Wikipedia talk:Contents/Categories

Publishing

I'd like to suggest adding publishing. Most other types of mass media are included. Maurreen 05:52, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes indeed--I just spent some time trying to find it in this index :) How do we go about it?DGG 03:14, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup

I'm removing the non-category-related links from the sidebar. --Quiddity 18:45, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Special:Categories

At the bottom of every articles is the word Categories. This leads to a list of Categories. The top of the list should be the Contents, the general categories. This I have done. The Category called !!!Albums shouldn't be there--Chuck Marean 20:58, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Chuck, it is not correct to start creating a multitude of categories that start with an "!" just so they appear at the top of the list. That is disruptive. Please stop. --ZimZalaBim (talk) 21:11, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

You are 100% wrong. --Chuck Marean 15:42, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Chuck, your utter refusal or inability to even entertain the possibility that the opinions of other (multiple) editors might indeed contain some validity leaves me baffled. --ZimZalaBim (talk) 20:49, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

This is an even better idea for getting a Table of Contents of Wikipedia on the Special:Categories page.

[[:Category:! Art and culture]] with this: #REDIRECT[[Wikipedia:Browse#Art and culture|Art and culture]]

does this:

! Art and culture

-- Chuck Marean 06:06, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Chuck, for the thousandth time, we don't need (or want) a table of contents at the Special:Categories page because the page is supposed to be alphabetic since such a list is useful to many users. And for those users who (like you, apparently) want a more structured list of categories, they are directed to visit Wikipedia:Browse for just such an interface. Please stop trying to re-invent the wheel - it just is a waste of your (and my) time. --ZimZalaBim (talk) 11:06, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Categories link at foot of articles

The top of the Categories page should be high-level categories for sub-categories like the following.
Category:!Art and culture
Category:!Geography and places
Category:!History and events
Category:!Mathematics and abstractions
Category:!People and self
Category:!Philosophy
Category:!Physical sciences and nature
Category:!Religion and spirituality
Category:!Social sciences and society
Category:!Technology and invention
This would make it another directory as good as this one. -- Chuck Marean 15:39, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Special:Categories is an automatically generated, alphabetic list of all Wikipedia categories. It is meant to be a simple list, not an ontologically-organized interface. That is why, at the top of this page, users are directed to visit Wikipedia:Browse for an organized list of categories. Your attempt to create empty categories that start with "!" to force them to the top of this list is mis-guided. (see further discussion at User talk:Chuck Marean). --ZimZalaBim (talk) 16:04, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

I concurr; it shouldn't have been necessary, but I wanted to make evident that ZimZalaBim's is not idiosyncratic. DGG 04:03, 21 September 2006 (UTC) While here, I corrrected alphabetization in Math and PhysSci. I did not yet correct Philosophy, because it's so out of order thhat something special might have been intended. If no objections, I will.

Shortcut

This might be a good idea:

shortcut - WP:Cat

--Chuck Marean 19:33, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

---

• How about:
  
  ...?  Regards, David Kernow (talk) 19:45, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

---

It will be in the sidebar soon, according to the sidebar redesign, hence shouldnt need a shortcut. --Quiddity 19:49, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Nice. Thanks, David (talk) 20:04, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm a bit concerned that we've now WP:CAT, which points to Help:Category, and WP:Cat, which, having been created by Chuck Marean, points here. In view of CIX, ought we to redirect WP:Cat to Help:Category (or perhaps simply to RfD the latter, insofar as miniscules are disfavored in project space redirects where disambiguation isn't necessary or where an extended title is involved [as, for example, with WP:RfA and WP:RfAr])? Joe 02:02, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Joe. If not RfD, then WP:Cat should follow the same redirect as the existing WP:CAT (just as WP:Auto redirects to WP:Autobiography) --ZimZalaBim (talk) 02:35, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Yup. Done. --Quiddity 03:00, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

library of congress classification as applied to wikipedia

The link just added (Section 1.2) goes to Library of Congress Classification, an article which now makes not the slightest reference to WP. It might be good, however, to have such an article, though it might duplicate the categories work. *Is the intent to reorganize the categories page according to LC? *Is the intent to provide a separate organization arranged by LC? *Is the intent to actually add the LC classification numbers to each WP article? Though the LC classification is traditionally regarded as best suited for whole books, not narrow articles, the articles in WP are broad enough (for the most part) so it might be good---especially since most college students are familiar with it. (For others, we might want to consider Dewey.) From (library) classification theory, the most suited would be the UDC, a special version of DDC intended to also work with narrower topics. Although few people (in the US) are familiar with it, it can be navigated with a rough knowledge of DDC, which almost everyone has. DGG 18:47, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

I've removed the link. It's already present in the footer box on that page (as is DDC).

