, from :category:.hack to :category:ß-lactam antibiotics. -- user:zanimum
*And how many cats do you think there should be? —Mike 03:34, Sep 7, 2004 (UTC)
*20,000 categories for almost a million articles seems like a fair ratio, especially taking into consideration that there are a number of categories that necessarily supercategorize other categories rather than articles. -Sean Curtin 03:39, Sep 7, 2004 (UTC)
*The number has grown by about 50% in the last month!  There is a general movement to categorize taking place. I'm not convinced it's the way to go.  Too many people seem to be categorizing without agreeing a structure first.  Noisy 09:07, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Too many cats--- 20165 to be exact

message: * By popular demand... User:Pearle/categories-alpha (~700k!) contains a plaintext list, sorted alphabetically, of all categories that existed in the database or were linked to from an article or subcategory in the latest database dump. -- Beland 02:50, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  One-page alphabetical listing 

message: If we add "Category:A Category:B" to the bottom of an article, it'll display: Categories: A | B.
But if we switch it, this order will also switch.
So, there should be a default way of sorting categories. I suggest we sort them by meaning or importance within the article, and not alphabetically.
For example, let's take Edgar Allan Poe:
Categories: 1809 births | 1849 deaths | People From Baltimore | Edgar Allan Poe | American writers | Science fiction writers | U.S. poets | Virginians
That's messy. Why his birth, his death and the fact his from Baltimore come before the fact he is writer? Each category has some connection to the article's subject, and the strongest connections SHOULD come first. In this case, I think it should be something like:
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe | American writers | U.S. poets | Science fiction writers | 1809 births | 1849 deaths | Virginians | People From Baltimore
Why? Well, simply because:
# He has his own category, and therefore, this category is strongly related to the article about him
# He is mostly known as a writer, otherwise he probably wouldn't even have an article here!
# He was an important US poet ("poet" is within "writer")
# He also wrote science fiction (also inside "writer")
# He was born in 1809 (birth comes first)
# He died in 1894 (then death, if it should)
# He is a virginian
# He is from Baltimore
Does anyone agree with me? Then we should make it as a guideline and add it to the categorization page. Thanks  — Kieff | Talk 08:44, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)
:Sounds good to me.  If no one objects for a week or so, I'd say add it to the page. JesseW 10:44, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure there should be a default. But if we do set a guideline, I lead toward alphabetical order, partly because it's objective. Maurreen 19:08, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sorting categories 

message: :Some articles have
 Category:Plants
at the bottom, which comes out as a link as you would expect;
some have 
  
which comes out as 
 Categories: Botany | Tree of life
?? What's the deal?
Which is more correct? Why are there two different techniques? Shouldn't these two be connected?Gzuckier 22:48, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Huh. That's interesting. Haven't come across that before. I think it may be a mistaken attempt to use some sort of shortcut by inserting :Category:Plants using the template inclusion syntax:   . The resulting "Categories: Botany | Tree of life" appear in the article because they are the parent categories for :Category:Plants. If you look at the article Hen and chicks, you can not only see the not only the categories, but also the   template also mistakenly appears below the external links section. This should be corrected whenever you come across it and converted to use Category:Plants (or a more specific subcategory) older≠wiser 23:07, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)
Ah. Many thanks. Gzuckier 15:45, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: [[category vs {{category?

message: User:Hyacinth added this line recently.  While I think its a good idea, I don't totally understand it.  I assume it means that if there is an article with the same name as a category, it should be included in the category; it does not mean that all articles should be in a category of their own, or that all categories should have an article with their same name.  Or does it?  If I was sure, I would just change it, but I'm not.  Hyacinth, please explain further.  JesseW 01:26, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. See page and please edit. Hyacinth 01:42, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: That's much better.  Thanks! JesseW 03:20, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  "An article on a subject should be in a category of the same name." 

message: After some discussion at Category talk:Years (some of which occurred on the Village Pump), I'd like to propose the following way of handling year categories, such as :Category:2004:
* Subcategories and articles should be sorted in the category by topic (and, when relevant, chronologically), rather than simply alphabetically.
* This means that an article like 2004 in film would contain the category reference Film, 2004 Canadian budget would contain the reference Canadian budget, and so forth. (Similarly for subcategory pages.)
* A List of... article like List of religious leaders in 2004 would contain Religious leaders.
* The article 2004 itself would contain *, to make it sort first among all articles.
* A month article like October 2004 would contain *2004-10 to make it sort chronologically in the first section on the category page.
See :Category:2004, :Category:2003 and :Category:2002 for the results of these proposals.  (Note that these have changed a little since I last worked on them, so they don't follow this scheme exactly. You should still get the idea, though.)
Compare to, say, :Category:2001, :Category:2000 and :Category:1999, which have not been systematically changed to this format.
Any objections to my adding (some of) these suggestions to Wikipedia:Categorization? Should this be officially voted on? I forsee the most controversy coming in the areas of 2004 in... and List of... type pages, but so far I've only heard one objection, from User:Docu — see his objections at User talk:D6#Better sorting for year categories. - dcljr 21:53, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Better sorting for year categories 

message: Hi, wondered if any of you had any good ideas about how to organise a schema for articles about sources/references? We've had a look at the existing category schemes and this seems to be rather big gap. Discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Forum_for_Encyclopedic_Standards#Source_category : ChrisG 18:40, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Categorising articles about sources/references

