Difference between revisions of "LinuxMCE talk:Community Portal"

Revision as of 19:27, 8 October 2007

Moved from Zaerc's talk page

Categorization

Hi Zaerc, I have noticed that you have moved a number of hardware articles from more specific categories, such as Category:TV tuner cards to the more general category Category:hardware and that you have nominated the more specific categories for deletion. Why was this? Surely the more specific categorization is helpful, especially when product codes often do not explain the nature of the equipment Lozzo 00:37, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Can we please hold fire on further re-categorization until further community consensus is sought. Many thanks Lozzo 00:59, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Why did you de-categorize everything from the TV tuner card category? Lozzo 01:05, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Because I wanted to get back to where I was with organising things before people started to re-organise everything. See also the "community-proposal" page. I suppose I went a little overboard as I had to go through just about all the pages under "hardware" again anyway, which I wasn't to happy about in all honesty (I was getting tired, having to put everything back, and obviously didn't gave it enough thought).

The original idea was to dump hardware into the main categories untill there is a bunch similar and then put them into their own sub-category as well. When I went through all the pages again I felt that would leave the "video" category as good as empty but now I realize I could have just added the tv-cards to both "video" and "tv-cards".

My thought also was that categories with 1 or 2 pages in them wouldn't be very usefull and spread them out to much (the video category would be almost empty with the tv-cards removed) but now I see that wouldn't be a problem if they remain in the parent categories as well. So I agree with you on putting (at least) the TV-cards category back in, that makes it a lot easier to specificly find them.

Unless you want to take categories away from pages again, I see no reason to hold fire, we can just add new (sub-)categories to the pages wherever suitable. And if anyone feels that a page really does not belong in a certain category they can just remove it with a little note on the talk page (see Nokia770 for example).
--Zaerc 05:16, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Firstly, yes I agree with you that there needs to be a critical mass of articles in a certain area before a sub-category is created.

Secondly, yes, I do want to make sure that articles do not appear once in a category and then again in a more general category. This would involve, as you put it, 'taking categories away from pages'. I understand that this is not Wikipedia and I'm not suggesting that we should do everything the same. But the Wikimedia projects have conventions which have been subjected to a large amount of thought and debate and can be very useful guides for less mature documentation projects such as this.

Wikipedia sets the de-facto standard for how wikis should be organised - especially when we are using the same software (MediaWiki). Regardless of that, I think that having article A in one category and then a more general category is confusing and runs counter to the intention of how the category function was designed. It makes for general categories which are needlessly cluttered with articles which should be (and are) also categorized more specifically higher up the tree.

Having a list of articles in one place (so they are as you claim) may be appropriate for a small number of articles but this is not scalable for a large amount of documentation like we have. To quote directly from the Wikimedia guidelines:

Each page is typically in at least one category. It may be in more, but it may be wise not to put a page in a category and also in a more general category.[1]

I do not think you have given a good enough reason to deviate from this. Of course, articles can be in more than one category. You give the examples of phones and orbiters. With the following category structure

-Hardware
 |-Phones
 |-Orbiters

A device as you describe (which is not exclusively a phone or an orbiter) can appear in both the phone and orbiter category - but not hardware as this is a more general category. Pleas can we hold fire on further changes in this area until there is more agreement. I will ask others for comment. Cheers Lozzo 06:55, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Succinctly

In my opinion (and following established conventions) this is fine:

-HARDWARE
 |-PHONES --> Cisco smart phone article
 |-ORBITERS --> Cisco smart phone article

This is not fine and makes for clutter:

-HARDWARE --> Cisco smart phone article
 |-PHONES --> Cisco smart phone article
 |-ORBITERS --> Cisco smart phone article

Lozzo 07:05, 7 October 2007 (MST)

A phone is just as much hardware as it is a phone or an orbiter. And it is extremely convenient to have a category listing all the known hardware. As for the other more general categories, they make it easy to quickly find related solutions. Apart from that it is a lot easier to remove tags from pages then to add them, should they prove to be unecessary.

I see no reason to comply with policies of unrelated wikis, and: but it may be wise not to put a page in a category and also in a more general category, does not seems like a very convincing argument. Even if it is an "established convention" elsewhere.

