[Wikipedia-l] Categories considered harmful

Sat Jun 19 21:22:39 UTC 2004

Jakob (jakob.voss at 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.