Difference between revisions of "Thoughts On Categories"

Abstract

see also: CategoriesToCull

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 100 references (VeryGeneralCategories)
  • Lets get some samples to determine at what level (if any) categories are useful. Obviously human created categories are mostly useful, but the bot ones don't seem to be. I'll work on getting a list of categories together, so we can do a more in-depth review. Jason Parmer 13:57, 16 May 2007 (PDT)
  • Obviously, we'll need to keep Category:AboutUs Featured Site, which lists all of the past featured sites and is at around 400 items currently (but growing everyday). -- TakKendrick
• 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

Data Points

• 75,560,247 references to Categories
• 10,451,207 Categories
• 7,449,146 1 page Categories
• 1,284,985 2 page Categories
• 1,717,076 3+ page Categories
• 59,548 100+ page Categories

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.
  • Perhaps a similar mechanism for people trying to save a page with 20+ (or 30+) categories. They can do it, but they get a warning message. -- TakKendrick

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.

This isn't really doable until our categories are cut down a LOT from what they are now. I start gibbering in fear thinking about renaming, say, the "Regional" category. Jason Parmer 13:54, 16 May 2007 (PDT)

• It would be great if each category has some "random from category" mechanism that allowed users to view a random page inside of that category. Potentially could also be paired with the "5 or more edits" idea the current random page has to ensure that random searches would contain useful pages. This would be a boon for big categories like "Real Estate". -- TakKendrick

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 the categories from the wikipages.

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

Categories to keep

please do not delete these:

• Category:WikiIndex
• Category:NoBot
• Category:LASIK
• Category:LASIKEquipment
• Category:LASIKManufacturer
• Category:LASIKTerm
• Category:OrganizedLabor
• Category:AboutUs_Featured_Site
• Category:AboutUsPortal
• Category:AboutUs.org
• Category:CustomThumbnailBox
• Category:AboutUs:Glossary
• Category:Reviews_Needs_Patrolling
• Category:Discussion_Needs_Patrolling
• Category:NetworkWeaver* - all of them (please list)
• Category:Adult Content
• Category:AboutUsBotGoneBad
• Category:AboutUsRestaurantPicks
• Category:2008 Presidential Candidates
• Category:US Politics
• Category:US Governors
• Category:New Mexico
• Category:2008 Presidential Election
• Category:EmergingFutures.net
• Category:Human Rights
• Category:Geneology
• Category:PortlandTech