[WikiEN-l] Categories considered harmful

Mon Jun 21 07:26:51 UTC 2004

I agree wholeheartedly with what Jakob says (although it seems many people
don't like the idea of someone rejecting their new toy). Maybe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers ,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Melbourne_trams or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Viennese_composers can serve as
eye-openers: In each case, the "category" itself is rather pointless, and
the entries are dubious. What is more, no one seems to be discussing this
anywhere.

All the best,

KF

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jakob" <jakob.voss at s1999.tu-chemnitz.de>
To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, June 21, 2004 1:24 AM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Categories considered harmful

> Hi!
>
> Maybe the problem with categories is not that bad in en.wikipedia, but as
far as
> I can see its pretty chaotic there, too. I wrote this having in mind the
attemts
> in de.wikipedia - my main reasons are true in every language.
>
>
> Since Version 1.3 of MediaWiki we have the nice category function. In the
> german wikipedia there is a lot of confusion and struggle on how to use
> categories in the right way. As a student of library science I could tell
> several methods how to classify, index and sort things but none of them
> seems to be applicable easily with the current implementation of
categories.
>
> 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 not easy to know how to do it in the right way because subject
> indexing is a complex issue and it's not easy because of lacks in the
> implementation (no rename, no redirects, no assignment of articles to
> categories without editing every single the article pages). Editing an
> article I have to guess which categories are existing, how they are
> spelled and the rules what to classify into them and what not.
>
> 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 nor when sub-categories are
> created.
>
> 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).
>
> 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.
>
>
> Given the reasons I strongly recommend to stop using the categories and
> to focus on writing and improving good articles. Many categories can
easily
> be replaced with normal links between articles. Adding and removing
> categories do not change an article's content a bit. 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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!
>
> Greetings,
>   Jakob Voss (aka nichtich at de.wikipedia)
>
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