[WikiEN-l] User categories and lists

Wed Sep 21 14:45:20 UTC 2005

>From: Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com>
>
>The List of Caribbean Wikipedians was redirected to the Category:Caribbean
>Wikipedians tonight. Thus I learned about Wikipedia:User categorisation.
>While I realised that these cats (Wikipedians in Foo) were spreading, I was
>shocked to realise that this page was telling people to redirect lists to
>categories. Maybe I missed the discussion at the Village Pump, but I could
>not figure out what the point of this change was.
>
>The List of Caribbean Wikipedians is a working resource associated with the
>Caribbean Wikipedians' notice board. It serves a purpose in the improvement
>of Caribbean-related articles. So why must it be removed? In addition,
>although there are 17 names on the list, there are only 4 names in the
>Category, and over a dozen national sub-categories...sub-categories which
>are so badly named that I cannot add myself to one of them (I am not in
>Trinidad and Tobago). The best case scenario would leave the names 
>scattered
>through over a dozen categories, with no clue as to whether they had any
>interest in matters arising from the notice board or not.
>
>Am I the only one who is bothered by projects which set out to remove 
>useful
>material? True, some of the lists are too long to be useful, and true, it's
>"fun" to be able to add a link to your user page saying that you in Foo 
>(not
>from, not associated with...in). But what sort of a project focusses on the
>appearance of the Wikipedia namespace instead of focussing on usefulness? 
>Or
>is it no longer true that we are here to write an encyclopaedia?

There's a natural tension between Categories and Lists.  On the one hand, 
categories are self-maintaining, and only link to things that actually exist 
on Wikipedia.  On the other hand, lists can contain additional information 
about the items in them, can reference important information for which no 
articles yet exist on Wikipedia, and can be organized in more meaningful 
ways than categories.

I'm tend to favour Categories over Lists, but I can see why someone would 
prefer to have Lists as well.

Jay.