Viajero wrote:
Maybe I have been out of the loop but just what is the
purpose of Categories?
Just now I noticed that someone went through a bunch of pages I was watching and added the
cateogry "Opera Composer" which seems entirely logical for the relevant
articles, except that we have already have a page [[List of opera composers]]. Does this
mean that this article is redundant? My personal instinct, which may or may not be
relevant here, is not to do things in two different ways when one suffices. Will people
continue to update the handmade lists now that Categories pages are available in such
cases of redundancy as this? If not, they should be deleted, as outdated lists are a help
to nobody.
Yes and no. To some extent the manual lists are wish lists with empty
links appearing in red. The category system can't pick up list elements
that don't exist. Any manual list should probably receive a category
tag as well. In a closed end subject or one that is effectively
closed-ended (such as the list of US presidents) there are strong
arguments from deleting the list when pages exist for all its elements.
The list of opera composers, however, is open-ended and should probably
remain so that new names can be added, and we can know which have been
done and which remain to be done.
Ec