User talk:Adrignola/2009/04

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Like many Wikibookians, I saw noticed your impressive work on categorisation in my watchlist. I've long looked with dread at the categorisation schemes as these desperately need a lot of work. I'm glad someone has taken the initiative on this important task.

One of my areas of interest is project documentation, mainly the help pages (see: Help:Contents and a full list at User:Swift/Help pages) and project resources (e.g. Wikibooks:Templates and Wikibooks:Maintenance). As you should now have a great deal of experience with the categorisation aspect of our project, I was hoping you migth be able to lend a hand to explain the cataloguing schemes to others.

I just did a bit of copyediting on WB:CCR (which should perhaps be moved to something like Help:Cataloguing) and brought it up to date. Where did you read up on categorisation, and do you know of a better place to put this information? --Swift (talk) 21:43, 29 April 2009 (UTC)Reply

I was a bit nervous when I first tried to add some order to the chaos, knowing that I might stir things up a bit on Recent Changes and even worried that someone might get angry. I'm glad you're all supportive! Before I got the itch to start taking the broom to things, so to speak, I believe I looked over Help:Category, which is linked from Help:Contents. It's pretty extensive in covering categories in general, but at the time I was looking for any rhyme or reason for how things were organized. I already had knowledge of Mediawiki from my own use of it on my website. I did a search on "categories" to find more information and came across Wikibooks:Categories, which I now see is linked to at the very bottom of Help:Category. I see it's marked for cleanup and I would probably agree.

I leave what the title ought to be up to you, but I think a merge of WB:CCR and Wikibooks:Categories would be helpful for explaining guidelines for Wikibooks in particular. Help:Category focuses mostly on Mediawiki operation. WB:CCR mentions book categories, subject categories, dewey decimal, alphabetical listing, and library of congress. Wikibooks:Categories contains good descriptions of subject and book categories with no information on implementation or mention of the others covered by WB:CCR. Wikibooks:Reading_Levels could be good for incorporating into a final page as well, since it's something that would need to be considered at the same time as the others. I'd certainly be game for lending a hand in explaining cataloguing on a nice combined page with all the information a prospective Wikibook creator would need to know in order to file their book properly for others to find it. After all, I'd hate to spend time trying to spend time getting things sorted out for it to go to waste in a matter of months when others don't follow the same pattern! Just let me know which target page should be the focus for our efforts on documentation.

The following is some additional information that may or may not be in that page but, at the least, defines for you my plan of action. I'd eventually like to see categories match up in structure to the structure of subjects with Category:Books by subject matching Subject:Major_Subjects from top-down. But as Whiteknight noted above, the subjects were ad-hoc as well. My initial focus is getting books I see in the categories filed properly and the categories filed within themselves properly. Then I can take a higher level look as Whiteknight suggests and analyzing whether the subjects themselves make sense. I've seen the discussion at Subject_talk:Major_Subjects on sentence or title case. Guidelines here seem to point to book titles being title case and so sentence case for categories avoids conflicts. While subjects can be any name as the category they pull from is in the code, it'd be nice if they match, so that would mean they should be sentence case too. It's why I made the subject category Category:European history to file all the books that were put in Category:European History and that serves as the one major example that defines my stance on that, in the absence of technical changes or policy changes that would prevent another occurrence. I'd also like to note that Category:Fine arts shows how I'm filing subject categories within other subject categories using [[Category:Blah| {{PAGENAME}}]]. In this way someone browsing the categories immediately sees the difference between a book's category and a subject's category (subject categories show up first). This hasn't been done for all the categories yet, of course, but I feel it will be helpful to prevent people from filing their new books into a category reserved solely for another book and improve navigation when browsing by category. -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 04:09, 30 April 2009 (UTC)Reply