Jakob (jakob.voss(a)s1999.tu-chemnitz.de) [040620 06:28]:
As far as I can tell there are three main reasons for
Wikipedia's success:
1. It's very easy to contribute (Wikitax, everybody can edit)
2. Every edit is monitored in watchlists and list of lasts edits
so we can control each other
3. There is a clear common mission - to create an encyclopedia (+NPOV)
As far as I also can see the category-function contradicts all of them:
1. It's not easy.
It's remarkably easy. I find it so anyway.
2. It's not controllable.
You cannot watch a category to get noticed on new articles or when
somebody removes an article from the category.
This could do with fixing. OTOH, it's becoming conventional for one's edit
summary to say "[[Category:xxx]]" when you add an article to category xxx.
Which of course shows up in your watchlist.
3. There is no common mission
Can anybody tell the purpose of categories? Finding articles (without
a coordinated search function?!) Browsing in topics (without a clear
overview of all categories?!) Are we trying to index articles with
subject heading, using a thesaurus, a classification or even a structure
ontology? Library science has invented several kind of schemes like that
but at the moment everybody is muddling this and that trying to invent
the already invented wheels of documentation (by the way there are also
methods of automatic indexing, clustering and classification).
I find it very useful to accumulate a group of articles on a subject I'm
interested in (e.g. Category:Scientology and Category:Goth, which I
created). A quick overview give one some idea of what's missing as well.
It also allows one to try to bring all of a category up to scratch. A lot
of the articles in Category:Goth are just a bit crappy and need work. But
now they're on one list, and I can feel a sense of achievement at making
that category worth the effort.
And: In classification there is no NPOV because there
is no "right" way
to classify the world but it depends on the special needs and questions
I want to answer with a special system of subject indexing.
I think you're wrong here. Categories are emerging quite nicely.
Badly-named ones are getting turned into well-named ones, even if that
means editing thirty articles by hand. It's clunky at first, but the wiki
process is working on this one too.
Given the reasons I strongly recommend to stop using
the categories and
to focus on writing and improving good articles.
As I note above, a category can help one write obviously missing articles
and give an incentive to bring bad ones up to scratch.
Many categories can easily
be replaced with normal links between articles.
One important presentation function I find for categories is that they
can replace those bloody ugly article series boxes people are so fond of.
If you want to
keep track of all articles in some area use (Wiki)Projects, article
series, portals and learn how to use the "what links here"-function!
A good article is an article that can be found easily without categories.
I disagree. I've found categories useful already (goth, scientology - once
each was created, others added stuff to them).
Indeed classifying wikipedia articles is very
interesting and will
become more important, but this should be an independent project - maybe
in a "Classifipedia" or "Categorypedia" that links to wikipedia
articles.
Bottom-up category creation is working, in my humble opinion - because
hierarchies of categories are emerging, and it's a lot easier moving a
category in a hierarchy than moving all thirty-odd articles to a different
category.
You know - librarians normally do not write the books
they organize and
search engine experts do not write the websites they crawl, so let's focus
on what we can do the best: creating the most detailed, most understandable
and freest encyclopedia in the history of mankind!
I appreciate your frustration with the current proces, but it's early days
yet. I haven't addressed everything you've said, and I do see your points,
but I think they won't be a problem in the long run - because good stuff is
already coming out as an emergent behaviour. Which, by the Bazaar process,
will produce better stuff if it's a sound approach in the first place.
Which I think it is.
- d.