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→Philosophy of categories: new section
Andy expressed interest in doing conservative entries for such a project, but again I think this ObamaCare lawsuit is keeping him very busy right now. [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 06:14, 25 May 2015 (EDT)
Andy expressed interest in doing conservative entries for such a project, but again I think this ObamaCare lawsuit is keeping him very busy right now. [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 06:14, 25 May 2015 (EDT)
== Philosophy of categories ==
I'd like to say a few things about my philosophy of how categories should be done. Actually, I'm aware of a lot of discussion of the topic, but I don't know where to find the "manual of style" on the subject, because finding help pages is so very hard. If you could point me at the appropriate page, so that I could see what I may be doing wrong and/or what I'm up against, I'd appreciate that.
There seems to be something of a belief that pages should be in only one category in a hierarchy of categories. This is wrong, and here is why.
I'm going to use some esoteric mathematical things as examples, guessing that they may not be well known to you, so that you will "feel the pain" of someone trying to find his way around. You've heard of something called a "regular space", and you want to know more about it. Well, actually, if it were that simple, you would just type "regular space", and there you would be. So let's think about a less straightforward case. You're browsing around in categories, and, if the phrase "regular space" jumped out at you, you'd find that interesting, and you'd go there and learn something. So suppose you are in the mathematics category, looking around for interesting things. Alas, "regular space" isn't there. The person who wrote that article would probably have liked you to find it.
:By the way, it wasn't me; it was "pixologic" back in 2007. I consider stuff like that to be way too esoteric for Conservapedia, and a number of other people, like Ed Poor, agree with me. I won't waste my time on that sort of thing. But that's all ancient history by now.
So what's going on? "Regular space" is only in the topology category. You didn't know that, so you missed it. Now the topology category is a subcategory of mathematics, but, when browsing mathematics, you shouldn't have to follow all the subcategories. And it doesn't help that the first page of the mathematics category only lists the first 200 items, which goes through "I". You have to click on "next 200" twice before you get to the "T"s and can see the topology category, and click on it, and see all the stuff in there.
I believe that the topology articles (there are 55 of them) should also be listed directly under mathematics. That would make the mathematics category go up from 426 to 481, but once you scrolled through it, you'd see everything that might strike your fancy in mathematics.
The preceding scenario may sound far-fetched, but I've been in that situation many times. I like to browse. And I don't like to have to do a "tree search", as we computer science folks call it, when I'm browsing. The "Regular space" article should be in both the mathematics category and the topology category.
Does this mean that everything has to be in every category? Of course not. One needs to apply common sense. One should be able to figure out, for a given article, what categories it should be in. This requires common sense and some good knowledge of the subject area. I recently reworked the categories of some electronic terms (inductor, alternating current, etc.) to put them into what I consider a good choice of categories. (If you disagree with my choices, feel free to change things. This is a wiki.) I also took out some excessive stuff about "wind energy" etc. Much more needs to be done—the connection between [[Ampere's_law]] and the wind energy category is utterly ridiculous.
The reason I bring this up now is that you recently took out the physics category from several articles involving relativity. That is wrong. These things should be in both relativity and physics. (And maybe science, and mechanics, etc., but I'm not going to argue that.) This is ''especially'' true of Galilean relativity. Galilean relativity is not about Einsteinian relativity, that is, what most people think of when they hear "relativity". It's the classical concept, espoused by Galileo, that Einsteinian relativity built upon.
E=mc^2? Both physics and relativity. Really. Just do it.
I see that you are revamping other categories involving mechanics. I won't interfere or second-guess you; I know you do good work. But I just wanted to make some comments about my philosophy of categories.
Peace,
[[User:SamHB|SamHB]] 02:09, 1 June 2015 (EDT)