OrthodoxWiki:Categories

This is a general discussion page regarding Categories on OrthodoxWiki—their naming, organization, streamlining, and so on.

Categories and sub-categories

As of now, the vast majority of our articles which have sub-categories included also include the category which contains their sub-category. As such, instead of creating a hierarchy of categories which contain particular articles, we have a hierarchy of categories which contain either all or some articles.

My question is what everyone things about this. The Wikipedia way is, if an article is included in a sub-category, it is not likewise included in the "big" category. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

What do you think? —[[User:ASDamick|—Fr. Andrew ^talk contribs (THINK!)]] 09:10, 6 Jul 2005 (EDT)

RFC: Various categories

I'm wondering what we should do about various category issues. Mind you, these are simply my reactions and questions, not assertions as to what we ought to do to forgo my taking my ball and going home.  :)

Stubs

Should we have a Stubs category? Such a thing exists on Wikipedia (not that that's necessarily a direct reason we should have it), and especially if we're going to be creating multiple empty articles or articles which consist only of outlines, then it might be useful to have all the stubs grouped by a category so that folks can take a look and see what needs work. (On a side note, we need to make sure that all such articles include the {{stub}} tag.)

Addendum: I went ahead and created Category:Stubs and made Help:Stub as an explanatory page. --Rdr. Andrew 21:33, 1 Feb 2005 (CST)

Addendum II: On Fr. John's advice, I'm removing Category:Stubs and including this link instead. --Rdr. Andrew 15:19, 2 Feb 2005 (CST)

Sorry I didn't see this before you had already put the work in! Fr. John

People

What about people who don't necessarily fit into a particular existing category (e.g., Origen, Elder Ephrem (anyone know his surname?), and so on)?

I'm loth for us to create a generic People category, mainly because the overwhelming majority of people for whom we create articles are likely to fit into existing categories, and it'd be a big amount of work to have to continually make sure that every person gets put into Category:People. Additionally, it's such a vague grouping that someone looking for a major church figure who isn't a saint, writer, father, bishop, etc., wouldn't necessarily think to look for them in People.

The problem is that there are a goodly number of people about whom we could have articles that aren't obviously categorizable. Sure, Origen, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Lucian of Antioch, Elder Ephrem, Joseph the Hesychast, and so on may well be heretics or monastics or what-have-you, but those aren't generally how they're known in the Church.

Perhaps we just need more categories of people. What do you think?

We probably couldn't include my personal name for people like Origen and Tertullian—"Uncles of the Church."  :)

It seem to me that Origen and Tertullian could be "Church Fathers" but not "Saints" and that a category for "Contemporary Monastics" or something like that would be very appropriate. If we have a category for "People", I think it should be for otherwise uncategorized people -- or else we could organize other types of people as subcategories (and not bother to put Cetegory:People on every single page but only on the other Category pages). Fr. John

Various categorical issues

Should we have some sort of discussion before creating a new category? For instance, Theology, Dogmatics, and Theologoumena were recently created in the article about Apocatastasis, but there are several questions being begged there by having them all together—for instance, if it's a dogmatic question, can it really be considered a theologoumenon? Should we just leave it generically Theology?

Another I was wondering about is Category:Disputed Issues—definable limits on that one would be hard to find. Perhaps we should just note the disputes in the articles where appropriate and not have a separate category for disputes? After all, depending on how one delimits such a thing, almost every article could end up in that category.

Also, should we have a category for pages like this, which are dedicated to discussion? Perhaps Category:Chat?

--Rdr. Andrew 20:18, 30 Jan 2005 (CST)

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I think you're on to something -- good wiki planning is probably a lot like good city planning. The more effort we put into working out a solid schema now, the less cleanup we'll have to do later. This would be a great page to work through some of these things in more detail.

In the grand scheme of things, this would be equivalent to working out an ontology or topic map that, if we wanted to follow it all the way through, could have implications for the semantic web.

Another thought would be to eventually visually represent the arrangement of topics. I don't think MediaWiki has a visual browser plugin yet (like TikiWiki), but we could use MathML or some other kind of mind mapping / charting software to generate one. (Maybe something like Onmigator?)

As far as Category:Chat goes, I don't think it's necessary. I'd be rather fond of Category:Meta, but actually I think for now the OrthodoxWiki category is sufficient for all the 'meta' pages, no?

Does anyone else have specific comments on the issues raised by Rdr. Andrew? Let's talk more about strategy.

Fr. John 17:35, 2 Feb 2005 (CST)

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