LoC and a DDC system are linked at Wikipedia:Reference pages#Categorical indices, but are both "under construction", and have been for years. I don't know if there are ongoing discussions to add the LoC or DDC numbers to articles, though I'm sure it's been suggested in the past. Personally I'd be against it: too much like trying to push a square peg into a round hole. --Quiddity 19:26, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Education

Education is needed as a prominent category. It should go under social sciences, as the closesy top level category. But how does one go about doing this? DGG 19:37, 27 September 2006 (UTC) Apologies; it's there after all. DGG 19:49, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

It's listed under "Society", as it is a major social institution. --The Transhumanist 02:45, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Architecture

I suggest that architecture be listed under arts (and also remain under applied sciences). Modern architecture may not be artistic, but traditionally it seems that architecture has been considered part of the arts in general and might be sought there, too. --Matthew K 14:21, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, laws (in the form of building codes) in many cities and other jurisdictions require an artistic element. It turns out that people far and wide consider big bleak box structures to be ugly. For building plans to qualify, the buildings have to look good! Architecture is as much art as it is technology. See The arts and Applied science. --The Transhumanist 02:41, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Prints

There is currently no category (Arts & culture - Visual Arts) for the articles on prints & printmaking Johnbod 00:28, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Animation In The Wrong Place

Currently as a subject "Animation" is listed under Computer And Video Games. It should be listed under "visual arts" as im a bit confused (and scared) to edit the actual page i just thought i'd point it out.

Its clearly misplaced as all the other listings under video games are specific video games (Warcraft , Final Fantasy, etc)

Troy Spiral 06:21, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Done. It was just a duplicate. Thanks :) --Quiddity 07:24, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Nursing and midwifery

I would favour moving nursing and midwifery to the health sciences line as they are not branches of medicine and category:nursing is not a subcategory of category:medicine but of category:health sciences. --Vince 15:10, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

If there is no objection, I will leave this about a week and then move them. --Vince 22:05, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Pregnancy?

I think there should possibly be a category for pregnant women. That is, women, with entries on wikipedia, who are currently pregnant. I don't know if there's one already, but I've never seen it. We have categories for loads of other things, so I think this one would be nice. I thought I'd suggest this first, before I actually went ahead and did it. Morhange 04:11, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

The place to ask would be Wikipedia talk:Categorization. (I'd guess that might be too time-dependent (leading to inaccuracy problems), but I don't know). Thanks. --Quiddity 04:42, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Philosophical Terminology

I added the Terminology category list to the general philosophy category list. Philosophy has very specialized terminology which often share terms with other fields yet have very different meanings. Jonnylocks 08:44, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Business and Finance Category is Needed

Business and Finance are vital parts of everyones life and these days there is the opportunity to invest as an individual. Wikipedia should be able to educate individual investors with the kind of plain spoken explanations it has for everything else. THere is tons of Jargon in business (go to Yahoo Finance) and this should be wiki-accessible.Mrdthree 11:52, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

por que no escriben en castellano teniendo en cuenta que estamos en peru

Real People Assassinated in Works of Fiction

Is there already a category for this? If not, I believe there should be one (not sure if this is the right place to suggest such a thing, though it seems to be where many others are doing it). This category would include noteworthy persons such as George W. Bush and Bill Gates, both of whom have been portrayed in various works of fiction as having been assassinated. In addition to living persons (who have not [yet] been assassinated), the list would also include historical (that is, "deceased") persons who were not actually victims of assassination, but were portrayed as such in a fictional work (i.e. in an "alternate reality" historical fiction sort of work). Anyone else think this is a worthwhile category? And someone please let me know if this is not the appropriate page for this discussion. -Grammaticus Repairo 18:51, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I can't find one; if you wish to create one, by all means go ahead – Qxz 18:24, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Computer & Video Gaming

It seems that this page still directs to an old, now defunct category just now moved to a new category, Computer & Video Gaming renamed as Video Gaming. And, frankly, I never liked links to a redirect from an article or category. Just a pet peeve of mine, don't know why. ;D Legion 00:52, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Is there a way of searching for articles that exist in two categories?

