Wikipedia talk:Categorization policy

message: Please add your opinion below!
Looking at the bigger picture, categories do not work in the vast majority of mirror sites. -- John Gohde 21:25, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

message: :Disagree--A virtue of WP is its flexibility. Another is its refusal to elevate members to exalted status or restrict them to a minor role. This proposal takes WP in the direction of the old Nupedia: "Let's have real experts do it right the first time." That's been shown not to work. 
:This proposal does point to some real problems; some of these may be an unavoidable "cost of doing business". But I'll wager there are more than 2 Finnish botanists, perhaps even more than 2 worthy of note. We simply haven't gotten around to filling out the category. In 100 or 200 years, I wouldn't be surprised to see a dozen in there. We're just laying the groundwork today. 
:I think it is appropriate to understand that over the next several centuries, Wikipedia and its sister projects will probably become the central repository for human knowledge: the primary source of durable, factual information, absorbing and subsuming all others. Maybe your planing horizon does not extend quite that far. (Sony Corporation's chairman once said that Sony's long-term planning horizon was 300 years in the future.) That's fine; work on today -- it's all we have now. 
:None of us today can fix a plan for WP, except in the most general terms, that will endure for centuries. Let's just stay flexible and trust in the Wiki Way to produce a work of value from moment to moment -- which is all that anyone has any use for, anyway.  — Xiong (talk) 15:07, 2005 Mar 17 (UTC)
*No, not exactly. This proposal makes sure that categorization is done by community consensus, rather than by whatever user happens to feel like making a new category. Just like we require a community vote for deleting anything, we should (imho) also require a community vote for major changes such as adding categories. The current category system is degenerating into a useless mess, and it is too large to be overseen by, say, a Wikiproject Category Watchers if any user can make any change at any time.  Radiant_* 15:45, Mar 17, 2005 (UTC)
::Replace "category" with "article" in that post, and read it again. Just for kicks ;) -- grm_wnr Esc 16:11, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: *Well, yes, but the inherent difference is that an individual category can reach over the entire 'pedia, and an individual article cannot. Nobody is saying that article creation should be restricted, that would be patently absurd and unWikiish. The slippery slope argument is a fallacy.  Radiant_* 16:42, Mar 17, 2005 (UTC)
I also disagree with the proposed restrictions on category creation. I think the current chaotic state of categorization is just a transient phase; en's collection of articles is vast and there's still an ongoing wild profusion of new categories being created to hold everything. Once most articles are thoroughly categorized I believe the process will start shifting over to consolidation, with categories being renamed and shuffled about and gradually coalescing into a more standardized and rational structure. Trying to "lock" categories at this point would only slow that process down, IMO. Bryan 09:04, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Disagree

message: If it is going to be policy to redirect lists with the same name to categories, it should be specified in the policy listing that any user (or whoever) can edit the category page for things other than adding subcategories, including adding redlinks.  And when the list is redirected, the redlinks existing should be put on the Category page.  Gene Nygaard 15:14, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redundancy with lists 

message: This is a horrible proposal. It goes against the very nature of Wikipedia. That is, the ability to edit anything and be bold. Right now, if I see something wrong with a category, I can just fix it. I don't have to appeal to the council of category gods and wait five days to see if my application is in order.
Locking categories will drastically restrict gradual improvements and lead to stagnation. Locking categories will also cause many editors to say "up yours, Wikipedia!" and find ways to organize things without categories. That is, they'll use lists and navigational templates and pseudo-categories instead. In other words, locking categories will make categories useless and obnoxous.
I'm all for an effort to create category standards and work with the local wikiprojects to share knowledge and create a grand category scheme, but this is absolutely the wrong way to do it. Make a WikiProject instead (See WikiProject Categories), and make it easier for people to find out about current guidelines and best practices. As Cburnett said, "The answer is education instead of legislation". - Pioneer-12 22:53, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes. Thank you, Pioneer-12. Septentrionalis 21:30, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Locking categories is evil 

message: In the long run, categories need to be a.) faster and b.) easier to edit.  (It's absolutely ridiculous that I had to write a bot to facilitate category moves.)  The proposal of storing a list of the members of a category in a single file, perhaps as an "enhanced" article, aligns well with both of these goals.  The important thing to preserve is that changes made in one place show up in all other relevant places.  That is, if you edit an article and add it to a category, that change shows up on the category page.  If you edit a category page and change the membership list, that change needs to show up in all the affected articles.  Lists can't do that, and that makes them potentially harder to maintain.  The proposed re-engineering would also make it possible for categories to be annotated, just like lists.  At that point, the only thing that lists would be good for that categories wouldn't, would be to create groups that aren't listed on the article pages themselves.  This can be good, because some articles would get cluttered up by all their memberships.  If a feature were added to enable categories to be "hidden", then categories would essentially obsolete lists, and then it would be a good idea to convert all lists into categories.  (I assume there would be a way for curious readers and editors to see an article's "hidden" category memberships.) -- Beland 06:16, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Lists and categories

