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overlapping & redundant categories

[edit]

We have a large number of overlapping and redundant categories that are not clearly inter-related in the category structure, and have inconsistent naming styles. These include these very general trees:

General "Works" trees
Subject subcategories of the general "works" trees

The subject breakdowns of these various trees include:


Proposal

Without deleting any of the existing categories or trees, I propose a category clean-up that will create the following tree to organize works & publications in various media -- informational and creative works in various media (books, films, works of art, periodicals, tv, radio, etc.).


Questions include -
  • what is the best overall term for the tree? Having looked at all of these, I think "works" is probably the best -- it doesn't imply any particular medium or format and it is clearly a "plural" category so denoting subcategories of particular works. "Publications" implies "published to the world" which would implicitly exclude unpublished works, and also suggests literary publications, not, e.g., films. "Media" is not clearly a "plural instance" like "books" and is also a subject; it also is used more frequently in the context of "mass media" and so implies to some people film, tv, radio, and exclusion of books & art. "Sources" refers to how they're used and I think that's not a helpful designation.
  • Are there any scope concerns? Reasons to include or exclude some of these trees?
  • Major trees I've missed?
  • Preferences between the common "by topic", "by subject", and "by interest" formulations? I think "by topic" is probably the best of the three.

Thoughts & reactions? --Lquilter (talk) 18:18, 23 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Generalisations: cleaning up category trees of this size can be quite a project. Maintaining them is even harder. When I came here i thought Id do some, but in practice I haven't been able to , unless i were to drop doing everything else. You & I are librarians, and sometimes a large (or predominant) part of our work is doing things like this. that means we know how to do it right, get ambitious--but we may not have the time here to follow through--the inevitable curse of volunteer projects. (In my case, how to organise lists of electronic resources.)
"by medium and genre" requires two trees--the categories are overlapping: horror fiction, for example, comes in all media.
remember what used to be called "literary warrant"-- the categories should match the contents--there's no point in being logical in the abstract,w are not classifying knowledge, but WP articles.
in consequence, the large categories need to be subdivided; thats why we have "books" as well as "works" , and "fiction" as well as "books".
It's a general problem that categories at WP contain instances of the items intended to be categorized as well as articles about the category and about various aspects of it: for example, the Category:documentaries contains "Academy Award for Documentary Feature" and "Australian International Documentary Conference" , "List of documentary television channels" as well as articles about dozens of individual documentary films. This by itself is enough to make all of the usual theoretical considerations somewhat irrelevant. So there's no point trying for rigor, only for some amount of practicality.

DGG (talk) 07:06, 26 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I hear you. I'm trying for the most practical approach -- it seems like setting up a Category:Works tree that builds on the preexisting Category:Works by year as a generic title, and doesn't try to rename any of the types of works that have grown up -- might be a simple way to start. I can hold off on issues of genre & medium until we see how everything fits together. --Lquilter (talk) 01:43, 28 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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