For example, if I wanted all articles that included 1981 births and People from London, would there be a possible way of searching? I'm guessing not...--h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 01:15, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Category intersection has been a wanted feature request ever since August, 2006. Why don't you show your support for it? -Lwc4life 00:42, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Living/dead celebrities...

I was looking for something and I noticed on the newer musicians that there is no category for the following:

Living Musician Dead Musician Current Band Disbanded Band

I tried looking and the closest thing I could find was "living people" and "dead people". Wanted a consensus before I created one and put them on randomly on the variety of artists...

--Hourick 03:05, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

How about a "Search categories" search box here?

Would that be possible? Yes i know we'd use it instead of doing our homework of navigating through the hierarchy, and that would put an additional burden on the servers; or would it? --Jerome Potts 17:44, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Neuroscience as a Natural Science

Neuroscience should be listed on this page. It is an independent discipline that combines biology, psychology, chemistry, and physics to study the nervous system.--Dentate 18:36, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

The medical specialties seem to be listed primarily under the Health section. I've replaced neurology and neurosurgery with neuroscience. --Quiddity 19:34, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

I was actually thinking that it might be best categorized under Hard Science, or if necessary, under Biology - for the following reasons: First, as a scientific discipline, neuroscience should not be listed under medicine because medicine is really the practical application of information derived from science. In the US, in order to be a medical scientist, one must attain both the MD and the PhD.. Whereas some physicians who happen to conduct research on the brain may rightly call themselves Neuroscientists, the overwhelming majority of neuroscientists are Ph.D.s and conduct basic science research. In fact, many of them do not even work on humans, which brings me to my second point. Neuroscience shouldn't be listed under human medicine, either, because this is terribly misleading. Neuroscience would be the scientific study of the nervous system (in any animal), and not "the art or science of restoring or preserving health or due physical condition, as by means of drugs, surgical operations or appliances, or manipulations: often divided into medicine proper, surgery, and obstetrics" - we leave that to the applied people.--Dentate 20:07, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

As a subcat of Biology in our system, I agree and moved it there. :) --Quiddity 16:00, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

How about a "company under lawsuit category" ?

tried to read and see if this catagory is avalible but could not find it. Could we get it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Onepoint (talk • contribs) 01:52, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Topical contents pages transclusion test

I'm using this page to test the process of transcluding contents page sections to multiple pages. You can see the related discussion at Portal talk:Contents#Topics-based contents pages project. You can see a working example of how a section here is transcluded to another page at Portal:Contents/Reference. RichardF 03:31, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Coordinating Portal:Contents pages

A group of editors is working on coordinating Portal:Contents and all of its subpages. This activity has two basic parts. The simplest part is to coordinate their presentation, such as page layouts. Most of the discussions about how to accomplish this are at Portal talk:Contents. The more involved part is to coordinate their substance, such as what gets linked from the pages and their classifications. Most of the discussions about how to accomplish this are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Contents and related projects such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Lists of basic topics, Wikipedia:WikiProject Lists of topics, Wikipedia:WikiProject Glossaries, Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals and Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories. Please feel free to join in on these activities. RichardF (talk) 12:48, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Titles

'Philosophy and Thinking' should become 'Philosophy and Thought', and 'Natural Sciences and Nature' should be the reverse, 'Nature and Natural Sciences' The verb 'thinking' sounds awkward in a title, and in a Title the simplest form of a word always comes first if its used twice. --PearlWhiteSerial 22:47, 7 December 2007

AZ Quick links index

Why has the very helpful AZ index panel been removed, please? TerriersFan (talk) 00:58, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Scrub that; it's lower down - can it be moved up again, please? TerriersFan (talk) 01:01, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Where it is it is easy to miss - I'm going to move it up unless there is a good reason not to. TerriersFan (talk) 03:56, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

