Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 1

message: * To minimise reinvention of wheels, consider the category structures of Web directories such as www.zeal.com, which have been painstakingly thought out over long periods. Some of them cater well for the "converging path" problem, eg "Country and Western Dancing" should be locatable under "Music" and under "Folklore" and under "Dance Styles". See, as a starter, Zeal's main top-level categories (Entertainment, Work & Money, Computing, Shopping, People & Chat, Sports, Lifestyle, Travel, Library, and Personal), and follow a few down: http://www.zeal.com/category/preview.jhtml?cid=302562 - and/or see the three paths that lead to the "Country and Western Dancing" category at http://www.zeal.com/category/profile.jhtml?cid=225504 (two of them are not the main line and are listed at "Symlinks to this category"). Wikipedia can improve on those Web directories with its upward links (Zeal doesn't let you easily browse up in any line except the main path; others are probably the same). - Robin Patterson 01:07, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Using other sites as a guide to category structure 

message: Removed from the page:
:Non-gendered terms are required. :Category:Actors and Actresses is used instead of Category:Actors or Category:Actresses.
I fail to see why we couldn't have gender specific categories, e.g. there is a list of famous women in history, and we could also have a similar category. -- User:Docu
The idea that categories should be plural really should be re-examined. Shakespeare was a playwright, not a playwrights. Elizabeth II is a monarch, not a monarchs, a queen, not a queens, a female, not a females, a woman, not a women. John XIII was a pope, not a popes. - Nunh-huh 20:52, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, the category links to what group(s) the people belong to.  Elizabeth II isn't the only monarch, but is a member of the group of monarchs, John XXIII isn't the only pope, but is one of the many people who make up the group of popes.  I can see your argument, as well, so I have no prefrence. Gentgeen 23:21, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Naming conventions 

message: Should we split articles that deal with more than one thing with the same name (where one is not obviously more important than others), eg William Baldwin?, before adding categories to the page? - Jeandré, 2004-05-31t23:00z
:Well, eventually such articles will need to be split anyway. If you want to split them as you're adding categories, that's fine, but if not, I don't see any harm in adding categories before splitting. --Camembert
::On unsplit pages, it might be a good idea to add the category markers at the end of the text section they are relevant to, rather the end of the article itself, to make splitting easier and less error prone in the future.  If the category applies to both sections then...well...uh...just don't list the category twice.  8-> --ssd 03:43, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Pages with different entries

message: I have placed Pudding, Pie, and Yoghurt into both :Category:Desserts and :Category:Food and drink, even though :Category:Desserts is a subcategory of :Category:Food and drink.  That's because these items are each really two closely related ideas: a food item which may be savory, and a dessert made with that food item prepared sweet.
I'm pointing this out just so that we don't get too strict on the heirarchicalization policy.  Sometimes it needs to be broken.
If we did require strict heirarchicalization, the alternatives I see would be:
#Create a new subcategory of :Category:Food and drink, called, say, Foods that are often but not always desserts.  Yuck.
#Just put these things into :Category:Desserts.  This is easy, but it's also just wrong.  A chicken pot pie is not a dessert, and no amount of stamping our feet will make it one.
#Just put these things into :Category:Food and drink.  That's better — at least it doesn't require knowingly encoding wrong information into WP.  But it means that when someone goes looking for desserts, they won't see Pie, which they should, because pie is a dessert — except when it's not. 
--TreyHarris 01:01, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Cow pies are also not pies, at least in the conventional sense. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:02, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: I think we should do it "correctly" and not have to fix everything later if/when the code arrives because we categorized everything in every possibly applicable category instead of the most specific applicable categories. -- Cyrius|✎ 18:17, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, and you forgot about Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe :) -- Cyrius|✎ 18:21, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: I'm rather thinking that unless a category has a sufficiently wide remit to get a reasonable number of entries it shouldn't exist. :Category:Philosophers should be a link on all philosphers, :Category:Musicians on all musicians. Add multiple categories (eg. :Category:German people, :Category:Guitarists) or whatever, but keet the category itself fairly major, otherwise the tree will get so nested that it will become unusable by, uh, 'users'. --VampWillow 00:26, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I tend to agree that categories shouldn't be so specific that they don't have much in them.  However, we're only just now setting up categories, so I think it would be better right now to be nice and specific, and build category structure to fill out later, and maybe trim and un-nest it later. --ssd 22:07, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Breaking the heirarchy on purpose 

