(At Please Please Dont Categorize Every Page On Wiki,) Someone asked for specific testimony on Categories. So here is mine. -- John Fletcher.
I first came to Wiki in 1997 when it was much smaller. On my home page there are still some comments from those days and you will see that I owned up to starting some of the categories which are used now.
I then went away for several years (because access was too slow) and came back again earlier this year. I was amazed to see how some of the acorns I had planted had grown. Also there was now a considerable richness of information about how to do things I am trying to do, like write good C++ programs. You will find some of my comments from my first coming back in places like Categories Discussion.
I started to add things such as CategoryCpp precisely because there was this richness, but it wasn't indexed, and the page names didn't always give the correct clues. There are also pages which give examples of how to implement ideas in more than one language, so it is useful to index them for C++, Java, etc as well as to e.g. Pattern.
I come to this not as a professional programmer, but rather as someone using other disciplines, chemical engineering, chemistry, physics, mathematics and interested in how the discipline of a computer program can help me build better tools to solve problems in the real world.
I have used the resources of wiki to increase my understanding in a number of areas recently, starting from C++ templates, to Standard Template Library, Functional Programming and Graph Theory. I was fascinated to discover there is something called Category Theory which is not a category here, but about the logical theory of the process of building categories.
So it comes full circle to talk about the theory of what we are doing. I think that is called Wiki Reflection.
I think that putting in a category is not done for the person who does it, but for the future searcher, who, on another topic, may be myself. It increases the richness of the Wiki. It might be a joke, but usually I am serious. I believe in increasing the number of cross connections.
I agree that there should be a distinction between a Category and a Topic, but in practice I go along with what has been put there already.
Footnote: YAGNI (You Arent Gonna Need It) does not seem to me to be the point. Any reference I put in, I don't need myself. Someone else will, and I will need some other one when I figure it out. -- John Fletcher
You seem to have some real experience with categories and with it some judgement about what kinds of categories make sense. However, there seems to be an ongoing effort to categorize every page without understanding the utility of categories. With the result being that we have lots of new categories that aren't very useful and (until recently) lots of noise on Recent Changes (I, by the way, have had at least one post removed from Recent Changes as part of the noise reduction effort and so am not particularly happy with that aspect either). Now we have CategoryNone, CategoryDiscussion, CategoryStrategy and a host of others that might make sense if you are reading a page upon which they appear, but make no sense at all as items in an index. That's my objection. I really like categories. I just want us to have categories that are useful. I put up a page on the Dewey Decimal System. Maybe that can serve as inspirational material for what sorts of things make good categories. -- Phil Goodwin
There seems to be 2 ways to make an index:
Put category tags at the bottom of each relevant page, and then let the Wiki generate the index automatically.
Manually build an index page.
The tag method is more scalable.
On the other hand, maybe we don't need an index -- perhaps Find Page does the job. Is there anything that people do with an index that can't be done with Find Page?
-- David Cary
Yes. Find Page is a search operation and operates on single words or parts of words. Indexes on the other hand are simply lists of characteristics or topics, usually but not always prepared manually or systematically, usually alphabetically organized, and in the case of wikis, serving as hyperlinks to what is listed. As such the index serves as a pre-organized, use as is listing. I use lists, whether indexes or otherwise as basis for collections of pages to be contained in another collection of Pdf files placed in a reachable location which can then be searched as single documents, or as a collection of documents for more wanted information at a later date. In the case of wikis, I use a method I call Wiki Batics to construct my Information Base. It Depends to a large degree on the scale and depth to which one will go to get what is wanted. I prefer to build my information in such a way as to make it, not only immediately useful, but also useful at a later date in ways not yet anticipated. -- Donald Noyes
I wrote the section at the top of this page some time ago. I want to add something now based on a recent experience of the renaming of Category Operating Systems to Category Operating System. This started as a suggestion and has been taken up by several people and is now (27 August 2007) completed. Comments.
The category now reflects more truly the fact that most pages in it cover one operating system.
There is a case for retaining Category Operating Systems for pages that cover families of operating systems, compare Category Book and Category Books.
In my opinion that is too subtle to be worthwhile and is better to collect all the relevant pages in one category, to help a future researcher.
In the process of renaming, a lot of pages came to light which were not in the category which have now been added.
The category page itself has a lot of useful information and has been cleaned up and extended.
This activity has been carried out by a number of different people without any agreement in advance. Each has picked up a piece of the work and done it as they saw best.
I have learned some things about Operating Systems which I did not know before.
In conclusion, I think this is an example of Why Wiki Works and I wanted to put that on record somewhere.
[replicated from PleasePleaseDont...]
I have to say the categories here helped me out of a jam a few years ago. I was trying to put together a set of white papers for a client. I remembered reading specific discussions on engineering process and process related matters such as requirements gathering and zero defect process, but I could not recall the specific pages, the authors, nor the words used to express some of these ideas. By searching through the categories I came across pretty much everything I needed to extract in order to bring my points into focus. Without the categories I would have spent a great deal of time hunting for stuff I needed but didn't know how to find. -- Marty Schrader
See original on c2.com 