Forum talk:Categories - How to use them

Progress?
Hello, folks! There are at this moment just over 4,500 categories.

Trimming the numbers
You currently have over 14,000 articles. I therefore can't agree that you should be looking to trim down to something under 400 categories. With many articles belonging in two or more categories, that would produce an average of 40 or more articles per category. That is not an easy number to see at a glance; it takes a while to look through; and someone wanting to burrow down the category tree to find articles in a particular area may prefer to have 3-10 subcategories where one will be seen at a glance as the one to open.

I also disagree that "place" categories should be on the standard hit list. Users of this site may well want to see all the psychology-related pages pertaining to their town, city, or state.

Trimming the categories to some extent would, however, be a good idea. I suggest you look at the list of categories and target those that have very few members and little or no relevance to psychology. Each such category should then be opened to see what pages and subcategories it includes; each of them should be edited to remove that category link (and to replace it if it's the only one - use the category's parent category if appropriate).

Uncategorised pages and categories
The list of uncategorised articles displays only the first 1,000; at that point it has reached only "F", so I suspect there are lots of them. They should be categorised, for easier discovery and comparison with similar pages.

Many of them almost write their own category names - all those that have a common initial word or phrase followed by a colon. Example - the 36 uncategorised pages with names starting with "Addiction:". Can there be any objection to putting all pages of that form into the same-name category (which possibly - as in that example - already exists and is deficient because of not including them)? The article that has the same name as the category will also be in the category, listed at or near the top by means of a piped link (just as "Addiction" has ).

Much the same applies to the uncategorised categories - currently over 130 of them.

Unless you want to reinvent wheels, use the Wikipedia categories (many of which you already have, as one of you has noted). Much thought has gone into creating them, by hundreds or thousands of contributors. When you have hundreds of active contributors you will be able to create new names if you want to.

Kind regards - --Robin Patterson 06:04, 17 February 2007 (UTC)