I'm again intrigued by the discussions here, be it categorizations or a user
I seem to have never come across called 172 (?). I came back from a weekend
a couple of hours ago and since then have been trying to access Wikipedia --
to no avail.
As far as categories are concerned, I tried to point out some days ago that
there should be some policy everyone could agree on, but Timwi suggested we
should just go ahead. The result of this approach is being deplored already.
I wonder though if a bot is the right answer.
KF
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Trump" <wikipedia(a)decumanus.com>
To: <anthere9(a)yahoo.com>om>; "English Wikipedia"
<wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 06, 2004 6:54 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: A first encounter with Categories
Yes the bot idea or some variation sounds extremely
attractive.
During this shakedown cruise of categories, the main thing I've
noticed is that they are changing very rapidly. A category is
created, and articles are added to it. Then someone else creates more
specific sub-categories and begins shifting articles from the higher
level to the lower level category. Or the category name is changed to
reflect standards of capitalization or formatting (as might happen
the opera singer example)
In any case, this is resulting in many editors going through many
articles repeated to change the categorization. My watchlist is
filled with long repeated edits in multiple waves.
The root of this is that unlike lists, which can be changed "all at
once" by moving a page, categories have to tweaked by hand in every
single article in a particular category. It is the flip side of the
auto-generated nature of categories.
I agree with Anthere that some kind of bot system or automated update
of categories would be a very good thing if could alleviate this
problem. The current system is not only time-consuming but will
inevitably generate anger among editors as they see their hard work
of editing many articles swept away. Unlike page moves, this cannot
be undone by a simple procedure but requires many edits and hours of
work to undo under the current system.