User talk:Jerzy/Top Arc Categories

This page contains my Topical Archive re Wikipedia Categories
 * In /Top Arc Categories (9 kB, 2004 Nov 4)

Overlapping categories (French poets &c.)
Ihcoyc/Smerdis of Tlön tl With regard to the crossed categores at "French poets" and "French language poets":

There isn't really a way to cross-reference these things, or is there? Of course, "French poets" is somewhat ambiguous, but it might mean poets, citizens of France, writing in Breton or Flemish; while some of the "French-language poets" are citizens of Canada, the USA, Uruguay, or Belgium, and so forth. It struck me that some of the poets are misclassified because of this vagueness. Is the only solution, then, to add all of the "French poets" who wrote in French to "French-language poets" so they can be found from either category? This looks ugly and odd to see both Category:French poets and Category:French-language poets among the categories on the same page, and I can see this making trouble as well. FWIW, this is the only category I've found that presents this particular problem.


 * PS, I think I've fixed it in-text. I didn't know about the colon trick.  Smerdis of Tlön 21:52, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

categories by surname: practical example.
Hi Jerzy,

1) I posted a remark on user talk:Aris Katsaris on his way to give lay-out remarks to other wikipedians. Don't think he would mind other people joining in on the discussion.

2) Re. "categories by surname": I just found out there is no Newman (disambiguation) yet (Newman is now a redirect to Seinfeld, which is kind of singleminded). Maybe this would be a good "case" to test what works best for grouping all people with "Newman" surname: "disambiguation" page, or surname category, or both. So: feel invited to construct both grouping systems, and tell about your experience what works best for what you intend!

--Francis Schonken 11:56, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Cats and sanity
User talk:Bishonen See, I originally neither no-wiki'd nor put a colon (thanks for the tip!) inside the brackets of Category:Drama when I posted the question on Seth's page, with the exquisitely dumb result that, since I wikilinked it three times, it said Category: Drama three times at the foot of his Talk page. After a while it struck me with a sickening thud, and I went back and nowiki'd the links. I kind of hope I did that before Seth even saw the stupid first version, but I don't know, that's why I also changed the headline to say "now nowiki'd". Anyway. That's brilliant, about editing the cat page in order for it to update. Thanks very much, Jerzy. Of course in a sense it never is that urgent, but in the sense that it's nice to know I haven't gone insane, it feels quite urgent. ;-)--Bishonen 19:24, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Scary cats, scaredy cat
Thanks, that's a lovely thought. ;-). You know, it turns out I daren't try to edit those strange category pages to get 'em to update, because I don't understand them. I just a little while ago stared at the edit field of Category:Drama with popping eyes, then clicked "Cancel" with a shaking hand. But at least I have now seriously depopulated Category:Drama, he he. ("List of Irish short story writers" is drama? WTF? Etc, etc.) My depredations just don't show up yet. Now, if only I knew how to turn "English Renaissance plays", "Shakespeare Apocrypha", and "Dramatic portrayals of Jesus" into children of Category:Plays, instead of standing as its misconceived siblings, we'd be cooking. But I don't. (Oh, that's nothing. I don't even know how to create a category, I wish I did. (I wish some people didn't.)) --Bishonen 21:56, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

(Latest machete swing at cat:drama still doesn't show up)
Uh, Jerzy? Thanks very much, and I can see your message is choc full of helpful info that I really want, but ... well, I'm lost. It's the abbreviations. I'm sure they're transparent to a lot of people, but I'm not a native speaker, and not much of a forum surfer or web user altogether.

I think I do understand the principle of descendancy and ancestry in cats, yes. That's all I understand, though. I probably don't even look at the right Category:Drama page :-(, because the one I see has no definition at all, only subcats plus articles, and when I go to edit it (scary!) the edit field contains only this text:

Drama

To which I can only respond from the bottom of my heart: huh?

I dare hardly ask you to translate your previous message. I would indeed appreciate it, but I totally sympathise if you didn't bargain for quite this much ignorance when you took that carefree dive into the cats+Bishonen swamp.

(You're totally right about the dramatic portrayals of Jesus, of course, I wasn't thinking.)--Bishonen 16:43, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)``

Another way of forcing update :-)
Ha, guess what, though? Adding a new article to Category:Drama, which I just did a minute ago, turns out to also force the page to update and stop showing all those lists of short story writers etc that I removed yesterday. Cool. I look forward to "Drama" soon being a svelte category containing exclusively articles I've written myself. ;-) --Bishonen 16:59, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

OK, I'll just subordinate it myself
Wow, a whole Jargon File, thanks a lot! I don't know how you stand it either, Jerzy. ;-)

Just linking to an article instead of giving a definition on the cat page is bad, surely. Not just lazy but harmful. The article may be OK the moment you create the link, but how will you notice if a crazy person later turns it into a fruit and nut piece that's going to get the cat mis-populated? That very thing happened to my friend Francis Schonken, who went by the article Dramatist when populating the cat "Dramatists", humbly assuming as a non-native speaker that statements like "a dramatist can also mean an actor" had to be true because the cat page linked to them, and, uh, because they were on Wikipedia. ;-) (I cleaned up Dramatist when I realized.)

Yes, it ought to be "Genres", right. A category "Genre" should only contain articles that discuss the concept of genre. As it might be... OK, Genre in New Criticism, The limitations of genre as an analytical concept, A definition of genre, Is genre a more valuable category than heteroglossia? And, those being articles we don't need (you thought I was about to create them, didn't you? :-)), we don't need the cat "Genre" either.

Oh, it can't be as simple to move a cat as you say. No, no.

Hey, it is that simple! This is so great. Moving "English Renaissance dramatists" ... moving "English Renaissance plays" ... adding "Dramatists and playwrights" (smart new cat by Francis Schonken, don't know if you saw the discussion about that on the Cat:Dramatist talk page) to "Drama" (without removing it from "Theatre"). I see what you mean about getting sucked into the black hole. :-( And I need to drop a note to Francis, who has given drama/dramatist cats a lot of thought. (And I'm delighted, absolutely delighted, to see that you've put my Talk page into Category:Genre. :-D)--Bishonen 15:31, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

What else could I do?
Well, you know, who could resist the symmetry of it. :-) Anyway. I don't usually flag my personal info so much, but I can't resist this either: that's "You sadistic bitch", if you don't mind. ;-) How do I stand it?--Bishonen 19:07, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Advice columnists
M tk Hi, Jerzy. Thanks for your very nice note. I think I don't know as much about categories as you give me credit for, but I think I get your point.

I'd like to suggest that for Category:Advice columnists, Category:Writers by non-fiction subject area might be a more appropriate category than Category:Journalists.

Being an advice columnist doesn't necessarily require any more than writing advice, personal opinion, and being able to market it. Maybe this is bias on my part, but journalists at least like to think that more than that is required of the profession. In my view, whether these people are journalists is a gray area.

I often categorize random pages, so I'm receptive if you have any tips concerning people.

About my name, it's just a coincidence with my time in the Marine Corps. "Maurreen" is my real name. I know the spelling is unusual, but all three of my names are unusual and unusual names runs are common in my family. :) Maurreen 06:36, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Editors
Hi, thanks for your message. I have to say, it's a little too much for me to get my head around at the moment. I'm happy enough for you to CfD anything I've created that doesn't fit in and bash out the details on Talk Categorization or CfD. (Incidentally, I think it's time you did some Talk archiving ;o) Regards. --[[User:Bodnotbod| bodnotbod »  .....TALK Q uietly  )  ]] 20:32, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)