Categories - next

2010-10-10T14:24:07Z

Perhaps, Kirby Phelps has a point in wanting a good number of categories at each article, but in my opinion it will not work. The purpose of categories is to navigate the wiki, not to introduce new information or echo what already exists - therefore, too many categories are perhaps worse than too few.

Let's take the shapeshifter example. We all know that: 1) while not all Quileutes are shapeshifters, all shapeshifters are Quileutes at least on their paternal side; 2) all shapeshifters are members of a pack; 3) with one exception, shapeshifters are all male. We can therefore infer a rule: mempership to a pack -> shapeshifter and male -> full-Quileute or part-Quileute on their paternal side. Categories will therefore reflect this rule: "Uley's pack", or "Black's pack" are the lowest level category, "shapeshifter" is the intermediate level categories, "Quileute" and "male" are the top categories. (We may even add an over-the-top category: "human", since it has not been proven that shapeshifters are a distinct species or just a specialized variety of human beings, either way.) Embry Call is no exception, that his mother is Makah is something to be stated in the article, whether in the categories is debatable. Leah Clearwater is only partially the exception to the rule: she's a fully functional shapeshifter, but she's female. We can introduce a low-level "female" category to override the higher-level "male" one - in this case the information is important enough to spill over into the categories.

By this rule, Kirby, you know that a member of any of the packs is a shapeshifter, a male (unless otherwise stated) and at least part Quileute (additional information in the article). Which reminds me that when Albert Einstein fled Germany for the US, he was asked his ethnicity and answered "human". You can hardly beat that.

This should answer, at least in part, Kean; my idea (which is actually provided by TagAlongPam, and I have no idea where she found it) is to provide a pyramid of categories from the most restrictive at the bottom and the most general at the top.

There will be plenty to do just in the planning stage; but since at this side of the Atlantic is 2 in the morning, I'll leave a deeper analysis of it for after I've caught some sleep. Ngebendi 00:13, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

Categories.

2010-10-08T11:20:44Z

Some recent activity on categories made me feel that there's little or no consensus on them; it has not agreed upon which ones should be included directly on each page, which ones should be included higher up because they are implied in the lower-order ones. The main example I can bring is the categorization of shapeshifters - in the past week, there's been much adding and much deleting of the "shapeshifter", "male" and "Quileute" categories to the single shapeshifters' page. A number of people feel they should be explicitly added to the pages, a number of other people think (I among them) that the "Sam Uley's pack" or "Jacob Black's pack" categories are enough to indicate their species, gender and ethnicity - the only two exceptions, namely Leah Clearwater and Embry Call are too well publicized to ignore and are therefore perhaps the only ones allowed to get more explicit categorization.

I would therefore like to see if we can reach some consensus on how categorize the pages of the wiki and implement the result, rather than to have a number of people editing and counterediting a page because they haven't managed to reach a common ground.

Anybody willing to share their opinion, indicate which categories they find strong, which they find weak, tell what category pyramid they woul like to see on the wiki and so on?

Thanks! Ngebendi 11:20, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

Ngebendi's blog

Categories - next

Categories.