 Done Someone rearranged the sections without moving the infobox back up. RichardF (talk) 04:40, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. TerriersFan (talk) 03:45, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Study of Wikipedia using the Categories

A new study of Wikipedia used 11 categories (not including Reference) to quantify growth What's in Wikipedia? --Ancheta Wis (talk) 12:34, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Layout is atrocious

I'd like to suggest looking at an overall layout redesign of this page. Currently it's just a massive wall of links. There are technologies like JQuery that can make this page much more stream lined and interesting. Any thoughts? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Houw (talk • contribs) 18:54, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

It is customary to add new comments to the foot of the page. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 12:25, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

For a rationale of the current layout, please see #a short history of the page and its ancestors below. 22:25, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

A short history of the page and its ancestors

It may be useful to review just how this page came to be. In general, it came from a conscious effort made to restrict the number of top-level categories on the main page to seven. The theoretical reason is The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, meaning that our minds tend to chunk items into seven categories, at most. Any more than that, and our minds push things into subcategories of one of at most seven separate 'tops'. (Try to think of multiple things simultaneously and you will see what I mean. The phenomenon is called chunking.)

At one time, the 'Overviews' page, which survives today as part of the 'Portal:Contents/Overviews' page, was the main page. When the main page was being redesigned, and the list of hyperlinks to overview articles had to go, User:Eloquence decided that a limited (e.g. seven) number of categories ought to be on the main page. The seven could serve as a mini-listing of the Overviews,on a single line of the main page. The editors then started formulating just what the seven ought to be; some were obvious, like category:history,category:geography,category:science, etc. Later, category:Mathematics and category:Technology, among others, were added to this list; category:Culture and category:Society were also at the top, but Culture was pushed down to a sub-cat, eventually.

We were able to hold the line at eight 'top-level pages' for some time. After some effort, the category pages for each of the links on the Overviews pages were populated, and it was possible to create a Categories page which mirrored the Overviews page, except that the links were to Category pages instead of article pages. It made good psychological sense to make the structure of the Categories page the same as the Overviews (at that time called the Browse page). That of course is the reason that the current Contents of Overviews, Topics, Outline of Knowledge, Portals, Glossaries, and Categories all have the same structure; they simply took the example of the Overviews page. The category pages were used before there were enough portals to serve as introductory pages to a topic; these category pages served as proxies for the portals, and the 8 categories Culture/ Geography/ History/ Math/ Science/ Society/ Technology/ were at the top.

After the Contents portals were ready for Prime Time, they took over in an integrated structure of multiple pages, following a look & feel you see today. Today, of course, in the upper right-hand corner of the main page, there are links to more Contents portals, up from the 8 which are the main page top. The number of details in the subcategories have increased as well. However, the basic idea of a uniform bar of 'eight' items across the top has survived, and in fact increased beyond the geography/history/science etc. to Overviews/Topics/Categories etc. See Portal_talk:Contents for more; there is a wikiproject for this.

That is how the layout of this Categories page came to be. Like the rest of Wikipedia, it evolved, only it was part of a set of pages following a similar theme. I hope that this shows a massive redesign of the page would require buy-in across a wide range of the readership of the encyclopedia, seeing that the set of Contents evolved organically. Thus an emphasis on a specific enabling technology, for the purpose of improving the layout, would have to be at least as stable as html/http itself. Remember, JavaScript does not run uniformly on all machines yet.

At the very least, a stable set of UI concepts would have to show itself in order for further change to the page can go forward.

--Ancheta Wis (talk) 13:54, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

History synopsis effort greatly appreciated. Much thanks. -- Quiddity (talk) 05:05, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Cross-referencing

Hey guys. Does anyone know of a useful tool to automatically cross-reference categories? Say if I wanted to cross-reference "2010 films" with "black comedy films" to get me something to go out and buy, or to cross-reference suicides by Chinese monarchs, or something like that. I know it would be crude and imperfect, but I could find such a thing useful if it existed (or enjoy making one, with some help). Cheers, ~Zythe^{Talk to me!} 13:52, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

The keywords you seek are "Wikipedia:Category intersection". See specifically the links at the end in the "Proof of concept implementation" section there, and the tool Wikipedia:CatScan. :) -- Quiddity (talk) 17:13, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Name change proposal

