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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:
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:
well that's the idea. Comments? -- Alexandre Van de Sande 18:58, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
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:
well that's the idea. Comments? -- Alexandre Van de Sande 18:58, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
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? --[[User:Bodnotbod| bodnotbod » .....TALKQuietly)]] 21:49, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)
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)
Mammals Carnivores Cats
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)
I believe that much of the trouble over at Category:Fundamental is because the category is mis-named.
It seems that Category:Categories was originally intended to be the root of the tree of categories, or the overall container for all other categories (let's call it a level-0 category), and that level-1 categories were intended to be for different ways of organising things (things = topics, knowledge, articles, categories, etc.). (Strictly speaking, the categories are not arranged in a tree, because a category can have multiple parents, and there can even be loops, but it seems to be reasonably tree-like near the top levels.)
Category:Fundamental is all about organising things by somebody's idea of a sensible scheme (and it does seems reasonably sensible to me). However, it is just one of many possibly ways of organising things. As such, I think it probably deserves to be a level-1 category (as it currently is). However, I think that the name "Fundamental" is inappropriate, because Category:Fundamental is neither the root of the category system ( Category:Categories has that honour), nor is it the One True Way of organising things.
I suggest that "Fundamental" should be renamed to "Academic disciplines" or "Fields of study", or "Topics", or something similar. There is already a Category:Academic disciplines, which is divided into sub-categories in much the same way as Category:Fundamental. Surely they should be unified? Or do they represent two different views of how to break everything down into categories?
I envisage a scheme something like this:
Categories Topics (perhaps omit this level, and promote all the "Topics by <name of scheme>" categories up one level) Topics by Dewey Decimal System ... Topics by Library of Congress classification system ... Topics by (a better name for the system currently known as "Fundamental") Nature ... Academic disciplines Philosophy ... ... Events By geological era By year By day of year ... Places Universe Continents Countries ... People People by country People by year of birth People by profession ...
If you disagree with everything else I said, I hope you will at least agree that Category:Fundamental is mis-named. — AlanBarrett 18:20, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I think it's too soon for a vote. The questions I am trying to have answered are:
If we can answer all that, then we can think about how to shuffle things around to fit the plan. — AlanBarrett 23:55, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I think my answers are: 1. Yes, Category:Categories should be the root. There should be very few top-level categories below it. 2. Yes, "Fundamental" is supposed to be a way of organising everything by topic. 3. I don't know. Perhaps "Topics by name", or one of my earlier suggestions. 4. Yes, many other schemes. Some deserve high-level categories. 5. Not sure. Probably make "Topics by Dewey Decimal System", "Topics by LOC classification", and "Topics by academic discipline", all top-level categories for now. 6. Yes, also make "Places" and "Years" top-level vategories. — AlanBarrett 23:55, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Thanks, Alan and Ancheta, this is good. Belief in the One True Way is a common and annoying fallacy. Category:Fundamental is mis-named. I've written a slightly unclear speil on the topic at User:gracefool/What is a category. ··gracefool | ☺ 05:27, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
[Referring to part of above list]
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 [[:Category:X|X]] verb [[:Category:Y|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)
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. --[[User:Allyunion| AllyUnion (Talk)]] 11:31, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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)
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)
I don't really expect anybody to care much, and I know the decision must already have been made, but I'd like to register the fact that I really don't like the category feature that's been added to Wikipedia. The beauty of Wikipedia is that it constitutes its own category scheme. This just adds another layer of complication to the (large) category scheme that *is* the network of Wikipedia articles. If you want to know how knowledge is organized, you should be able to gather that from the links in the articles themselves. If you want to be able to navigate around articles easily, that's what the links within and below the articles are for. The whole idea of categories as implemented here strikes me as an excuse to impose conceptual hierarchies instead of letting the structure of the universe display itself beautifully, as it will, if we write and interlink articles as you have been. I've elaborated some of these thoughts, in case you're interested, here. Thanks for listening... Larry Sanger
The trick is to reference not articles, but categories as the subject and object, and to use the remainder of the sentence as the verb with modality and other conditions. This makes each sentence a veritable database of relationships. A parser can then rip through the Wikipedia and mine these relationships, and place the relationships into a database of cognitions. We are that much closer to a more intelligent encyclopedia, through the simple expedient of multiple namespaces. Regards, Ancheta Wis 00:20, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Here is another example from the Category:Wisconsin for the state in which I live:
This simple sentence has some amazing Wiki-technology behind it: it allows us to write a simple English sentence that allows us to reference Wikipedia articles, the category to which the article belongs, and the context of the containing category. This in fact is how many people actually think, in multiple layers, all at the same time. We can actually start to represent intension and extension in Wikipedia. Ancheta Wis 07:53, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
The only relevant article I could find on Larry Sanger's user page was m:Accidental linking and hard-wired category schemes. That article discusses a hypothetical category scheme that imposes a rigid hierarchy. The category feature that is implemented in Wikipedia does not do that: it allows multiple category schemes to coexist (each scheme being implemented using the same feature), allows articles to exist in multiple categories, allows categories to exist in multiple parent categories, and even allows loops in the category graph. While I agree with most of Larry's criticism of the hypothetical rigid scheme, and some of those criticisms also apply to the most visible way that the existing feature is used at present (via the Main Page's use of Template:Categorybrowsebar and Wikipedia:Browse by category), I do not believe that the same criticisms apply to the feature itself. — AlanBarrett 12:05, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Category:Macintosh software, User talk:Ellmist#Category:Machintosh software.