message: I believe many contributors seem to think of categories as keywords rather than hierarchical "is a" relationships and effectively attempt to use categorization as a general indexing mechanism for wikipedia articles.  In the limit, I think this leads to a category for every word or concept expressed in an article as well as requests for features like category intersection and union.  As gracefool eloquently points out in What is a category? the current category feature is in reality a mechanism for defining sets where each category (or set) contains articles and other categories (sets).  Using explicitly defined set membership as in indexing mechanism seems fairly inefficient.  Given the ability of google to fully index nearly every page on the entire web, I don't see any particular reason wikipedia should not provide a searchable, full text, index of all its articles.  In addition, just as google provides the ability to restrict searches by DNS domain, wikipedia could provide the ability to restrict searches by category and by wikipedia links.  I think this would go a long way toward eliminating the desire to create categories and could help avoid some of the arguments about how articles are categorized.  For example (categories currently in WP:CFD):
* :category:Oil for Food - completely unnecessary, search for "links-to:oil for food" (this category isn't even currently necessary given "what links here")
* categories of the form <some property> <actual category> (e.g. :category:Venezuelan Soap Operas) - completely unnecessary, search for "links-to:soap opera" and "links-to:venezuela".  If you don't trust that the links exist in the article, search for the words "soap opera" and "venezuela".
The point is that many (perhaps even most) of the existing categories have nothing to do with categorization but rather address some form of indexing.  If indexing is explicitly addressed with a generalized search mechanism, the category feature can be used for something else. -- Rick Block 20:26, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories vs keywords 

message: Page Special:categories lists all categories alphabetically, beginning with numbered years, but is useless because I don't have the patience to scroll past the numbered entries!  I need to get all the way to the L's to find the name of the category I need.  Can a better way be found to help identify what categories are defines? RJFJR 05:43, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Special:categories page

message: The case-sensitive sorting of category entries is rather annoying. Are there any established conventions for dealing with it? For example, I just added the sort-text "Ponie" to the PONIE article to stop it from appearing before Perl 6 and Perl Design Patterns Book in :Category:Perl. A more serious example is :Category:Free software which has a lot of capitalized entries such as GNOME, GIMP, LAMP, etc.  — PhilHibbs | talk 14:49, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have logged a bug report for this.  — PhilHibbs | talk 10:39, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Case-sensitive sorting 

message: My understanding of main namespace categories, especially for people, should not include Wikipedia users, but there is not a specific admonition against this in the guidelines, but I think it should be added.  The closest to an admonition is included in: Wikipedia:Categorization#Wikipedia namespace, where it says:
:Categories relating to the Wikipedia namespace should be added only to the talk page of articles. For example, tags suggesting the article is needs work, or is listed on VfD would be placed on the talk page as they are relevant to editors, not an aid to browsing in the way ordinary categories are. Please use  on the Category description page to show that it is a Wikipedia-namespace category.
This arose because on Alkivar's user page, he lists himself in several article namespace people categories such as:   :Category:1978 births, :Category:DJs, :Category:People from Maine, :Category:People from Maryland and  :Category:Libertarians which is not the intention of these article namespace categories.
Listing himself in :Category:Wikipedian musicians, however is entirely appropriate as it a Wikipedia-specific category.  I removed the non-Wikipedia specific categories and he reverted the change, claiming no specific admonition against it.  It seems clear that it is, or should be, the implicit rule, so I propose to add the following explicit guideline:
:Categories relating to the User namespace should be added only to Wikipedia-specific categories 
::Users should not add their user pages to article namespace categories such as :Category:People or other subcategories, :Category:Biologists etc, which are reserved for pages in the article namespace.  However it is entirely appropriate to add a user page to Wikipedia-specific categories such as :Category:Wikipedians or other similar subcategories such as :Category:Wikipedian musicians.
Any objections, please let me know. --Lexor|Talk 09:57, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)
:Seems like a no-brainer. Could be even more specific and say that user pages should only be in categories descended from :Category:Wikipedians (or possibly other categories useful for pages outside the main namespace if anyone can think of any). grendel|khan 10:22, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)
::I agree, feel free to reword the above text along those lines. --Lexor|Talk 10:29, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)
For the record, there is some discussion about this at m:Help:Category, which is what I have cited when asking folks to remove categories from their user pages in the past: "Linking from a test page, user page, etc. to a category is considered to pollute the category." -Aranel ("Sarah") 23:37, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed policy: article namespace categories should not be added to user pages 

message: The section on creating categories says: 
How to create categories
Creating a category is as simple as adding a soft link to the appropriate article in the Category: namespace; for instance, to add Felis silvestris catus to the "fluffy creatures" category, you would edit the article and enter Category:Fluffy creatures at the bottom, but before interlanguage links. Although the link will not appear in the article text, a page called Category:Fluffy creatures is automatically created and it will list alphabetically all articles that contain the :Category:Fluffy creatures link. The appeal of categories is that unlike lists, they update themselves automatically, and that one can use them to quickly find related articles. However, categories are not a substitute for lists, and you will find that many articles belong to both lists and categories.
This is incorrect. The category is not created automatically. You have to create it yourself by adding something to that page. You can still put articles into a non-existent category, but it isn't of any use to anyone. Can we please update this to reflect the actual situation? A red-linked category, for all practical purposes, doesn't really exist. (Also, a link to the category does appear after the article text.) -Aranel ("Sarah") 17:40, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category creation