[WikiEN-l] Hello

Wed Dec 13 10:04:13 UTC 2006

On 12/13/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>

> That does not mean that I want [[Category:Mathematics]] to consist of 15000 pages. How would that help anyone? I have actually done work, on [[Category:Set theory]] (where I was thanked) and [[Category:Fluid dynamics]] (perhaps unnoticed) on getting useful subcategories; which then can sit inside two or more higher-level categories. This all adds to the convenience of the user. It is quite a good idea, in many cases, to consider splitting categories which have gone 'over the page'.

Purely and simply, categories are useful for many things they weren't
designed for or intended to do. Remember, they were a cute hack
invented by Magnus a couple of years ago in the face of some pretty
serious skepticism.

I don't think it would take much to make them much more powerful, but
as long as most people think they're primarily a navigational tool,
using them to record all kinds of attributes about the subjects of
articles is going to run into a lot of criticism. As it already does.

Steve