message: The most common categorization mistake, and the one we are actually currently the most backlogged in fixing, is when someone puts an article in a category that doesn't exist or isn't connected to the universal category hierarchy.  These errors are actually easy to detect.  Every database dump, I have Pearle do a scan and dump a list on :Category:Orphaned categories.  I would support adding a "warning" message when someone tries to commit an article that links to a non-existent category:
:Category:Foo does not yet exist.  You might want to check your spelling or see if there is an appropriate existing category.  Choose 'Save anyway' to create this category.  Be sure to edit the category after it's created and put it in the appropriate parent category in the existing tree.
If someone is intentionally creating a category that the enlightened majority will think is malformed, that's fine with me.  It's much easier to clean up these few instances than the large number of errors and blind assignments. -- Beland 06:16, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I would support this as well.  It might even be useful to include in the message a generated list of possible alternatives (particularly spelling and capitalization variants).  -- Rick Block 19:24, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposal: "New category" warning

message: In an ideal world, the software would suggest some possible alternatives.  Pearle gives a "top ten best guesses" for Category:Orphaned categories.  The correct category is suggested less than 50% of the time, but I am using a very primitive algorithm.  Also, many times the "right" category is only a few clicks away from one that is suggested.  But doing this is very computationally intensive, and would take time to develop properly.  So this is a pie in the sky idea for now. -- Beland 06:16, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The Distant Future

message: :This is cross-posted from Wikipedia talk:Merge some redundant lists to categories, to get more general discussion
Lists and Categories generally try to solve the same problem, but have different appealing functionality. Categories are better conceptually, and save on manual edits, whereas lists allow for:
#Extra information per each item
#Missing articles ('Red links')
For #1, I propose parametrized categories (somewhat similar to template parameters). For example, in some actor's article, inserting Doe, John|Birth=...|Death=...|Descr=... would create properly formated item on the Category:Actors page, with birth/death/description next to the name. We can have some standardized formating element on the category page, describing how category parameters should be rendered:
 (here, '*' is auto-replaced with the article name)
For #2, category pages can allow special "missing" element template: . This element would force current category page to add "Jane Missing" to the list as a red link. A bot can later clean up  templates once articles have been written.
The feature request has been added to bugzilla: [Bug 1775]
--Yurik 07:23, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Solution: How to fix list vs categories shortcomings 

message: Overall, I think this proposal is a very good one. I'm wondering though, whether it's really a problem having a well-constructed category with few members. For example, if a particular WP reader has an interest in Finnish botanists, it would be useful for that person to see a Finnish botanist category. I think the real problem is that when an editor assigns the Finnish Botanist category (or the British Botanist category for that matter) you lose some of the utility of having all those botanists appear in the more general "Botanist" category. In other words, it prevents the display of a complete alphabetical listing of all articles that are at the same level of sub-category. It means there's no way that the reader will see all the botanists without clicking, one by one, through every national botanist category. This seems like a major problem even when the subcategories are well-populated.  Perhaps what is needed is a checkbox or button in the category page that will allow the reader to display all articles within the current set of subcats (or even one or two levels below). --Lee Hunter 15:42, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Lee Hunter is right; there should be an option to display articles in subcategories. And Radiant has a very good idea; an "intersection of x and y categories" feature would be very powerful. Wikipedia's MediaWiki needs a software upgrade. Now, where do I go to disuss MediaWiki software upgrades?... --Pioneer-12 19:23, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "Categories: Botanists by various nationalities - These are not useful. It breaks up the complete list of botanists at :Category:Botanists, thereby making pages much harder to find when one needs to know (a) if a particular botanist has a page, and (b) what the page is titled, when adding links at e.g. a plant named by that botanist. Botanists are also highly international in their work, and the their nationality is often completely irrelevant to the areas they worked in, making it hard to predict what their nationality might have been (e.g. Siebold worked mainly on Japanese plants while based at a Dutch mission, making it very hard to know that he can only be found listed at :Category:German botanists). These subcategories would be best deleted, or at the very least, any botanist listed at one of these subcategories must also be on the full list at :Category:Botanists". - MPF 13:05, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The Finnish botanist question

