Thoughts On Categories
Abstract
Gads, there are way too many categories for most of the articles and many of them either don't make sense or are too broad. We need to trim them down so they are usable.
Possible One-Time Solution
- Look at adult categories and use the existing categories to tag all of these pages "AdultContent"
- Identify and store all category names in which there are more than 1,000 references (VeryGeneralCategories)
- Delete these categories because they are too bulky and not helpful to users (Do a manual review first, there may be some worth saving)
- Delete all singleton categories (where there is only one page with that category) because these are likely too narrow
Ongoing component
- The AboutUsBot should not create categories in new records that match the "VeryGeneralCategories"
- When a user creates a new category, if it is a "VeryGeneralCategory" then they should be warned about that before saving (but still allowed if they want). This will actually give an opportunity to some people to "capture" a general category such as "Real Estate" but I'm not sure what to do about that.
Category Utilities
- Ability to "Delete a worthless category" - which would delete all instances of a worthless category
- Ability to "Rename a category" - which would rename all instances of a category to another name
- For user-created categories this may not always be what we want to do. i.e. if there are two categories that mean basically the same thing like "Table Tennis" and "Ping Pong", it may be fine to let them both exist because that will continue to match the folksonomy that people have created. Where this utility may be useful is in renaming some of the major categories that were prepopulated to categories that are more wiki-ish.
ParkingLots
I am sure there's a one click fix.... In The Category:LinkFarm, which is just about 1000 strong and comprised of what we have tagged as ParkingLots, I've removed most of the categories from the wikipages (currently:A-K; Q; X- to the end).
- I've noticed:
- Many of the wikipages in the Category: LinkFarm -Parkinglots do not have any categories or related domains.
- Those that do tend to go overboard (way too specific, names as categories, the, for, urls-overkill)...and would not be useful to users, even if these pages were not ParkingLots.
- Some of the categories found in this overall Category:LinkFarm would be useful (Healthcare, Portland, Colleges,??...) categories, but they link to ParkingLots. On some level this diminishes the quality of our fledgling category function when viable categories link to ParkingLots.
- Many of the categories are useless Kasey