Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 5

message: Are too many images merely with a person somewhere in the picture being included in the category "images OF people"? Wikityke 22:15, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Category - Images "OF" People should not mean "WITH" people, should it? 

message: I have run into this issue a few times in my very short stay (so far) on Wikipedia and did some thinking about the situations where I think an article should be in a category as well as a sub-category.  I came up with two guidelines and wanted to see if other people had similar ideas or if I am smoking crack.  This seems to be the best place to get opinions on this issue so here I go ....
==== Qualitative vs. Quantitative ====
If the articles in a category are fundamentally the same type of article (i.e. about people or places etc.) and the difference between the category and sub-category is fundamentally qualitative then the article should only be listed in the sub-category.  This is the example from the main page: Queen Elizabeth should not be listed directly under People, but Queens of England might be a good place for her.  To say it a different way Queen Elizabeth would not be put "Queens of England" just because she was a better/more famous/more notable person.
The other side of this is when the difference is primarily quantitative.  The example than I ran into that is good here, is the category "Chess grandmasters" and "Chess players".  A person DOES go from being 'just' a chess player to being a Chess grandmaster by being a better chess player, so the difference is primarily quantitative and the article should be listed in both.  A good way to tell if you are in this situation is: If the sub-category were deleted and all its contents imported into the super-category would it significantly reduce the usefulness of the super category?  This brings me to the second guideline.
==== Navigational utility ====
In the above example the category "Chess players" could be further subdivided so that there were categories for "Chess International Master", "Chess Masters" etc. so that no people articles are in the super-category.  In that case you would not want to include individual articles in both categories.  But would this be useful?  Categories are fundamentally a navigation aid.  What is going to help the user looking for an article by navigating the Category tree (graph) find what they need?  Does a specific categorization make it harder or easier for them to find what they are looking for?
My example here is also from chess.  Category "Chess" is currently in the following three categories: "Chaturanga game family", "Mental-skill games", and "Board games".  Based on the rule of not listing an article in a category and a sub-category "Mental-skill games" and "Board games" should be removed since "Chaturanga game family" is already in both of these categories.  But, how many end users have ever heard of the Chaturanga family of games?  I play chess a lot and I did not know this bit of information.  This is the kind of Category that is useful moving up the category hierarchy rather than down.  Chess should be in "Board games" and "Mental skill games" because that is where users will look for it when trying to find it.  Equally it should be in "Chaturanga game family" because users might learn that and then after they are done reading about chess use the link into the category to learn more about related games.  
Summary: I hope this is the right place for this, and as a clueless newbie I hope I am not re-hashing something that has already been discussed into the ground and resolved.  If so and there has been some succinct treatment of the issue somewhere a pointer on my talk page would be awesome, even though I put "Proposed guidelines" above I am really just asking since I keep running into this and I am a but of a metadata freak.  Dalf | Talk 02:18, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: To anyone who has read this thread to this point, please read the other related entries on this page.  Also, note that there is a proposed comromise to this issue further below. -- Samuel Wantman 00:23, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed Guidelines 

message: In the above example the category "Chess players" could be further subdivided so that there were categories for "Chess International Master", "Chess Masters" etc. so that no people articles are in the super-category.  In that case you would not want to include individual articles in both categories.  But would this be useful?  Categories are fundamentally a navigation aid.  What is going to help the user looking for an article by navigating the Category tree (graph) find what they need?  Does a specific categorization make it harder or easier for them to find what they are looking for?
My example here is also from chess.  Category "Chess" is currently in the following three categories: "Chaturanga game family", "Mental-skill games", and "Board games".  Based on the rule of not listing an article in a category and a sub-category "Mental-skill games" and "Board games" should be removed since "Chaturanga game family" is already in both of these categories.  But, how many end users have ever heard of the Chaturanga family of games?  I play chess a lot and I did not know this bit of information.  This is the kind of Category that is useful moving up the category hierarchy rather than down.  Chess should be in "Board games" and "Mental skill games" because that is where users will look for it when trying to find it.  Equally it should be in "Chaturanga game family" because users might learn that and then after they are done reading about chess use the link into the category to learn more about related games.  
Summary: I hope this is the right place for this, and as a clueless newbie I hope I am not re-hashing something that has already been discussed into the ground and resolved.  If so and there has been some succinct treatment of the issue somewhere a pointer on my talk page would be awesome, even though I put "Proposed guidelines" above I am really just asking since I keep running into this and I am a but of a metadata freak.  Dalf | Talk 02:18, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: To anyone who has read this thread to this point, please read the other related entries on this page.  Also, note that there is a proposed comromise to this issue further below. -- Samuel Wantman 00:23, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Navigational utility 

message: Are here categories Arithmetics that could answer to queries?:
#Intersection - what belongs to two categories.
#Substraction - what belong to one category, but not other
Conan 20:43, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Arithmetics