message: Rather than trying to split it up I'm just going to post all of my comments at once.
#Except for the fact that we cannot easily move them, categories are just like articles. We should no more require approval to create a category than to create an article. (A better idea might be to push for a feature that would allow us to move categories as easily as articles. Or at least more easily than is currently the case.) Categories are still relatively new. Standards are evolving. It's not an overnight process. 
#Using the stub sorting project as an example is actually fairly useful. The Project suggests  that new categories be discussed first, but it doesn't require this. Often, new stub categories are created without any consultation. If they are useful, they are kept and used (see for instance Template:Norway-bio-stub). If they are not useful, they may be deleted. 
#Categories are not lists. It's true that a list of articles is redundant with a category and should be merged. However, a list of, say, towns in Bosnia is not redundant, since there is a good chance that it will include items that do not currently have articles (but should). Lists also have the ability to be annotated, which makes them more appropriate for unusual or potentially controvesial subjects. 
#The way that templates and categories are used is evolving. Redundant templates exist. (There are also redundant articles. They are merged. The same should hold for templates and cateogories.) We are working towards standards. -Aranel ("Sarah") 00:23, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  General comments 

message: We have perhaps hundreds of thousands of articles that aren't in any categories, much less the right categories.  We also have lots of categories that are starting to get too big, and need someone ambitious to come along and subcategorize everything in them.  Personally, I do a fair bit of categorization of articles.  Having to ask for permission and wait 5 days before creating a new category would create a significant disincentive to do this work.  I would object to doing so; it severely undermines the open-edit principle of the Wiki.
If WP:CFD is overloaded deleting categories, just imagine what a bottleneck would be created by having to approve each new category!  Right now, far more categories need creating than need deleting.
I don't like the idea of prior restraint of the creation of categories.  Making ideas subject to the veto of others before anyone can see what the finished project would look like means that some good ideas will get vetoed for bad reasons, including by people who won't put in any effort to explain themselves or make a better suggestion. The time-consuming part of categorization is not fixing "Barish Foo" to "Foo of Bar", it's assigning articles to a category in the right genre in the first place.
The time-consuming part of WP:CFD is not so much the mechanics of moving articles and categories around; it's figuring out what to do when people disagree on what the proper names are.  The backlogged decisions on WP:CFD are usually those that aren't straightforward.  There was also a backlog for a while while Pearle was inactive, but that's since been cleared.  I hope to prevent that sort of thing from happening in the future by publishing her category cleanup code so that others can use it. (But first it needs to stabilize a bit.)
The category hierarchy is currently in an expansion phase, given how recently (compared to the size of the project) the category feature has been added.  Articles are currently being added to categories faster than articles are being created.  Obviously, the rate of categorization will slow down as the number of existing articles which have been categorized approaches 100%.  At that point, there will be far fewer spurious or redundant new categories created, and the "standardization crew" will have a chance to catch up.  Though some people already spend a lot of time "fixing" the category system without the approval of WP:CFD, either alone or in discussion on a local category talk page.  I think it's important that we encourage them to continue to do so. -- Beland 06:16, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: General opposition to prior restraint

message: Please keep in mind while pondering starting new WikiProjects that Wikipedia:Categorization and Wikipedia:Categorization projects (current) already exist as central collaboration points.  I also recently started :Category:Wikipedia_categories in need of attention as a central collaboration point for remedial category work.  It could certainly use more people fixing things up and also pointing out which categories need help. -- Beland 06:16, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: On starting a new WikiProject