Ellmist has been hard at work adding this category to as many cross-platform tools as he could find, including Lynx (browser) and Mozilla Firefox. I don't think that's right — can you image what a Category:Windows XP software would look like? — but all the same, the intent is to list all notable programs that work on a Mac in one place. It is a noble intention. The question is:
I honestly don't know, and I figured the best place to ask was either here or at the Village Pump. -- Ardonik. talk() 05:25, Sep 10, 2004 (UTC)
The right thing to do if I decide is to treat all equal; that means we should have Macintosh software, Windows software, BSD software, etc. (Note that we should not use "PC"; any computer is a PC, we have to specify platform. So it should really be Mac OS software, Windows software). We shouldn't worry about using too much categories. The category tree _should_ be detailed and articles should be well categorised, when we need it. The cross-platform category sounds good if we can come up with a good definition, like "This is a category for software that runs on Windows and Mac OS and Unix (or Linux?)-based platforms". That's all I can think of now, but generally I like specific and detailed categories.[[User:Sverdrup| ❝Sverdrup❞]] 15:56, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
That sounds like a good idea to me. I guess I'll create Category:Windows software. -- Ellmist 05:52, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to distinguish between "Software designed for platform X (and that is unlikely to work on other platforms)" and "Multi-platform software that works on platform X (and probably also on other platforms)". To me, terms like "Macintosh software" or "Windows software" imply the former (so Firefox is not Macintosh software, but the Mac version of Firefox is Macintosh software). — AlanBarrett 12:21, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'm still asking myself the question why we need these categories at all. On some point we need to stop making categories, otherwise we'll end up with categories like Category:Windows 2000 software or even Category:Windows 2000 software that runs with service pack 2 and above. Why exactly do we need a category that lists all windows/linux/unix/beOS/macOS/DOS software? -- Conti| ✉ 14:59, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)
Instead of discussing what should be in the tree, just edit it! Be bold -- I'm serious, I want to see your ideas.
And so on. All software articles would eventually contain one or two leaves from this category tree; for instance,
Duke Nukem 3D would fall into both
Category:First person shooters and
Category:DOS games. Note that
Category:Computer and video games by platform already exist sand and is very extensive. I'm not sure how to incorporate this scheme without breaking it up.
What do you all think? --
Ardonik.
talk() 16:20, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)
It would be possible to have both a Category:Macintosh software and Category:Macintosh-only software. -- Ellmist 01:29, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I am in favor of renaming Category:Macintosh software to Category:Mac OS software. User:Sverdrup mentioned this earlier. The move function appears, but it says "This action cannot be performed on this page." If there isn't an easy way to do this, we should decide on this before there are too many pages to change. -- Ellmist 01:35, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Is it intended that every article be in a category? The categories seem pretty disjointed and inconsistent to me, but I think it would be great if they actually made sense. How can I best help in this? Spalding 03:32, Sep 5, 2004 (UTC)
OK, I'm trying to put article List of radio stations into Category "Reference>Lists" and then other subcategories into what should be the new category List of radio stations. But what I really need to do is create a new category with that name, correct? I added the Category markup to the bottom of the article. But it will still be an article and not a category, correct? The instructions for categories show some scripts, (that maybe will make things (articles) a category?), but I have no idea how to run them or if I even can or should. I'm in over my head - any ideas?