I just wish we could focus more on expanding and organizing instead of endless re-organization and debate on how it should be done. And why exactly do we need to have several threads discussing this on my talk page and not the forum or the hardware-category's talk page? --Zaerc 08:45, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Okay I've now moved everything here. Forget other wikis for the time being. There is still obviously some disagreement here which we need to resolve by coming to some kind of consensus decision. Can we please hang fire on further changes in this area for the time being? Lozzo 10:19, 7 October 2007 (MST)

You are completely correct to say "A phone is just as much hardware as it is a phone or an orbiter." But this is accounted for in the example below because both phones and orbiters are subclasses of hardware. It doesn't need to be repeated again in the hardware category - this is implicit.

-HARDWARE
 |-PHONES --> Cisco smart phone article
 |-ORBITERS --> Cisco smart phone article

As a compromise, how about we have a list of all hardware as an article in itself? This would surely satisfy your requirement for a complete hardware list in one place? Lozzo 10:24, 7 October 2007 (MST)

I'm in favor with Lozzos proposal at the top here, I think this makes sense and also as Lozzo says we could have a long alphabetical list with all hardware that's easy to search through if it's needed. --Samme 11:03, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Unless somebody comes up with some good reasons to remove all the pages describing hardware from the hardware category, I see little reason for me to stop organizing the hardware section as I have been doing since before you came along (no offence intended). I'm really not that interested in acedemic debate on grouping theory, whether something "isn't needed" or "implict" seems hardly worth the discussion. As for pages with lists, that simply does not work, you can find a whole bunch of attempts in the "hardware lists" category. --Zaerc 11:30, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Zaerc, I'm not saying we should necessarily go one way or the other for the time being. But I think it would be reasonable and proper to have a little bit of a discussion with a few of us to get some group consensus before we press on in any particular direction with regards the way we categorize/list things. I'd be very interested to hear your further thoughts on why you believe a hardware list is unworkable.

Also, what do you reckon should be the minimum number of articles to justify a category?

Lozzo 14:20, 7 October 2007 (MST)

I think the absolute minimum would be one, but ideally the more the merrier. If you look at the RCS TXB16 for example, it is the only thermostat we have (afaik) in the wiki. Still I think it is a good idea to give this device a Thermostats category so that the people looking through automation subcategories (for example) will find it there. And somebody looking for info on that particular device instead will be able to find it in the hardware category without having to go through sub-categories first.

Now if you want to make and maintain a seperate list that is fine with me, I'm not having that discussion again. And so far I still haven't seen any good argument to remove all the hardware from the hardware category. --Zaerc 15:53, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Zaerc, as far as I am aware, you don't have executive fiat on this wiki. With all due respect, what I'm hearing from you at the moment is: "I've decided what's going to happen with regards categorization, I don't care what anyone else says and I'm not going to debate the matter further". I've outlined my arguments at length and in a civil manner. This has included a compromise proposal (supported by Samme) and I do not feel you have given a proper explanation of why you don't think it's workable. You have instead responded by saying you won't discuss the matter further ("I'm not having that discussion again"). Lozzo 11:18, 8 October 2007 (MST)

Lozzo's compromise proposal

Re-iterating the above...

Current situation

1. Zaerc wants somewhere where there is "a category listing all the known hardware."
2. He has achieved this as follows by listing articles in one category and also in its more general parent category as follows:

-HARDWARE --> Cisco smart phone article
 |-PHONES --> Cisco smart phone article
 |-ORBITERS --> Cisco smart phone article

Disagreement

1. Lozzo believes that this:
   1. Violates the generally accepted convention for how categories should be structured
   2. Goes against the elegant principle of categories - the whole reason the function was added to MediaWiki
   3. Makes for very cluttered general categories the further down the category tree you go
   4. In the more general categories, for example harware, the user is presented with an arbitrary list of product names which do not necessarily describe what a product is. How are we supposed to know what an LG 42LB5D is or a Leadtek DTV1000T if they are in one big homogenous general category?

Proposed compromise solution

• To satisfy Zaerc's requirement for a single place to list all known hardware, we can maintain a single list article. I (lozzo) am very happy to help construct this in partnership with Zaerc. In fact, this would be better than putting all harware in the general hardware category because it would allow notation.

• The articles should be tagged with categories as follows and according to convention:

-HARDWARE
 |-PHONES --> Cisco smart phone article
 |-ORBITERS --> Cisco smart phone article

This compromise is supported by Lozzo and Samme (see above).

Please comment below. Lozzo 11:18, 8 October 2007 (MST)