Category talk:Publications

overlapping & redundant categories

We have a large number of overlapping and redundant categories that are not clearly inter-related in the category structure, and have inconsistent naming styles. These include these very general trees:

General "Works" trees

• Category:Sources (collects things used as reference sources; originally created as a wikipedian resource category per original category description; subjective name based on use (anything can be a "source"; e.g., people)
• Category:Publications (collects things made available to the public; suggests paper/print/text in some fields)
• The Category:Works tree which doesn't fully exist but includes parent categories Category:Works of art and Category:Creative works, and subcategories Category:Works by year (including albums, architecture, books, bridges, comics, films, literature, musicals, novels, operas, paintings, plays, poems, radio, radio programme debut, railway stations, short stories, singles, software, songs, tv, video games
• Category:Serials, periodicals and journals (now Category:Periodicals Carcharoth (talk) 11:18, 8 January 2008 (UTC) )
• Category:Media by format (includes Category:News media and Category:Mass media
• Category:Documents (currently in Category:Sources and the main "writings" category in "Category:Writing")
• Category:Written communication which includes several "instances" categories (Category:Correspondences, Category:Documents, etc.)
• Category:Websites (currently in Category:Sources) and a variety of categories in Category:Internet that haven't been collected Category:Internet albums, Category:Online newspapers, Category:Blogs
• Category:Creative works which houses fictional things and was renamed from Category:Works (see CFD 2006/10/2 and CFD 2006/8/20 - contains just arts & literary categories

Subject subcategories of the general "works" trees

The subject breakdowns of these various trees include:

• Category:Publications by interest and Category:Publications by topic (which are so redundant I propose that they be merged regardless of any other reworking of this structure)
• Category:Newspapers by content and Category:Newspapers by interest ("by content" includes gazettes, satirical, and sports; most of the other subject/topic categories are in "by interest")
• Category:Texts by topic
• Category:Journals by subject area
• Category:Magazines by interest
• Category:Newspapers by interest
• Category:Websites by topic
• Category:Books by topic
  • Category:Study books by subject
  • Category:Novels by topic
• Category:Films by topic
  • Category:Documentaries by topic
• Category:Media by interest
• Category:Journalism by field should certainly exist to cover journalism, but it's become a dumping ground for publications/works in those fields

Proposal

Without deleting any of the existing categories or trees, I propose a category clean-up that will create the following tree to organize works & publications in various media -- informational and creative works in various media (books, films, works of art, periodicals, tv, radio, etc.).

• Category:Works (alternate proposals: Category:Publications or Category:Media; media lacks because it is also a subject (redirecting to Category:Mass media; publications lacks because not all works are "published" (made available to the public) and in some fields it suggests paper works)
  • Category:Works by medium ((I note that "Category:Media by genre" is a neatly-organized category that is wrongly named; based on its content, it should really be named Category:Works by medium and genre.)
    • Category:Films
      • Category:Documentaries
    • Category:Serials, periodicals and journals (could be put together with books as "texts" or "textual works" or "text-based works")
    • Category:Books
    • Category:Websites
  • Category:Works by topic (or Category:Works by subject)
  • Category:Works by year
  • Category:Works by location

Questions include -

• what is the best overall term for the tree? Having looked at all of these, I think "works" is probably the best -- it doesn't imply any particular medium or format and it is clearly a "plural" category so denoting subcategories of particular works. "Publications" implies "published to the world" which would implicitly exclude unpublished works, and also suggests literary publications, not, e.g., films. "Media" is not clearly a "plural instance" like "books" and is also a subject; it also is used more frequently in the context of "mass media" and so implies to some people film, tv, radio, and exclusion of books & art. "Sources" refers to how they're used and I think that's not a helpful designation.
• Are there any scope concerns? Reasons to include or exclude some of these trees?
• Major trees I've missed?
• Preferences between the common "by topic", "by subject", and "by interest" formulations? I think "by topic" is probably the best of the three.

Thoughts & reactions? --Lquilter (talk) 18:18, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Generalisations: cleaning up category trees of this size can be quite a project. Maintaining them is even harder. When I came here i thought Id do some, but in practice I haven't been able to , unless i were to drop doing everything else. You & I are librarians, and sometimes a large (or predominant) part of our work is doing things like this. that means we know how to do it right, get ambitious--but we may not have the time here to follow through--the inevitable curse of volunteer projects. (In my case, how to organise lists of electronic resources.)

"by medium and genre" requires two trees--the categories are overlapping: horror fiction, for example, comes in all media.

remember what used to be called "literary warrant"-- the categories should match the contents--there's no point in being logical in the abstract,w are not classifying knowledge, but WP articles.

in consequence, the large categories need to be subdivided; thats why we have "books" as well as "works" , and "fiction" as well as "books".

It's a general problem that categories at WP contain instances of the items intended to be categorized as well as articles about the category and about various aspects of it: for example, the Category:documentaries contains "Academy Award for Documentary Feature" and "Australian International Documentary Conference" , "List of documentary television channels" as well as articles about dozens of individual documentary films. This by itself is enough to make all of the usual theoretical considerations somewhat irrelevant. So there's no point trying for rigor, only for some amount of practicality.

DGG (talk) 07:06, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I hear you. I'm trying for the most practical approach -- it seems like setting up a Category:Works tree that builds on the preexisting Category:Works by year as a generic title, and doesn't try to rename any of the types of works that have grown up -- might be a simple way to start. I can hold off on issues of genre & medium until we see how everything fits together. --Lquilter (talk) 01:43, 28 December 2007 (UTC)