My intention was to make it match television stations, with a subcategory named List of radio stations, and under it would be things like Lists of radio stations in North and Central America, etc. But wouldn't that require deleting the article List of radio stations that is basically functioning as a category? I'm getting too confused here. Spalding 11:31, Sep 5, 2004 (UTC)
I put the article " List of radio stations" into Category:Lists that should be categories, but it doesn't look correct. The text shown when editing is less than the article - the second section doesn't show. Does that get processed every so often? Spalding 12:43, Sep 5, 2004 (UTC)
I generally disagree with the idea that categories supplant/replace lists. Lists can have red links, inviting new articles, categories can't. The only exception I can think of is lists that are known to be 100% complete. Niteowlneils 14:13, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Categories can have a list of unwritten articles. Just edit the category page and put it there.-- Eloquence *
User:Netoholic is using a sort key beginning with '!' to sort certain articles to the top of the list. E.g. in Ford Motor Company he did [[Category:Ford|!Ford Motor Company]]. I reverted his change there since I felt it was ugly and an abuse of the sort key system. He questioned my revert. Rather than disagree between ourselves I would like to hear some more feedback: what does everyone else think of this practice? Useful? Ugly? —Morven 18:49, Sep 10, 2004 (UTC)
I'd prefer if the space (" ") wouldn't be used for this, pywikipediabot doesn't handle it well. -- User:Docu
+---------------------+----------+ | Left(cl_sortkey, 1) | Count(*) | +---------------------+----------+ | | 745 | | ' | 24 | | - | 234 | | ! | 36 | | " | 4 | | # | 4 | | ( | 23 | | * | 1191 | | . | 130 | | / | 17 | | ? | 1 | | @ | 2 | | ` | 10 | | | | 1 | | = | 4 | | © | 2 | +---------------------+----------+
The most famous and influential reggae band in history if Bob Marley & the Wailers, which quite properly redirects to Bob Marley. While Bob Marley is in Category:Reggae musicians, he is not a reggae band and is thus not in Category:Reggae musical groups. It strikes me as strange and un-useful that Bob Marley & the Wailers is not listed in Category:Reggae musical groups. Could it be possible to place redirects in categories to avoid this problem? Tuf-Kat 18:58, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)
As some of you might have noticed, there are two different categories including sub-categories by country, one is Category:Cities by country and another one is Category:Towns by country. Though I am not an anglophone, I was vaguely conscious that the meaning of " cities" is quite different between different countries ; quite predictabily, some (presumably) US editors have begun to include into subcategories of Category:Cities in the United States quite small localities, e.g. Forest, Mississippi (population 5,987), while in other countries I could perceive a clear intent to make a distinction between (larger) cities and (smaller) towns, e.g. look at Category:Tasmanian localities ; see also the distinction (imported from the German Wikipedia) between Category:Cities in Germany (population over 100000) and Category:Towns in Germany (population under 100000). There seem to be a distinction also for Taiwan, though I am not so sure. (Anecdotically, note that localities of my native France are classified under Category:Cities, towns and villages of France -our permanent dream of rurality). Indeed there have been still other choices for other countries ; as I now check Spanish localities have not been categorized, their list by province being categorized instead, see Category:Lists of municipalities in Spain.
So am I stuck now in my cleaning up project ? Probably, but I can always ask for advice, I try to detail my queries:
Definitely we NEED some easy way to rename categories ! -- French Tourist 20:56, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I think categorization has gotten out of hand. We are now getting categories for all years and even for years of birth and death. Conceivably, one could categorize articles in innumerable ways—people who died on Sundays in December of 1921?—but what's the use in it? I think we should limit ourselves to relatively broad, reasonably useful categories, and not just categorize every way we can think of. Everyking 20:42, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'm all for having multiple independent or overlapping schemes of categorization. Yes, right now it's a little out of control. Yes, we probably need a WikiProject to look for anomalies and try to fix them; I've already fixed a few myself.
I think they are potentially far more useful to readers of Wikipedia than any other form of organization. You can traverse from an article that interests you to the category that looks most likely to you, then up and down the hierarchy category looking for other related material. I like it. I use it.
I don't find "year of birth" particularly useful, but I don't find the overwhelming tendency to link every year mentioned in an article particularly useful, either. Apparently someone likes it, or it wouldn't be there. It's easy enough to ignore a category you don't care about. -- Jmabel 23:09, Sep 9, 2004 (UTC)
I also think categorisation has got out of hand - seems to me it's for people who like to organise things rather than create new things, though of course there's a place for that. It would be nice if adding categories as the only change to an article could be filtered from a watchlist though, as at the moment it's jolly hard to pick out "real" changes amongst the noise. This make spotting vandalism harder, for one thing. Any reason this could/could not/should/should not be done? Graham 03:42, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I too think the categorization has got out of hand. Some categories are set up so they are only every likely to have a handful of articles. I also think the categories for each years must go. They are basicly doing the same thing that the year pages are. DJ Clayworth 17:17, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
End moved discussion
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)
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)
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:
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)
There are 20165 categories, from category:.hack to category:ß-lactam antibiotics. -- user:zanimum
I can't find any specific information about this; the question arose with Category:Vincent van Gogh, which currently contains both the articles related to him as well as the Images of his paintings. Should we keep Image: pages separate from articles in categories, or is this categorization acceptable? My common sense wants to believe that we should do as usual - keep reader-oriented (article namespace) and every thing else separate. Thoughts? Links to relevant discussions? ✏ Sverdrup 22:18, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I've been looking through the database, regarding catagories, and I found 19 catagories with multiple id numbers. I've listed them below. Please let me know if you know anything about this. I'm just curious.
JesseW 22:58, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)
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:
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)
Other sort orders often used are: alphabetical, chronological (e.g. for office related categories). Pywikipediabot formats them in alphabetical order. Template based categories appear above others (generally useful, e.g. the Template:Europe based Category:European countries on Sweden).
Preferences may vary depending on the skin used (some skins display the categories conveniently in the top right corner, rather than at the bottom in a separate box). Where the categories are placed at the bottom of the pages, they are generally preceded by a footer listing the most important topics.
The ideal order isn't necessarily the same for articles with 1-5, 6-9, 10 and more categories (see stats for biographies, Hank_Aaron has 26, George H. W. Bush 16).