message: Categories and navigational boxes are really the same concept with different front-end and back-end implementations.  Both mechanisms provide groups with membership lists, so all the related articles are linked to all the others, and updates are automatically propagated around.
There are pluses and minuses to each approach.  A page can get awfully crowded if there are too many navboxes on it, but viewing a category requires an extra click, and not everyone may realize what they are for.  (This could be changed, of course.)
The idea that "see also" links make the formation of categories unnecessary is somewhat misguided, I feel.  There are several reasons for this.
* In many cases, several articles will have "see also" lists that are nearly identical, because they form a logical group.  The problem comes when changes are made in one article but not the others.  Maintenance is simplified when the group is given a name and changes propagate automatically.
* Navigating around by inline and "see also" links is like moving around a maze of twisty passages, where you can only see one step ahead, and you're not sure where it will lead on the second step.  Even worse, it's a many-dimensional maze, with no clear sense of up and down.  Even with their many non-hierarchical cross-links, categories give more of a sense of having birds-eye view of things.  In a mature category system, you know that the list in front of you is the complete list of articles available on the subject, and that if you don't see what you need, you have a better idea of what direction you need to head.  A lot of times that means going up in abstract concept-space until you find the branch you want to be on, and then you follow that down to the specific topic you were interested in.  There's a reason that libraries have card catalogs - readers should be able to just know what resources are available on a particular topic.  They shouldn't have to waste time discovering them.  Putting articles into neat, tidy boxes and hierarchicalizing them makes article-space a lot easier for the human brain to comprehend and to navigate.  Though we do realize that our boxes are not and should not be entirely tidy and we do not and should not have a strict hierarchy.  But if we wanted to let readers explore the universe in its full and confusing complexity, we'd advise them to log out and go get lost in the woods.
* Categories carry a unique sort of information that creates new opportunities for useful information systems.  They are essentially tagging a particular article as being associated with a particular topic.  Inline links can't always be considered to be doing this.  Many of them link to other articles that are only tangentially related, because the article happens to mention a particular year or person or use a particularly confusing word.  Human-created, machine-readable "topic tags" are very useful as input for search engines and language-processing systems.  Yahoo! originally depended on a similar list which classified web pages.  Google's innovation was to extract information from inline-style links.  But what we have here is a web which directly tags and links semantic concepts; we are just beginning to experiment with ways to make productive use of this valuable information.
* As others have pointed out, these properties make categories useful as a maintenance tool.
-- Beland 06:16, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Contra Contra categories

message: In addition, categories do not work, unlike lists to related articles, during server problems. Categories are a real time feature that obviously puts a tremendous burden on Wikipedia's limited computer resources. -- John Gohde 05:59, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: To me, these are good reasons to a.) re-architect categories to make them more efficient, b.) visit the One True Wikipedia, which we should be encouraging people to do anyway, since that means that more edits will be contributed back to the main project. -- Beland 02:17, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The problem with categories

message: So, any and all editors are supposed to assign CAM articles at their own whim to a sub-category, without any advanced planning, guidance, or control from a Wikiproject? The science people like to say that all of alternative medicine is quackery, yet they seem to be failing to put articles in :category:Quackery rather than in :category:alternative medicine.
Wikipedia:Wikiproject:Alternative Medicine/Classification Systems has documented that there are at least seven different ways to classify CAM articles.
The WikiProject's infoboxes currently classifies branches of medicine four different ways.  That is NOT 4 categories.  That is four parallel ways of classifying each of which requires more than one category.
To implement categorization by Classification by Standard of Knowledge and Quality of the Evidence alone requires 5 different categories: Real Science, Protoscience, Pseudoscience, Enlightenment, and the Supernatural. In addition to these 5 categories, two other categories have already been implemented: :category:Quackery and :category:Fraud.
Kindly, explain the difference between the :category:Pseudoscience, :category:Quackery and :category:Fraud categories? What if someone decides to implement :category:Health fraud?
The implications of this is that most branches of alternative medicine articles can be classified 5 different ways and could have up to 5 sub alternative medicine categories alone.
Currently, there are already 11 subcategories in :category:alternative medicine.  Should we add one on CAM stubs?  Medicine already has :Category:Medicine stubs. As time goes by, without guidance and more guidelines to follow the number of these subcategories in :category:alternative medicine will get a lot bigger.
Now, exactly how does the use of categories enable visitors to find articles on alternative medicine? How do all these sub-categories help visitors find articles?
Time spent categorizing articles is a bottomless pit.  Putting infoboxes in articles takes time, but at least the number of articles is finite.  The way it is now, you could categorize articles for ever.  And, somebody is sure to come along at a later point in time to undo what you have spent time doing.
This does not motivate me to spend any more of my limited time categorizing. -- John Gohde 11:57, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Then please don't.  Simply complaining about the system isn't going to fix it.  Write and edit your articles how you choose, and let someone else categorize them.  That's the beauty of the system.  You don't have to do everything.    -Kbdank71 15:46, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The Paradox of Sub-Categorization

message: The current way people work on lists is usually like this:
*An item is added to a list, with or without redlink.
*A new page is created.
Since both the new page and the list are regular articles they are all cached, wich is fine.
The current way of using cats is:
*A new page is created.
*This new page is added to a category.
Since the category is (at least to my knowing) currently not cached this degrades server performance.
Wouldn't it be possible to implement cats as semi-dynamic lists?
When adding a page to a cat that would mean that the cat/list-hybrid page would be automatically updated. The only difference from the current situation with lists would then be that the creator of the article wouldn't have to manually add his article to the list. Then both the article and the cat could be regular pages. Thus it would (from caching perspective) behave just as good/bad as the current lists.
Since those things would be quite light-weight they would (perhaps) also be suitable for other things than cats.
Also some lists are embedded in other articles. That makes them very hard to find when compared to categories. This increases the risk of incomplete lists, i.e. articles that should be in some list, but aren't because the creator of the article didn't know about the list.
Just a thought. Shinobu 19:23, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Categories as semi-dynamic lists?

