User:Tim!/Ceci n'est pas une pipe

This is an essay about categorisation. The title of this essay refers to a famous painting by Rene Magritte called The Treachery Of Images, in which he shows that a painting of a pipe is not in itself a pipe.

The most important thing to remember about categories is that they contain articles and not the real life objects described by those articles. Hence when people say that a certain thing is not defined by a category, this is largely irrelevant, as the only important thing is what the article contains.

For example, it is commonly argued at CFD that actor categories are non-defining. However, if one actually looks at many articles, for example Tom Baker, one sees a large amount of information about the television series Doctor Who. Therefore it makes sense for the article to be placed in a category related to Doctor Who. As there are a large number of articles about people who have appeared in Doctor Who it makes sense to categorise them together in Category:Doctor Who cast members. Clearly, there will be many articles about people who have appeared in Doctor Who which will contain no information about the series. Those articles should not be categorised in that category.

The argument that an article may end up with too many categories must also therefore be false because it implies that an article contains too much information. If one reads the guide to writing better articles, large articles should be split up into smaller sub-articles. So any article with too many categories could be split up into sub-articles and move the categories to the sub-articles which contain the relevant information. To return to the above example, if Tom Baker grew too large, one could create a sub-article Tom Baker in Doctor Who which would be in Category:Doctor Who cast members, and the Tom Baker article would be in the more generic categories.