Personally, I find alphabetical ordering convenient for a smaller number of categories (let's say 1-5) and I'm not convinced if it's a good idea to re-write the opening paragraph of the article in terms of categories. If an article has a category of its own, most of the other categories should probably go on that category rather than the article. -- User:Docu
A series of municipalities (e.g. these), as well as other towns, villages and resorts in Switzerland, have articles, but they wont fit into Cities in Switzerland.
Is there a suggested standard? Should they use Towns in Switzerland? -- User:Docu
(I'm sure I'm missing something) -- Jmabel | Talk 20:02, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)
I was using "municipalities" in a (possibly misguided) effort to be general, but, for example, in New York State there are "unicorporated villages". -- Jmabel | Talk 23:36, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)
The "Creating Categories" section says that if you add a link to a category page, the category will automatically be created. I added the text "[[Category:Carnegie Mellon professors|Blum, Manuel]]" to the Manuel Blum, but the category wasn't created. The link appears at the bottom, under "Categories", but it's red. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks. -- Creidieki 02:01, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
[[Category:Plants]]
at the bottom, which comes out as a link as you would expect; some have
{{Category:Plants}}
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)
Ah. Many thanks. Gzuckier 15:45, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
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)
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:
[[Category:2004|Film]]
,
2004 Canadian budget would contain the reference [[Category:2004|Canadian budget]]
, and so forth. (Similarly for subcategory pages.)[[Category:2004|Religious leaders]]
.[[Category:2004|*]]
, to make it sort first among all articles.[[Category:2004|*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)
While working on Selected Anniversaries, I came across " The Year Without a Summer" which actually happened in U.S. history (also called the year Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death). This weather-related event clearly belongs to the category Category:Anomalous phenomenon but this Category is currently a sub-category of Category:Paranormal phenomena. I would like to separate Anomalous phenomenon from this POV category, as it is more of an Unexplained item than something in a fringe category. Ancheta Wis 17:29, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I've removed the following section from project page because it's mainly hypothetical discussion, which belongs here on the talk page. If someone wants to put it back, please expand the original idea in a way that takes into account, but does not literally contain, the comments. - dcljr 21:26, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
An advantage of categorization is that it allows extraction of large portions of Wikipedia. For instance, if years and dates were as below (leftmost items are regular articles, the rest are categories), extracting, say, a timeline for the 21st century would be trivial.
2004 -> Years in the 21st century -> Years - \ --> Time periods / 30 March -----> Days in March ----> Days ---
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)
I'm not very familiar with how articles that fall under these categories are categorized but my quick checks indicate that the categorization scheme excludes the possibility of "intelligent" alien life with the same things as humans. Brianjd
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):
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)
If you descend in Category:Rock music groups, you can get to lots of non-music-groups. For example, -> Category:The Beatles-> John Lennon. I'm pretty sure that this type of structure is deprecated. But Wikipedia:Categorization and its subpages are huge and ill-organized, so I haven't been able to find an unambiguous straight answer. Could someone in the know confirm or deny? Do you agree that Category:Rock music groups needs a big reorganization? -- Dbenbenn 03:55, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The business and economics categories were disorganized, so for the last week I have spent my time trying to sort it out. The way I approached it was to create a variety of categories, subcategories and subsubcategories. (There are about 50 of them now). Then I have been going through the articles listed in the old navigation system and deciding which of the 50 or so categories are applicable to each article. It turned out that the average is 2 or 3 categories per article. So far I have added about 1000 tags. I still have 6 of the old lists to go through. In going through this process I have discovered that different people have different ideas about what criterion to use in appending category tags. In particular, I have been in conflict with two other contributers:
I reject both these criteria. The criteria I use is I try to put myself in the mind of the user who is using the category system as a navigational device. I ask myself, "If I was browsing in (for example) the Finance category, what articles would I expect to find there, and what articles would I find useful there". Can we arrive at some sort of policy on the appropriate criteria to use before I get into any more edit wars about something as unimportant as which category tags to use. mydogategodshat 17:39, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
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)
How does one categorize the defining element of a category, so that, for example, the article "city" is somewhere pointed to in "Category:Cities". It seems some have done this by putting the article city in a category like: Category:Cities|? or Category:Cities|* and this may be appropriate. The article "city" is not actually a city (as an article like "New York City" would be) so it doesn't belong in a category that is supposed to contain cities (although it would be appropriate in an category like "Category:Urban studies and planning". Also, it seems that the first paragraph of the defining element article might should be automatically put in the intro text for the category, increasing the automation of categories. - Centrx 22:46, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'm running into this increasingly often lately. I believe articles ABOUT the subject matter of a category should NOT be category members, but should rather be referred to in the category description and should link to the categories (using See also: or something similar). I'm finding too often that others come along and change the articles I set up that way so that the articles are instead within the category.
I find this less useful, since these articles are different from things that are semantically part OF the category, and should be picked out specially rather than lost in the morass of category members. —Morven 00:13, Dec 28, 2004 (UTC)
Should I delete Category:Russian World War II people and create something like Category:Soviet Union World War II people ???
