User:SebastianHelm/categorization/combining

Combining categories

Moved here from Wikipedia:Categorization_policy#Combining categories

From a reader's perspective, a straightforward solution would be: Allowing the reader to combine existing categories. Categories such as the aforementioned Finnish botanists would be dissolved; any article would instead have two entries like Category:Botany and Category:Finnish people or three like Category:Botany, Category:Finland and Category:People. (The latter case might include a foreigner working about Finnish botany, but we may decide to live with this imprecision.)

Scenario: Heikki wants to find a Finnish botanist whose name he forgot. On the main page, he clicks on a link to Wikipedia:Find by category. That page presents him links to all categories (possibly sorted alphabetically or hierarchically). Next to each of these, there is (instead of the bullet) a checkbox. Heikki checks "Botany" and "Finnish people". When Heikki clicks "Submit" he gets a list of all articles that pertain to both categories.

This will be a big improvement for Heikki over the current situation: Currently, he has to read half a page of Wikipedia:Category schemes before he finds Lists of people (called "Biographies") and then he has continue on a cumbersome and detour-prone search till he finds Finnish botanists. And that assumes that he even knows that such a category exists in the first place! (Implementation detail: The link to Wikipedia:Find by category should be in a prominent place. It could replace the link to Wikipedia:Category schemes.)

It will also be an improvement for editors: We only need to remember a fraction of the current number of categories (- was that "Category:List_of_Libertarian_Economists_and_Business_Leaders" or "Category:List_of_Libertarian_Business_Leaders_and_Economists"?).

The same principle would be applied to stubs. Instead of {{bio-stub}} we would simply use {{stub}} and Category:People. In addition to the above advantages it would give us:

The categorization work won't have to be done twice.
Articles will be categorized correctly early on, which means among other things that anyone who looks up a category combination will automatically see all applicable stubs. We might even consider tagging stubs in category lists (e.g. with an icon) so that people are enticed into expanding them.

— Sebastian (T) 17:14, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC)

There is a bugzilla entry requesting boolean searches for categories, which would partially implement this suggestion. -- Beland 00:01, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Cool - thanks for the link! The bug seems more general and more demanding to implement and to use, though. — Sebastian (T) 06:50, 2005 Apr 18 (UTC)

Um, need I remind you that there are serious server problems when a template gets used on a large number of articles? As it is, the work of stub sorters is largely trying to iensure that no stub template is used on more than a couple of hundred articles. Now you're suggesting replacing these stub category templates with one template for 35000 articles? Oh, and:

Scenario: Heikki wants to find a Finnish botanist whose name he forgot. On the main page, he clicks on a link to Wikipedia:Find by category. That page presents him links to all categories (possibly sorted alphabetically or hierarchically). Next to each of these, there is (instead of the bullet) a checkbox. Heikki checks "Botany" and "Finnish people". When Heikki clicks "Submit" he gets a list of all articles that pertain to both categories.

Heikki is not likely to make that much work for himself. A more likely scenario is that Heikki goes to Category:Finland, easily finds Category:Finnish people, and from there finds Category:Finnish botanists. To do it by hunting through the entire category list would be a ridiculous waste of time. Grutness|^hello? 05:42, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

This is not a fair comparison for three reasons:

Your scenario only works under the assumption that the specific combination Heikki needs is already there. What if he searches for an Israeli botanist? You leave him out in the cold.
If you want to address that problem your way then you need 10,000s of new categories. (There are e.g. 34 subcategories under Category:Botanists by nationality, but 196 subcategories under Category:People by nationality. Difference = 162. Multiply with hundreds of occupations. And that's for occupations alone! What about books, music, history, organizations, plants, ...) Do you think this is feasible?
You're comparing apples with oranges. Of course, if a category already exists then it will be easier for any user to find it. However, the difference is far less than you make it appear. You're comparing my long description with your abbreviated version. You're not even describing how Heikki finds Category:Finland in the first place! (Granted, though, there is an easier way than my proposal - see m:Categorization.) — Sebastian (talk) 06:45, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)

Nice

Well, as you probably guessed, I really like this idea and would have no problem with writing it as a complete proposal. However, this is mainly an implementation question. So if you know of some way to get one of the official programmers to comment, that would be the way to go. I know a couple of them but they tend not to respond to their talk pages overly much. R adiant _>|< 13:50, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)

The only ways I'm aware of are WP:VP and bugzilla. VP is a bit short lived for this. And bugzilla is no wiki, so it is less suited to the discussions we are used to. More importantly, two related requests (1106 and 1411) have already been posted and seem to have stalled. I'll ask the developer for 1411, Amgine about it.

I wonder if there's a more inviting place than my user page to discuss this. — Sebastian (talk) 07:25, 2005 Jun 17 (UTC)