Help talk:Categorization

As suggested over at Category talk:cervine, I'm opening a general discussion here on the subject of how Shifti's category structure should be organized. Specifically the "by TF" subcategories.

On the one hand, I think it's important to avoid over-categorization and empty or low-volume categories. category:weasel and category:ferret are good examples of categories that I think are problematic right now; weasel has literally nothing in it, just the single subcategory ferret, and ferret itself only has two stories. IMO they should have been left in the "weasel" root category for now, there's no need for the extra level of categorization.

On the other hand, Shifti is a bit different from Wikipedia in that it's harder for the "general public" to help; most authors have chosen to put their stories in subpages that can only be edited by administrators, of whom there are just a few. So the current paucity of stories in many of these categories may simply be due to the fact that I haven't got my act in gear and categorized stuff yet.

A third thing to throw into the discussion is the possibility that soon a new version of MediaWiki will be coming out that will support "category intersections"; for example you could tell it "give me a list of all pages that are in both category:canine and category:transgender", or "a list of all pages in category:canine and its subcategories". So any solution we come up with now may wind up being superseded by that.

Oh, and one final thing while I'm at it; we should come up with some standards for category names. Right now there's a mixture of plural and singular names, capitalized and non-capitalized, and Latin vs English terms. If we could come up with a standard and stick to it it'll be easier to add pages to categories in the future, one could make a good guess without having to look up the actual spellings and such. Bryan 18:36, 30 April 2008 (EDT)

Speaking for myself and myself only, I hate having to work to find a story. If I'm looking for something - let's say an ocelot TF - I'd prefer to just have that on a "Cats" page than to go through subcategories. Lots of stories in a subcategory aren't in the main category. The fact that most of these subcategories are currently nonessential and sparsely populated makes me unwilling to click on them. I'd prefer it if we stayed general until specializing it is actually needed.

Of course, you have a point. Authors don't always use the categories already in place... As for nomenclature, I guess the question is whether we want to sound educated or average. Latin names can get a little pretentious, but I happen to like them. --Joysweeper 19:07, 30 April 2008 (EDT)

Yeah I probably went overboard on some of the categories. For the most part I tried to guess based on my own experiences, which tend to be 'popular' types (which would become a big category if they were in total). With Bull's, it was a problem with coming up with a name for 'cows' that isn't just cows.

Any time estimates for that Category plans on the MediaWiki development? Are we talking a "Next Major Release" enhancement or a "Sometime in the future" type enhancement?

Ideally, it would be nice if the category pages could autoload some subcategories if they don't have many entries, so we maintain the lesser groupings, while still seeing them on a single page.

The problem with your "Ocelot" example, is if you are looking for Ocelot stories/art/book reviews, and click on "Cats" or "Felines" or whatever, then you'll possibly get hundreds of items, with no indicator of what are lion stories, what are ocelot, and what are generic feline stories.

And finally, I definitely agree, we need to come up with some sort of generic species naming protocol to pull everything together. What it should be, I don't know. It depends on how much detail we want to go and such.

--Jetfire 07:41, 1 May 2008 (EDT)

For both cows and bulls one could use "cattle". :) I'll take a few minutes to sort through the existing categories and see if I can't tidy up a bit, and categorize some more stories so that we can get a better feel for what we actually have to work with here. Since some of the naming standards are going to be arbitrary, I'm going to take the initiative and say that we'll use lower-case category names wherever possible (except for the first letter, which doesn't matter - the software always capitalizes it) and use plurals where it makes sense to do so, since those are the standards used on Wikipedia that I'm most familiar with. I'm not going to change category:story to category:stories at this juncture, however, since that would require editing pretty much every single story we have. :) I'll also add a section on standards to the help page - I don't think we'll need a separate "policy" page, we're not that big and complicated yet. Bryan 00:39, 2 May 2008 (EDT)

There, just whipped up a template to help non-administrators get in on some of the cleanup if they like; Template:Needs category. If you find a story needing categorization but it's on a user subpage or otherwise locked, add this template to the page's talk page instead. Bryan 01:46, 2 May 2008 (EDT)

Oh, and unfortunately there's no solid timeline on MediaWiki features in development. It's a wonderful piece of software but the developers are somewhat notorious for taking a long time to implement certain new features in high demand. The current major project seems to be implementing "flagged revisions", a feature that will be incredibly useful for Wikipedia but not so much for something like Shifti where pages aren't edited much by anyone other than their original authors. So there's no need to hold back on refining our current category system, it's just a nice thing to look forward to in the future. Bryan 01:50, 2 May 2008 (EDT)