Darwin 16:34, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
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)
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:
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:
Any objections, please let me know. -- Lexor| Talk 09:57, 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)
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)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | → | Archive 10 |
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:
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:
well that's the idea. Comments? -- Alexandre Van de Sande 18:58, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
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:
well that's the idea. Comments? -- Alexandre Van de Sande 18:58, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
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? --[[User:Bodnotbod| bodnotbod » .....TALKQuietly)]] 21:49, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)
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)
Mammals Carnivores Cats
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)
I believe that much of the trouble over at Category:Fundamental is because the category is mis-named.
It seems that Category:Categories was originally intended to be the root of the tree of categories, or the overall container for all other categories (let's call it a level-0 category), and that level-1 categories were intended to be for different ways of organising things (things = topics, knowledge, articles, categories, etc.). (Strictly speaking, the categories are not arranged in a tree, because a category can have multiple parents, and there can even be loops, but it seems to be reasonably tree-like near the top levels.)
Category:Fundamental is all about organising things by somebody's idea of a sensible scheme (and it does seems reasonably sensible to me). However, it is just one of many possibly ways of organising things. As such, I think it probably deserves to be a level-1 category (as it currently is). However, I think that the name "Fundamental" is inappropriate, because Category:Fundamental is neither the root of the category system ( Category:Categories has that honour), nor is it the One True Way of organising things.
I suggest that "Fundamental" should be renamed to "Academic disciplines" or "Fields of study", or "Topics", or something similar. There is already a Category:Academic disciplines, which is divided into sub-categories in much the same way as Category:Fundamental. Surely they should be unified? Or do they represent two different views of how to break everything down into categories?
I envisage a scheme something like this:
Categories Topics (perhaps omit this level, and promote all the "Topics by <name of scheme>" categories up one level) Topics by Dewey Decimal System ... Topics by Library of Congress classification system ... Topics by (a better name for the system currently known as "Fundamental") Nature ... Academic disciplines Philosophy ... ... Events By geological era By year By day of year ... Places Universe Continents Countries ... People People by country People by year of birth People by profession ...
If you disagree with everything else I said, I hope you will at least agree that Category:Fundamental is mis-named. — AlanBarrett 18:20, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I think it's too soon for a vote. The questions I am trying to have answered are:
If we can answer all that, then we can think about how to shuffle things around to fit the plan. — AlanBarrett 23:55, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I think my answers are: 1. Yes, Category:Categories should be the root. There should be very few top-level categories below it. 2. Yes, "Fundamental" is supposed to be a way of organising everything by topic. 3. I don't know. Perhaps "Topics by name", or one of my earlier suggestions. 4. Yes, many other schemes. Some deserve high-level categories. 5. Not sure. Probably make "Topics by Dewey Decimal System", "Topics by LOC classification", and "Topics by academic discipline", all top-level categories for now. 6. Yes, also make "Places" and "Years" top-level vategories. — AlanBarrett 23:55, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Thanks, Alan and Ancheta, this is good. Belief in the One True Way is a common and annoying fallacy. Category:Fundamental is mis-named. I've written a slightly unclear speil on the topic at User:gracefool/What is a category. ··gracefool | ☺ 05:27, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
[Referring to part of above list]
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 [[:Category:X|X]] verb [[:Category:Y|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)
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. --[[User:Allyunion| AllyUnion (Talk)]] 11:31, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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)
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)
I don't really expect anybody to care much, and I know the decision must already have been made, but I'd like to register the fact that I really don't like the category feature that's been added to Wikipedia. The beauty of Wikipedia is that it constitutes its own category scheme. This just adds another layer of complication to the (large) category scheme that *is* the network of Wikipedia articles. If you want to know how knowledge is organized, you should be able to gather that from the links in the articles themselves. If you want to be able to navigate around articles easily, that's what the links within and below the articles are for. The whole idea of categories as implemented here strikes me as an excuse to impose conceptual hierarchies instead of letting the structure of the universe display itself beautifully, as it will, if we write and interlink articles as you have been. I've elaborated some of these thoughts, in case you're interested, here. Thanks for listening... Larry Sanger
The trick is to reference not articles, but categories as the subject and object, and to use the remainder of the sentence as the verb with modality and other conditions. This makes each sentence a veritable database of relationships. A parser can then rip through the Wikipedia and mine these relationships, and place the relationships into a database of cognitions. We are that much closer to a more intelligent encyclopedia, through the simple expedient of multiple namespaces. Regards, Ancheta Wis 00:20, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Here is another example from the Category:Wisconsin for the state in which I live:
This simple sentence has some amazing Wiki-technology behind it: it allows us to write a simple English sentence that allows us to reference Wikipedia articles, the category to which the article belongs, and the context of the containing category. This in fact is how many people actually think, in multiple layers, all at the same time. We can actually start to represent intension and extension in Wikipedia. Ancheta Wis 07:53, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
The only relevant article I could find on Larry Sanger's user page was m:Accidental linking and hard-wired category schemes. That article discusses a hypothetical category scheme that imposes a rigid hierarchy. The category feature that is implemented in Wikipedia does not do that: it allows multiple category schemes to coexist (each scheme being implemented using the same feature), allows articles to exist in multiple categories, allows categories to exist in multiple parent categories, and even allows loops in the category graph. While I agree with most of Larry's criticism of the hypothetical rigid scheme, and some of those criticisms also apply to the most visible way that the existing feature is used at present (via the Main Page's use of Template:Categorybrowsebar and Wikipedia:Browse by category), I do not believe that the same criticisms apply to the feature itself. — AlanBarrett 12:05, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Category:Macintosh software, User talk:Ellmist#Category:Machintosh software.