message: Looking at the new category system, the one think it should do in future it doesn't do now is drawing nice graphical representations of our hierarchy trees. To look if this could be possible one day, I tried if a category can be a super-category of its own sub-category: See :Category:Testing circularity, :Category:Testing circularity 2. In other words: we can do infinite loops with the category tags, which makes drawing algorithms (or any other automatical use of the category tags, like listing content of sub-category in super-category) quite a bit more complex. Is this a bug, is it a feature, should this be forbidden, regulated, automatical recognized and marked? -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 11:39, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's technically a feature, but should be avoided in the general categorization scheme. Any category traversal algorithm (be it for graphing or anything else) will have to handle encountering loops, because we can't guarantee that they won't exist. -- Cyrius|✎ 18:06, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: It's trivial as long as you remember that you need to handle it. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:07, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: And it makes algorithms more time-consuming if you have to test every node with every node you have already visited. -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 20:18, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: It gets a little harder if someone creates :Category:all categories which don't include themselves ;-) -- Solipsist 21:07, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Circles 

message: Two issues. First, there's :Category:9/11, a member of :Category:Terrorist incidents. There are lots of people associated with 9/11 in one way or the other. I was thinking of making a subcategory :Category:9/11 Commission members, which would include the members of that commission, but then I thought, the Commission Director (Philip D. Zelikow) isn't technically a member, and it would be a shame to exclude him. I could make it simply :Category:9/11 Commission, or :Category:People associated with the 9/11 Commission, but then one might want to include the people they interviewed. Which one could. So what's the best way to organize this?
Second, let's say there comes to be a :Category:People interviewed by the 9/11 Commission. (There are, after all, dozens, and this is information people might want to browse through.) Besides the fact that this would be an awfully long name, it would have to include George W. Bush. Which would indicate to me that the man would have a lot of categories. Off the top of my head, I can think of :Category:Presidents, :Category:People interviewed by the 9/11 Commission, :Category: People associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, :Category:Oil Executives, :Category:Republicans, :Category:Neoconservatives (although that's pushing it), :Category: Baseball team owners, and soon, possibly, :Category:Defendants in the Valerie Plame case. My point is, particularly famous and diverse people are going to be in a dozen, maybe dozens of, categories. Is this according to plan? Quadell (talk) 19:14, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
:I see no problem with Dubya being in multiple categories- as he's been famous in several roles, I see no problem with that... He is the President of the US, Leader of the Armed forces and all that. - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 19:36, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
::In practice most things and people can belong to several orthogonal categories. If the categories are not independent then there is a move to fit them into a category heirachy somewhere. I guess if it gets too far out of had you might want to give priority to some categories and hide others to avoid an over-long category line. As far as Dubya is concerned, don't forget to add :Category:Functional illiterates --  Solipsist 20:47, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Example of confusion using the 9/11 commission 

message: Now, what is the plural of person.  Is it (1) people or (2) persons; the answer is persons; people is a mass noun, and although in common usage as a plural of person, that usage is incorrect. Dunc_Harris|☺ 20:08, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Persons v people 

message: In the enthusiasm to populate Wikipedia with categories, the character of the project is changing in an unanticipated direction. Pages are being (randomly) categorised by proponents of various disciplines. There are three problems with this: 
*Firstly, over categorisation. I have seen the following anomalies in the last 24 hours:
** Shepton Mallet, a small town in England is categorised as British archaeology and nothing else
** walking is categoried as complementary and alternative medicine
** a lawyer who played chess is categorised as a chess player (subsequently as both)
*Secondly, clutter. Even if each of these categories is relevant (which can be doubted) the original page starts to clutter up rapidly.  Logically, there is no almost limit to the extent to which categories can be applied to any page for the imaginative editor.
*Thirdly, the neutral point of view is compromised. An example of this is domestic violence. One of the debates in this area is the extent to which claims of domestic violence are false or not. However, the category "abuse" has been blithely attached - thus begging one of the crucial issues. 
I suggest that there should be a Guideline for categorisation by which editors (1) exercise caution and err on the side of not ascribing a category unless the text of the page justifies it (2)limit the size of the categorisation link text so that it remains small in relation to the size of the page. It seems to me that without these minimal requirements we will end up with pages exhibiting content confusion. Pages will go through a long gestation period looking rather weird - perhaps even looking like they derive from a banner supported commercial website. Is there any solution to the problem of trying to create hierarchies in a more logical order? -- JPF 17:58, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Domestic violence is by definition abuse.  It's a different question whether any given incident could be called domestic violence or abuse.  But you make a good point about maintainging NPOV. Some categorizations might need to be labelled as disputed.  (Like whether or not something is part of Science...who knows.) -- Beland 07:36, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Creation order of hierarchies