Forum:Category trees

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Category trees

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)