message: This category is huge, hundreds and hundreds of subcategories.  Because of this, only about 3 letters at a time are shown.  It takes quite a bit of time to get to the end of the alphabet.  I'm wondering how big categories should be handled.  The guidelines say to divide things into new subcategories.  Since this is a huge category of subcategories, that means adding another layer of hierarchy.
I gave that a try:   I created a new subcategory :Category:Albums by artist: A-Z, but it would take forever to move everything into new subcategories.  Can this process be automated?  If so how?  Is there a better solution?
Since the issue of large categories has come up in previous discussions, and seems to be controversial, Is there any way to make a table of contents for a category? It seems that this would be really usefull, and would ease people's dislike of large categories.  I tried making a TOC by typing A  which resulted in A, etc... but that didn't work.  Is there any way to do this?
It seems that any category that is too big to be shown on one page should AUTOMATICALLY have a table of contents.  This should be in the software.  Has this been discussed?  
Thanks,  Samuel Wantman 07:36, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I just did a quicky (maunual) A,B,C,... index using URLs the software seems to interpret correctly.  I agree it would be nicer if there was a wiki reference (perhaps something similar to [:Category:Albums by artist#A]) or if the software did this automatically, but for what you seem to want I think this is an adequate workaround. -- Rick Block 14:55, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've played with this a bit to try to get rid of the external link indicator (present with the default skin, but not the "classic" skin which I usually use), and as far as I can tell there is simply no way.  Seems like a link of the form [http:/w/index.php?anything] should NOT be presented as an external link (since it is by definition a link served by the same web server).  I suspect a more elegant looking solution for the standard skin will require some sort of software change (sigh). -- Rick Block 21:01, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help requested with [[:Category:Albums by artist]] 

message: Should "by blank" (e.g. "by country") categories be keyed as "by blank" or just "blank"? Concrete example for :Category:Music by continent: should it be listed as By continent or Continent? My preference is for the former, as it keeps all the related "by" subcategories together. – flamurai (t) 02:07, Feb 24, 2005 (UTC)
:Personally, I prefer By continent. I might even put it in the first section with *By continent, but that might be overkill... - dcljr 22:47, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Keying "by blank" categories 

message: I've been trying to find where I should list a mispelled category I created.  I may be going blind because, despite WP:CFD stating: Read and understand Wikipedia:Categorization before using this page. Nominate categories that violate policies there, or are misspelled, mis-capitalized, redundant/need to be merged, not NPOV, small without potential for growth, or are generally bad ideas., I can't find a nomination list.  Would somebody who knows what is going on, please make the nomination list more prominent or change the text at CFD?  Oh, and if anybody wants to move :Category:Coup d'états to :Category:Coups d'état, I would appreciate it.  (Foreign language conjugations... bah!) - BanyanTree 14:21, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I changed it to "Nominate categories that violate policies here".  dbenbenn | talk 14:57, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the clarification. - BanyanTree 23:56, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  nominations for trivial deletion/moves? 

message: Recently, after a decision was made on CfD to delete all the LGBT people subcategories and move the entries into :Category:Gay, lesbian or bisexual people.  They were all de-populated and deleted using a bot.  I am appalled that this happened.  I hope it can be easily undone.  This destroyed a good deal of my and others' work.  I did not know it was being discussed until after it happened.  It seems obvious that this was going to be controversial, and there should have been outreach to the people that did all the original categorization.  The only way we'd notice is if we were closely watching the CfD or if we had done some work to the actual category pages.  Since I didn't set up the categories, and only worked to put articles into the categories, I only noticed after your robot deleted everything.  I am extremely upset that this happened and even more upset that it COULD happen in Wikipedia.  I think there should be MUCH more rigorous standards for deleting categories than what happened.  It is too easy for things like this to happen. -- Samuel Wantman 09:03, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hear, hear.  Me too.  With VfD, at least your watchlist informs you of a pending deletion.  With CfD, you have no chance of catching it unless you spend time on CfD.  A lot of us spend very little to no time on any Wikipedia:* pages. TreyHarris 17:41, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  LGBT people sub-categories 

message: A newcomer interested in opera has just created the category :Category:Operas by title and added it last night to all our opera articles (~200). This seems a misuse of the category scheme since it isn't a genuine taxonomic classification. Taken to the logical extreme, we would then have a categories like "people by name" or "books by title". Does this serve a purpose? Is there any precedent or solid arguments in favor of such a scheme? It would be helpful if commentary could be directed towards
Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Opera#Category:Operas_by_title, 
where a discussion about this is taking place. -- Viajero | Talk 10:48, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  category: ''x'' by name 

message: I was looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-thousander, and it occured to me that a Category with extended "pipetrick" could be used to generate an index table, not just a catagory with 1 char index. 
eg: by putting (maybe in a template) the following into Mount Everest:  Name=Mount Everest|8850|Height=8850||region=NP|First Ascent|May 29, 1953|First ascensionist=Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay  . It could/would generate a table, instead of just a (1 char) alphabetical list. And by using a second field, then table could be sorted into ascending height. This would encourage the growth of consistent indexes.
And where two table are desired, eg ordered by date climbed, and also ordered by height, then a template could be used to generate both/two catagories.  But have a different name (date & height), put this value after the first pipe.
Also the column titles can be derived, eg: Height=8850. would be a column.
This would reduce the hand editing to create indices, and also improve over all consistency.
And it fits in nicely with existing syntax.
NevilleDNZ 13:19, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: extended catalog pipetrick syntax

message: Maybe this category would be huge, but I think it would be useful to have a category for languages which are not the primary official language of any country; many would probably have some official status (Basque, Breton, etc), but are not the primary language of state. I'm not sure what to name this category to be precise. :Category:Minority languages is not sufficient because the term minority has a different connotation; some "minority languages" may be the dominant (or near-exclusive) daily language in certain region, or may be the language of state (e.g. Irish). ~ Dpr 22:58, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Category request