Peter Jaros wrote: I think series boxes are fine for articles that are in a _series_, but for groups of related articles, I think categories are the best solution. Perhaps we should implement a way to display all the articles in a category inline on a page, similarly to series boxes, but automatically, consistently, and _optionally_. - David

Alex Regh wrote: Maybe I'm just understanding categories differently from others. I see categories primarily as a convenient sorting tool. A Belgian mathematician wout be categoriized under both Belgians and matematicians, and he would be found by searching under either term. All the articles in a category would only need to be displayed (preferably in point form the way a recent changes or watch list page is displayed. The categories to which an article belongs could show up at the bottom of the page along with the links to other languages.. Why do edit wars have anything to to with it? Ec

Hello! On Thu, 29 Apr 2004 09:48:22 +0200, Magnus Manske wrote: The problem is the "we could see", because who would decide that? Look at the Belgian mathematicans mentionend before: While at least many people would probably agree putting all mathematicans with {{}} into the article would make some sense (although that is a rather large list), some Belgian people might feel that *all* important Belgians should be listed via {{}} in the article, too. And boom, a little edit war. Not to mention the possibility of a Belgian-American mathematician who also was an astronomer and a painter. Five plain links via [[]] or five long linklists drowing the article via {{}}? I really think that there is little reason to make the second option available at all, but a lot not to do it. BTW, while debating categories is certainly important, we should not ignore the box problem that the Wikipedia is having right now! Then why is there no regular meeting scheduled in Cologne? We can't be the only ones! ;-) Alex -- If you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side. --- Jim Steinman --- Alex' Assorted Homepages: www.alexsite.de

Take a look at something like [[Cleveland metropolitan area]], in which there is one line of text and about ten lines of box. There are many articles like that. RickK Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote: Alex Regh wrote: What problem might that be? --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs

Right, there was nothing wrong with the article per se, even as a stub, except for the minimal text and the excessive box. RickK Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote: Rick wrote: That article has now been redirected (not by me, I'm just reporting onw hat I saw) to Greater Cleveland. It strikes me, therefore, that the problem with the version you were talking about is that it was a stub, not anything inherently broken about the box itself? --Jimbo _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs

At 12:41 AM 4/30/2004 +0100, Timwi wrote: There are too many, they're too big and intrusive (especially at the top of the article floating in the margin), and the links they provide are often either redundant or only marginally relevant? IMO, anyway.

I personally think that categories and box-style lists should just go in the See Also as links. I also think that hyperlinking words within the text gives the richest content-correlation, and that the list or box models are at best poor approximations. I also would like people to consider that once an article is printed on a piece of paper, the box-lists and categories become completely useless. Finally, I wonder whether the edit wars are taking more of a toll among content-gatherers than on content-organizers. The proliferation of such schemes as the series-boxes indicates to me that there's more people doing organizing than people entering original information. I would suggest that people who are now not interested in adding new content to articles should go scour the web, libraries, and their neighborood to beef up articles rather than organize all the flimsy stubs into a highly polished hierarchy that becomes unwieldy and forbidding to newscomers. On an aside: I use XHTML and CSS. It's great for web, sucks for everything else. I for one recommend wikisyntax over {span} and {div} and {table} tags. I think ultimately we'll need to be able to have a converter to TEX or LATEX via DocBook to allow for easy publishing. This would be much easier to do with just wikisyintax. ===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan(a)yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell http://www.christophermahan.com/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover

Christopher Mahan wrote: I also would like to remind people that Wikipedia is not paper. Please stop comparing it to that. Nobody cares (or should care) about that just yet because we are not yet actively working on a paper encyclopedia. If and when we are, this is a concern of the people who work on that, and nobody else's. And even for them, the {{msg:}} things are extremely trivial to remove. On the web, they do not do any harm... of course, as long as it's not overdone. I quite agree with some of the sentiments brought up that an article on a Belgian mathematician would look rather silly if it had a list of all mathematicians as well as another list of all famous Belgians in it. But who's doing that, anyway? Nobody is seriously considering creating such boxes because by all measurements of common sense they would be way too large and there would be way too many of them. By contrast, the boxes on things like [[Greater Cleveland]] are perfectly fine. Timwi

Hi! On Fri, 30 Apr 2004 17:48:50 +0100, Timwi wrote: Unfortunalely, relying on common sense might be asking a wee bit too much. It usually is. Right now the argument often goes that well, right now, there is only one box or two, so who'd mind. Problem is, if some of those boxes stay, others will be created simply because putting *this* box in means that the relation of the article to *that* is drowned. So *that* needs another box as well. See the discussion about [[Heteronormativity]] again. Two already turned up, two more would be definitely needed, if they'd stay, and maybe even three. Not desirable. Also, it is extremly optimistic to assume that people won't create boxes for rather obscure series. After all, they created lists. Now the lists become ignored (or at least that is feared) so everybody will run to create a box out of the list. Anybody can check how many "List of"s the Wikipedia has? And imagine that, say, half of them become boxes. Also, even if people would only create boxes on "relevant" subjects - well, who will decide what is relevant? Somebody interested in history of mathematics will consider a list of all famous mathematicians very relevant, and a Belgian person might feel that most people just undervalue their country, and that therefore the list is sorely needed. Then the links to the lists get drowend by whatever box in *whatever* article - and boom, the box is dropped into any article that previously had links to lists. Which in turn will lead to more boxes, because other people will feel the new box drowns their link to the list. Which will get droppen into every ... I think you get the idea. Let's keep this the Wikipedia, not the Box-o-pedia. Alex -- If you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side. --- Jim Steinman --- Alex' Assorted Homepages: www.alexsite.de

Alex Regh wrote: Funny, but I interpreted the reference to the "box problem" as relating to ongoing hardware difficulties. :-) Ec

Timwi wrote: It's somewhat nebulous, I'll agree, but to me, an article series would be articles that (under at least one interpretation) are related to each other linearly, that is, each article in a series has a clear previous and next article. Articles series about history are an obvious example of this, but there are probably other ways that articles can be related linearly other than chronologically. An example that comes to mind (because I worked on them) are the articles about consonant sounds. The various places of articulation form a linear series of articles, from bilabial to glottal. I would say that most of the current article "series" aren't really series as such but are just groups of related articles, and so technically the box containing links to the related articles aren't really so much "series" boxes as much as they are "related articles" boxes. Another way to consider the so-called "series boxes" might to think of them as a sort of "tour" of a group of related articles. I could see perhaps formalizing this idea and creating "tours" of different topics. Of course the arguments about what is included in the tour and in what order I can envision becoming extraordinarily pedantic, but such is the way of Wikipedia. I'll stop before my ramble gets too long. -- David

Peter Jaros wrote: I can't see why the two features need to be mutually exclusive. Ec