Ellmist has been hard at work adding this category to as many cross-platform tools as he could find, including Lynx (browser) and Mozilla Firefox. I don't think that's right — can you image what a Category:Windows XP software would look like? — but all the same, the intent is to list all notable programs that work on a Mac in one place. It is a noble intention. The question is:
I honestly don't know, and I figured the best place to ask was either here or at the Village Pump. -- Ardonik. talk() 05:25, Sep 10, 2004 (UTC)
The right thing to do if I decide is to treat all equal; that means we should have Macintosh software, Windows software, BSD software, etc. (Note that we should not use "PC"; any computer is a PC, we have to specify platform. So it should really be Mac OS software, Windows software). We shouldn't worry about using too much categories. The category tree _should_ be detailed and articles should be well categorised, when we need it. The cross-platform category sounds good if we can come up with a good definition, like "This is a category for software that runs on Windows and Mac OS and Unix (or Linux?)-based platforms". That's all I can think of now, but generally I like specific and detailed categories.[[User:Sverdrup| ❝Sverdrup❞]] 15:56, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
That sounds like a good idea to me. I guess I'll create Category:Windows software. -- Ellmist 05:52, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to distinguish between "Software designed for platform X (and that is unlikely to work on other platforms)" and "Multi-platform software that works on platform X (and probably also on other platforms)". To me, terms like "Macintosh software" or "Windows software" imply the former (so Firefox is not Macintosh software, but the Mac version of Firefox is Macintosh software). — AlanBarrett 12:21, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'm still asking myself the question why we need these categories at all. On some point we need to stop making categories, otherwise we'll end up with categories like Category:Windows 2000 software or even Category:Windows 2000 software that runs with service pack 2 and above. Why exactly do we need a category that lists all windows/linux/unix/beOS/macOS/DOS software? -- Conti| ✉ 14:59, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)
Instead of discussing what should be in the tree, just edit it! Be bold -- I'm serious, I want to see your ideas.
And so on. All software articles would eventually contain one or two leaves from this category tree; for instance,
Duke Nukem 3D would fall into both
Category:First person shooters and
Category:DOS games. Note that
Category:Computer and video games by platform already exist sand and is very extensive. I'm not sure how to incorporate this scheme without breaking it up.
What do you all think? --
Ardonik.
talk() 16:20, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)
It would be possible to have both a Category:Macintosh software and Category:Macintosh-only software. -- Ellmist 01:29, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I am in favor of renaming Category:Macintosh software to Category:Mac OS software. User:Sverdrup mentioned this earlier. The move function appears, but it says "This action cannot be performed on this page." If there isn't an easy way to do this, we should decide on this before there are too many pages to change. -- Ellmist 01:35, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Is it intended that every article be in a category? The categories seem pretty disjointed and inconsistent to me, but I think it would be great if they actually made sense. How can I best help in this? Spalding 03:32, Sep 5, 2004 (UTC)
OK, I'm trying to put article List of radio stations into Category "Reference>Lists" and then other subcategories into what should be the new category List of radio stations. But what I really need to do is create a new category with that name, correct? I added the Category markup to the bottom of the article. But it will still be an article and not a category, correct? The instructions for categories show some scripts, (that maybe will make things (articles) a category?), but I have no idea how to run them or if I even can or should. I'm in over my head - any ideas?
