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I was recently advised that a category is for defining features only. Before I go back and remove some articles from this category, is there a way to make a list out of all of the links here before I start cleaning out the articles which are not defined by timber framing? Thanks; Jim Derby (talk) 00:46, 16 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
By "the links here" do you mean "articles in this category" ? If so you could drag cursor over the list of articles (including any continuation pages and sub-categories if necessary) and copy-paste into NotePad (it won't be neat though). Most category pages are watched by very few people (often only by those who've edited the page) so you're much more likely to get an answer to a general question like this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories. DexDor (talk) 08:11, 16 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Don't worry about it: they're not. Categories are a navigational feature for readers: Does the article have sufficient connection with the category to make this a useful navigational path for readers?Andy Dingley (talk) 09:42, 16 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
@AD - Part of your comment is in italics which might give the impression that it's a quote from somewhere, but it's not a part of Wikipedia guidance that I recognise and isn't entirely consistent with Wikipedia:Categorization#Articles. Could you clarify ? DexDor (talk) 23:29, 17 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
This is a long-running argument at Wikipedia. Now I'm not a Wikipedia expert, but I am pretty experienced with MediaWiki (I don't edit Wikipedia much, but my day job is largely selling my MediaWiki experience to corporates).
There are two issues:
What is categorization for?
What can categorization do, and do competently?
The second is the problem: MediaWiki's categorization model is a simple one, based on membership. That's all it does. It doesn't allow any context, it doesn't allow any predicates. So MediaWiki categorization simply can't be defining in any useful manner. We can't list Henry Ford under Ford cars (he isn't a car), so we either lose him from the categorization of the Ford empire, or we have to build a huge set of sub-categories for Ford-stuff-that-isn't-cars Works OK at the scale of Ford, but it's heavyweight effort for many other topics. MW categories are not an ontology definition language and no amount of over-optimistic WP policy changes that.
WP doesn't use categorization. Adding text content to category pages is discouraged – I've even seen categories deleted for the ludicrous reason that any category without a lead article shouldn't exist and that adding a descriptive para to the cat page itself somehow made this a bad category if it wasn't otherwise self-evident. For somewhat understandable reasons about server load, we also can't use tools like the DPL extension, which makes a hugely valuable synergy with categorization.
So what's categorization for? Not much really. We're afraid to use it usefully, we can't use it for ontology, we're just left with some vague navigational pathways. So the least we can do is to at least populate those in a useful manner.
WP has a bit of a problem with categorization. It's not understood, its potential for valuable use (which isn't demonstrated at WP) certainly isn't understood. As a result, we have editors running riot with hopelessly simplistic interpretations of policy (WP: policy should never become an excuse for basic stupidity). WP:OVERCAT is probably the worst offender, where the ability to navigate through a flattened list of all members of a shallow hierarchy (Engines by cylinder layout is a good example of this damage) is trashed by editors who insist that no articles can ever have membership in multiple related categories. As a result, readers are expected to navigate to sub-pages of sub-categories, when they can't even (without already having navigated there) see if a sub-cat would be useful to them.
The surprising thing here is that a fairly new editor like Jim has come to the problem afresh and added useful categories, where they added reader navigational value to articles. Then WP administered its usual stern thrashing, to make sure he doesn't get any more uppity ideas about doing something useful again. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:58, 18 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
