Forum:Category trees

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Category Trees (2008)

As you may have noticed, I am getting stuck into article relationship rationalisation with a vengeance.

• I believe that we need a structure of categories and sub-categories to help untangle the web of different systems that have grown up alongside each other.
• We also need some conventions to work out what category/ies a particular article should be filed under. For example, I have in mind a History-->Organisation-->Institution-->Imperial Institution structure in mind (along with various alternate routes like History-->Organisation-->Corporation or H->O->I->Hiver Institution. It would be too unwieldy to file an article under up to four or five separate categories that are all essentially related, and probably better to stick to a top domain category and lowest e.g. History-->Imperial Instituion, while still nesting the categories themselves within higher domain categories, reducing clutter while allowing a high degree of navigation.

Any thoughts? --RASN Lt. Cmdr. Reijerink 00:30, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

I would recommend reading through this page (and associated discussion page) on the meta-wiki regarding how to categorize pages. There are two insights. First, building a large, complex categorization system means that someone (you) needs to go through all 6,452 articles and make sure they are all correct. And a complex set of rules regarding which category to place an article raises the barrier to entry for contributers. Second, people searching the wiki don't generally don't walk up/down the category trees to find articles, they use the search box.

What I took away from this is it's better to build a forest of shrubs rather than a large tree for categories.

That said, the top level of the category tree should be Library (except the Meta categories), not History. All the library article go in the library category for no reason other than it's a catch all. The only reason so far we've added sub-categories is either because they are topically related (e.g. Vargr, Vargr Dictionary), or because the there is a subset of articles that can be extracted (e.g. Corporations, Megacorprations). In the latter case, the parent group has more articles than the child one. Tjoneslo 04:41, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

* You raise some excellent points. The main reason I want to press on with some form of categorisation rationalisation is for the browsers who don't actually know that a piece of information exists. One can use the search box for something we know or believe exists and it will help us stumble on some gems serendipitously, but by far the most powerful tool IMO to achieve this is a nice group of pages with categorised listings.

* Of course the top level category should be library, which is why I started getting worried when I realised the implications for the history page of including every single listing from the sub-categories.

* I for one am not afraid of the challenge of combing through a large number of articles to look for new possibilities for inserting links and categories, it rather suits my personality, and I see no reason to impose a particular system on other users, especially new ones like myself. It would certainly be too difficult to ensure a strict protocol throughout the wiki, but I think that by creating perhaps more links between the "shrubs" and perhaps rationalising a few of them it would create more opportunities to stumble across quirky canon trivia and non-canon articles.

The upshot of this is:-

1. Will I be stepping on anyones toes if I experiment a little more with this project?

2. Are the changes I have brought to the History category page (as one of the most browsed pages in the wiki) useful and positive or a hinderence?

--RASN Lt. Cmdr. Reijerink 05:46, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

1. no, please feel free to experiment.
2. Be careful of using the "most browsed" categories and pages to as justification for anything. Wikia has, for a long time, used a cache system which totally screws with the wikimedia visited page count systems. I'm very suspicious of the Top Content/Most visited list, and been thinking of removing it from the menu.

I'd add the following as recommendation: The Library, Canon and Non-Canon categories should be the only dumping ground categories. All the rest of the categories should have only article specifically relevant to that category. This isn't followed, there are a number of categories that could be cleaned up.

Tjoneslo 14:05, 16 September 2008 (UTC)