My intention was to make it match television stations, with a subcategory named List of radio stations, and under it would be things like Lists of radio stations in North and Central America, etc. But wouldn't that require deleting the article List of radio stations that is basically functioning as a category? I'm getting too confused here. Spalding 11:31, Sep 5, 2004 (UTC)
I put the article " List of radio stations" into Category:Lists that should be categories, but it doesn't look correct. The text shown when editing is less than the article - the second section doesn't show. Does that get processed every so often? Spalding 12:43, Sep 5, 2004 (UTC)
I generally disagree with the idea that categories supplant/replace lists. Lists can have red links, inviting new articles, categories can't. The only exception I can think of is lists that are known to be 100% complete. Niteowlneils 14:13, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Categories can have a list of unwritten articles. Just edit the category page and put it there.-- Eloquence *
User:Netoholic is using a sort key beginning with '!' to sort certain articles to the top of the list. E.g. in Ford Motor Company he did [[Category:Ford|!Ford Motor Company]]. I reverted his change there since I felt it was ugly and an abuse of the sort key system. He questioned my revert. Rather than disagree between ourselves I would like to hear some more feedback: what does everyone else think of this practice? Useful? Ugly? —Morven 18:49, Sep 10, 2004 (UTC)
I'd prefer if the space (" ") wouldn't be used for this, pywikipediabot doesn't handle it well. -- User:Docu
+---------------------+----------+ | Left(cl_sortkey, 1) | Count(*) | +---------------------+----------+ | | 745 | | ' | 24 | | - | 234 | | ! | 36 | | " | 4 | | # | 4 | | ( | 23 | | * | 1191 | | . | 130 | | / | 17 | | ? | 1 | | @ | 2 | | ` | 10 | | | | 1 | | = | 4 | | © | 2 | +---------------------+----------+
The most famous and influential reggae band in history if Bob Marley & the Wailers, which quite properly redirects to Bob Marley. While Bob Marley is in Category:Reggae musicians, he is not a reggae band and is thus not in Category:Reggae musical groups. It strikes me as strange and un-useful that Bob Marley & the Wailers is not listed in Category:Reggae musical groups. Could it be possible to place redirects in categories to avoid this problem? Tuf-Kat 18:58, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)
As some of you might have noticed, there are two different categories including sub-categories by country, one is Category:Cities by country and another one is Category:Towns by country. Though I am not an anglophone, I was vaguely conscious that the meaning of " cities" is quite different between different countries ; quite predictabily, some (presumably) US editors have begun to include into subcategories of Category:Cities in the United States quite small localities, e.g. Forest, Mississippi (population 5,987), while in other countries I could perceive a clear intent to make a distinction between (larger) cities and (smaller) towns, e.g. look at Category:Tasmanian localities ; see also the distinction (imported from the German Wikipedia) between Category:Cities in Germany (population over 100000) and Category:Towns in Germany (population under 100000). There seem to be a distinction also for Taiwan, though I am not so sure. (Anecdotically, note that localities of my native France are classified under Category:Cities, towns and villages of France -our permanent dream of rurality). Indeed there have been still other choices for other countries ; as I now check Spanish localities have not been categorized, their list by province being categorized instead, see Category:Lists of municipalities in Spain.
So am I stuck now in my cleaning up project ? Probably, but I can always ask for advice, I try to detail my queries:
Definitely we NEED some easy way to rename categories ! -- French Tourist 20:56, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I think categorization has gotten out of hand. We are now getting categories for all years and even for years of birth and death. Conceivably, one could categorize articles in innumerable ways—people who died on Sundays in December of 1921?—but what's the use in it? I think we should limit ourselves to relatively broad, reasonably useful categories, and not just categorize every way we can think of. Everyking 20:42, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'm all for having multiple independent or overlapping schemes of categorization. Yes, right now it's a little out of control. Yes, we probably need a WikiProject to look for anomalies and try to fix them; I've already fixed a few myself.
I think they are potentially far more useful to readers of Wikipedia than any other form of organization. You can traverse from an article that interests you to the category that looks most likely to you, then up and down the hierarchy category looking for other related material. I like it. I use it.
I don't find "year of birth" particularly useful, but I don't find the overwhelming tendency to link every year mentioned in an article particularly useful, either. Apparently someone likes it, or it wouldn't be there. It's easy enough to ignore a category you don't care about. -- Jmabel 23:09, Sep 9, 2004 (UTC)
I also think categorisation has got out of hand - seems to me it's for people who like to organise things rather than create new things, though of course there's a place for that. It would be nice if adding categories as the only change to an article could be filtered from a watchlist though, as at the moment it's jolly hard to pick out "real" changes amongst the noise. This make spotting vandalism harder, for one thing. Any reason this could/could not/should/should not be done? Graham 03:42, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I too think the categorization has got out of hand. Some categories are set up so they are only every likely to have a handful of articles. I also think the categories for each years must go. They are basicly doing the same thing that the year pages are. DJ Clayworth 17:17, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
End moved discussion
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)
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)
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:
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)
There are 20165 categories, from category:.hack to category:ß-lactam antibiotics. -- user:zanimum
I can't find any specific information about this; the question arose with Category:Vincent van Gogh, which currently contains both the articles related to him as well as the Images of his paintings. Should we keep Image: pages separate from articles in categories, or is this categorization acceptable? My common sense wants to believe that we should do as usual - keep reader-oriented (article namespace) and every thing else separate. Thoughts? Links to relevant discussions? ✏ Sverdrup 22:18, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I've been looking through the database, regarding catagories, and I found 19 catagories with multiple id numbers. I've listed them below. Please let me know if you know anything about this. I'm just curious.
JesseW 22:58, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)
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:
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)
Other sort orders often used are: alphabetical, chronological (e.g. for office related categories). Pywikipediabot formats them in alphabetical order. Template based categories appear above others (generally useful, e.g. the Template:Europe based Category:European countries on Sweden).
Preferences may vary depending on the skin used (some skins display the categories conveniently in the top right corner, rather than at the bottom in a separate box). Where the categories are placed at the bottom of the pages, they are generally preceded by a footer listing the most important topics.
The ideal order isn't necessarily the same for articles with 1-5, 6-9, 10 and more categories (see stats for biographies, Hank_Aaron has 26, George H. W. Bush 16).