message: I think we should use relational databases as a source of inspiration, rather then as a design template. RDBs definitely have some abilities that would be very useful for MediaWiki to have. However, the nature of relational databases is that (1) they work best when implemented with a grand design, like a cathedral (2) there is a significant learning curve to using them. Wikipedia needs a system that (1) works well in a distributed environment (2) is easy (and "obvious") to use. A pure RDB sistem is just not appropriate, but a system inspired by RDBs might be. - Pioneer-12 22:26, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relational databases as inspiration 

message: Would it be better to promote categorisation work within the community instead of restricting some functionality to admins? I have been drafting a project for working on the categories: User:GregRobson/Categories/Draft Project Page. I have done some work with :Category:Education in the United Kingdom (see User:GregRobson/Schools and have made some progress. Feedback from the community has been good. There appears to be a number of people devoting time towards the categories, and I assume that some of those may not be admins. I say we should divert their energies into improving the category system - the more manpower we can focus on this task the better - if that fails, then perhaps we do need to limit the control people have? Greg Robson 15:32, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, some of those category spaces overlap. For example, "History of Country X" articles are influenced by both Wikipedia:WikiProject Countries and Wikipedia:WikiProject History. Also, many wikiprojects run into the same types of naming and categorization problems--such as "German cities vs. Cities in Germany" and when to make a subcategory. A "meta" WikiProject to compile, coordinate, and share knowledge would be very useful. - Pioneer-12 00:11, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories WikiProject instead of new policy? 

message: Regarding the topic of redundant lists...
Yesterday morning, I noticed that the page Gay icon included a "List of gay icons". There is also a category for gay icons. (A gay icon is a celebrity--not necessarily a gay celebrity--who is somehow important to the gay community. Check out the article for more information). The list in the article and the category were different, with some on the list and not in the category, some in the category and not on the list, and some in both. Last night, I rectified this by going to the page of every single person or group on the "List of gay icons", categorizing them as gay icons, and deleting the list from the article.
Now, the obvious question is, if the list was somehow vandalized or inaccurate (and it almost definitely was), wasn't I just doing more damage to Wikipedia by spreading it over 238(!) different articles? The answer, I believe, is no. The vandalized or inaccurate information in that list was already in Wikipedia, but it was only apparent to those who ventured to the article Gay icon. Now that the information, accurate or not, has been spread around to some 238 articles. So if we assume that only one out of four Wikipedia articles has a full-time editor (i.e. someone who watches the page to make sure it isn't vandalized or otherwise made inaccurate), and further assuming that the article Gay icon had five full-time editors, I have increased the number of editors overseeing this potentially incorrect information from five to 60. And these are only very conservative figures--Gay icon probably didn't have five full-time editors (for instance, LaToya Jackson was listed as "American singer/trainwreck"), and I'm sure more than 1 in 4 Wikipedia articles has at least one full-time editor.
My argument is that by blindly merging information from lists into categories where appropriate, fact-checking will be more effective. Another advantage to the technique of blindly merging information is that it can be done by a script or a bot.
I am, therefore, proposing a categorization project in conjunction with the redundant list policy proposed in this policy proposal. I am proposing that all lists on Wikipedia that can be made into categories, or already have been made into categories, be merged into said categories by a script. My work on the Gay Icon Project (as I am beginning to call it) is a test case for this.
I recognize that this may not be the best place to post this, but in order for this project to happen, we need to have consensus, manpower, and someone to write a script/bot for the grunt work, and this looked like a good place to find some of those things.
Philwelch 23:21, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Proposal posted at Wikipedia:Merge lists to categories Philwelch 05:55, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems to me that List of computer viruses, cited in the proposed policy, is a good counterexample to its wisdom. Since computer viruses cause billions of dollars of damage, having a comprehensive list arguably has at least as much value as a list of Fictional chemical substances. New viruses appear so frequently that one can expect that most entries on the list will not be articles. Being able to quickly scroll through the entire list (not possible with large categories) is also useful. Finally, a list like this could (and should) eventually be annotated, say by adding the year of first appearance and operating system affected. Once it's a category, that becomes hard. Another example is legal cases, whose names tell nothing about their content. A list of cases on some area of law is useful in itself and can later be annotated. A category cannot. Compare for example List of leading legal cases in copyright law with :Category:U.S. copyright case law. --agr 12:49, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merging Lists Into Categories