See Portal talk:Contents#Proposal: Use the same naming convention for all of this portal's subpages

The Transhumanist 21:03, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Graphic of Wikipedia's category structure

See A visualization of Wikipedia's category structure as noted in Signpost [1] from Monday --Ancheta Wis (talk) 15:20, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Proposal to change a section title

There's a proposal to adjust one of the main section titles used in "Wikipedia's contents". See Portal talk:Contents#Proposal for main section title adjustment. The Transhumanist 10:10, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Edit request

Include redirect WP:9 in a "Shortcuts" box. 71.146.20.62 (talk) 03:18, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Some links point to categories that further redirect to some other category. Technically, such redirecting categories that have non-zero number of pages assigned to them will be collected under category:Wikipedia_non-empty_soft_redirected_categories, but seems like the bots ignore the Portal pages. So, such category links should instead point to the (softly-) redirected categories.

Make a button appear to the Legal portal?

Seems like a foundation of our societies? Judge Brussels Court,SvenAERTS (talk) 13:34, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

Cycles in the Category Graph of Wikipedia.

I noticed that there exists cycles in the Wikipedia's category system. To give one example, Canaanite writing systems -> Writing systems derived from the Phoenician -> Abjad writing systems, is a cycle. Is that an expected feature of the system ? I have a few issues with that, first, it's semantically wrong : Abjad_writing_systems is a subcategory of Canaanite_writing_systems and Canaanite_writing_systems is a subcategory of Abjad_writing_systems, which is not possible. Secondly, I'm trying to build a complete hierarchy of Wikipedia's categories and cycles makes this effort pretty much pointless. I'm thinking that it would be really valuable to strive for cleaning the category graph, in order to obtain an acyclic oriented graph. It would solve the two problems I see with the current way of organizing it. Is there any current effort to solve this issue ? If yes, how can I join ? If no, where should I start to suggest my help with it ?

Stilgarnat (talk) 14:29, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

This is a known issue, of course. The tendency is to avoid such cycles, if possible (especially "tight" ones, like the one you've pointed out), but they will inevitably occur because of ambiguity in the "meaning" of categories. Membership in a category often expresses an "is a(n example of)" relationship, but not always. For example, a so-called "paranormal triangle", like the Bermuda Triangle, is a kind of triangle, so it makes sense for Category:Paranormal triangles to be a subcategory of Category:Triangles (or perhaps it should be a subcat of Category:Types of triangles? … whatever). But category membership can also express other kinds of relatedness. For example, Category:Pyramids is also a subcategory of Category:Triangles, even though pyramids are not themselves triangles (in this case, the former merely contain the latter, or are composed of the latter [as faces]) — and the members of the subcategory Category:Triangle geometry have all kinds of different relationships to triangles, some of which may, as you trace the sequence of subcategories, eventually bring you back to triangles (and thus, Category:Triangles showing up as a deep subcat of itself). I'm sure there are much better examples, but you get the idea. In any case, check out WP:CAT, WP:CATFAQ, and especially WP:CATP (a WikiProject), and you might find what you're looking for. - dcljr (talk) 00:43, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 9 February 2022

Parnohlia caste is know as. :- Dalit (from Sanskrit: दलित, romanized: dalita meaning "broken/scattered", Hindi: दलित, romanized: dalit, same meaning) is a name for people belonging to the lowest stratum castes in India, previously characterised as "untouchable".[1] Dalits were excluded from the four-fold varna system of Hinduism and were seen as forming a fifth varna, also known by the name of Panchama. Dalits now profess various religious beliefs, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, Islam and various other belief systems. Scheduled Castes is the official term for Dalits as per the Constitution of India. Atul parnohlia (talk) 17:10, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Parnohlia caste Atul parnohlia (talk) 17:11, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Parnohlia Atul parnohlia (talk) 17:11, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Parnohlia surname Atul parnohlia (talk) 17:12, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

 Not done: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Wikipedia:Contents/Categories. Please make your request at the talk page for the article concerned. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 17:13, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:TI" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Wikipedia:TI and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 July 3#Wikipedia:TI until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Q28 (talk) 08:32, 3 July 2022 (UTC)