Personally, I find alphabetical ordering convenient for a smaller number of categories (let's say 1-5) and I'm not convinced if it's a good idea to re-write the opening paragraph of the article in terms of categories. If an article has a category of its own, most of the other categories should probably go on that category rather than the article. -- User:Docu
A series of municipalities (e.g. these), as well as other towns, villages and resorts in Switzerland, have articles, but they wont fit into Cities in Switzerland.
Is there a suggested standard? Should they use Towns in Switzerland? -- User:Docu
(I'm sure I'm missing something) -- Jmabel | Talk 20:02, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)
I was using "municipalities" in a (possibly misguided) effort to be general, but, for example, in New York State there are "unicorporated villages". -- Jmabel | Talk 23:36, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)
The "Creating Categories" section says that if you add a link to a category page, the category will automatically be created. I added the text "[[Category:Carnegie Mellon professors|Blum, Manuel]]" to the Manuel Blum, but the category wasn't created. The link appears at the bottom, under "Categories", but it's red. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks. -- Creidieki 02:01, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
[[Category:Plants]]
at the bottom, which comes out as a link as you would expect; some have
{{Category:Plants}}
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)
Ah. Many thanks. Gzuckier 15:45, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
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)
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:
[[Category:2004|Film]]
,
2004 Canadian budget would contain the reference [[Category:2004|Canadian budget]]
, and so forth. (Similarly for subcategory pages.)[[Category:2004|Religious leaders]]
.[[Category:2004|*]]
, to make it sort first among all articles.[[Category:2004|*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)
While working on Selected Anniversaries, I came across " The Year Without a Summer" which actually happened in U.S. history (also called the year Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death). This weather-related event clearly belongs to the category Category:Anomalous phenomenon but this Category is currently a sub-category of Category:Paranormal phenomena. I would like to separate Anomalous phenomenon from this POV category, as it is more of an Unexplained item than something in a fringe category. Ancheta Wis 17:29, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I've removed the following section from project page because it's mainly hypothetical discussion, which belongs here on the talk page. If someone wants to put it back, please expand the original idea in a way that takes into account, but does not literally contain, the comments. - dcljr 21:26, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
An advantage of categorization is that it allows extraction of large portions of Wikipedia. For instance, if years and dates were as below (leftmost items are regular articles, the rest are categories), extracting, say, a timeline for the 21st century would be trivial.
2004 -> Years in the 21st century -> Years - \ --> Time periods / 30 March -----> Days in March ----> Days ---
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)
I'm not very familiar with how articles that fall under these categories are categorized but my quick checks indicate that the categorization scheme excludes the possibility of "intelligent" alien life with the same things as humans. Brianjd
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):
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)
If you descend in Category:Rock music groups, you can get to lots of non-music-groups. For example, -> Category:The Beatles-> John Lennon. I'm pretty sure that this type of structure is deprecated. But Wikipedia:Categorization and its subpages are huge and ill-organized, so I haven't been able to find an unambiguous straight answer. Could someone in the know confirm or deny? Do you agree that Category:Rock music groups needs a big reorganization? -- Dbenbenn 03:55, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The business and economics categories were disorganized, so for the last week I have spent my time trying to sort it out. The way I approached it was to create a variety of categories, subcategories and subsubcategories. (There are about 50 of them now). Then I have been going through the articles listed in the old navigation system and deciding which of the 50 or so categories are applicable to each article. It turned out that the average is 2 or 3 categories per article. So far I have added about 1000 tags. I still have 6 of the old lists to go through. In going through this process I have discovered that different people have different ideas about what criterion to use in appending category tags. In particular, I have been in conflict with two other contributers:
I reject both these criteria. The criteria I use is I try to put myself in the mind of the user who is using the category system as a navigational device. I ask myself, "If I was browsing in (for example) the Finance category, what articles would I expect to find there, and what articles would I find useful there". Can we arrive at some sort of policy on the appropriate criteria to use before I get into any more edit wars about something as unimportant as which category tags to use. mydogategodshat 17:39, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
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)
How does one categorize the defining element of a category, so that, for example, the article "city" is somewhere pointed to in "Category:Cities". It seems some have done this by putting the article city in a category like: Category:Cities|? or Category:Cities|* and this may be appropriate. The article "city" is not actually a city (as an article like "New York City" would be) so it doesn't belong in a category that is supposed to contain cities (although it would be appropriate in an category like "Category:Urban studies and planning". Also, it seems that the first paragraph of the defining element article might should be automatically put in the intro text for the category, increasing the automation of categories. - Centrx 22:46, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'm running into this increasingly often lately. I believe articles ABOUT the subject matter of a category should NOT be category members, but should rather be referred to in the category description and should link to the categories (using See also: or something similar). I'm finding too often that others come along and change the articles I set up that way so that the articles are instead within the category.
I find this less useful, since these articles are different from things that are semantically part OF the category, and should be picked out specially rather than lost in the morass of category members. —Morven 00:13, Dec 28, 2004 (UTC)
Should I delete Category:Russian World War II people and create something like Category:Soviet Union World War II people ???
Darwin 16:34, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
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)
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:
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:
Any objections, please let me know. -- Lexor| Talk 09:57, 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)
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)