User talk:Gadget850/Categories

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[edit] You asked

Would this be an improvement--quite possibly. Are today's cats broken--no. Only showing 200 at a time keeps your screen from showing 1000+ at a time, I don't mind this. Are today's cats unimportant--No, they are actually quite important! I love them for sorting, browsing to related articles, etc. How do think I find articles for the portal every month? I hardly have 1500+ articles sorted and stored in my head. I'm also totally sick of the list vs cat debates and "this cat is meaningless" debates and having to waste all our time battling them. No one else, barely, lifts a finger to help the Scouting project other than us ourselves and we have to fix things like that image bot mess that I'm still working on cleaning up. Basically, the people that know a subject best and how important things like a specific cat are to it are members of Project XYZ and Project members are fully capable of determining this things by themselves. Now you know what I really think-;)Rlevse 20:43, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, you haven't been shy. In the long term, the issue at hand will be meaningless. If I understand it, categories will be created with no hierarchy- relationships will be created on the fly when queried. Categories will not show until selected by the user. The issue of "category clutter" will go away and category creation will be embraced. --Gadget850 ( Ed) 02:11, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't like the no hierarchy, if you want to browse all the Scouting in XYZ cats, how could you do it without typing in every possible country name? Has someone figured that out yet? No, I don't think the issue at hand is meaningless at all. I think it's very relevant. If we don't have our Eagle Scout cat, just as an example, how will we find every Eagle (well, most at least) with an article on wiki? Look at the ones you just found in the cat that aren't on the list. Do a text search through 1.5 million articles? The only complete list of Eagles is at National and nowhere else, unlike the Silver Beaver list we recently found.Rlevse 02:23, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Let's say you were on Louis Gossett, Jr.'s page and wanted to find other African American actors. Right now, Category:African-American actors is a hard category. With this proposed system, you would open the category section; this section would normally be hidden (somewhat like the Scouting template at the bottom of some articles), thus there is no problem with category clutter. You would then check "American people", "People of African descent" and "actors" and submit. You would then get all African American actors. You could select Eagle Scouts and Medal of Honor recipients and get a list of Eagle Scouts with the Medal of Honor, or look for African American Eagle Scouts with the Medal of Honor. You could write custom front ends to run queries and present relational charts. --Gadget850 ( Ed) 03:00, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

So you have to click 3 times instead of once to find something, plus guess what cat he's actually in? Don't like that part. Plus if you want to go through several Scouting in XYZ cats, you have to run multiple queries instead of just go up the tree once and back down once? Don't like that part either. I think the relational on the fly part is fine but it seems to be dropping features to me.Rlevse 09:56, 26 July 2007 (UTC)