Wikipedia talk:Contents/Lists/Archive 2006

Categories against Lists

What is the different between Lists and Categories? 212.235.116.115 17:52, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Ever since Wikipedia started, Lists served mainly as checklists of topics that have something in common, so that (#1) writers can see which ones have red links and need articles, and (#2) readers can see which ones have blue links and already have an article. This method obviously worked well enough, since it organized and drove Wikipedia's growth to a half million articles. Now Categories provides a way to automatically generate an updated list of articles on a broad or narrow subject (#2). Great! Just what we've been waiting for! I was ready to completely abandon this page and work entirely on Categories. But I forgot about feature #1. Since Categories cannot list articles that don't yet exist, you don't know whether an article doesn't exist or it just doesn't have a Category link yet. No red link to click -- you have to take the time to do a Search, which may not find the article if it hasn't been indexed by the search engine yet. We'll just have to see how Categories changes our methods of finding gaps and creating articles. GUllman 23:54, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The red-link thing is a good point, but I've put up a proposal which I think would help categories to replace lists (my main beef against which is that they rapidly get out of date). See: Annotated categories instead of lists. — Johantheghost 23:09, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

cleanup

There's a lot of information repeated from Lists of Basic topics, and some links are to articles, not lists, and they don't even include lists. --gatoatigrado 23:48, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

List of Books

I don't think List of books should be under literature since some books, such as manuals, aren't literature. It should be under Interdisciplinary topics instead. --JeffW 18:17, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Delete lists of links

At the risk of being criticized, I have nominated 3 pages for speedy deletion: List of online databases, List of online dictionaries, and List of online encyclopedias. When I did the deed I had not yet read this page. However, I still think these articles are going to be magnets for link spam with limited utility, unlike the other list articles. But that's just my opinion and that's why there's a process that allows discussion of this proposed deletion. Tono-bungay 01:04, 4 November 2006 (UTC)