Proposal:Easier categorisation

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1. Achieve continued growth in readership
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation
4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
5. Encourage Innovation

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Summary

Categorising articles is hard work! You should know what categories already exists and then choose the best one. Sometimes some categories seems to overlap and overcategorisation is easy. Furthermore, the current method potentially lacks of homogeneity among different contributors: people can think that an article should go in different categories

Proposal

Make categorising system different: ideally there should be a "categorise this article" in each page where a categorisation tree should be shown dynamically from more general categories (e.g. cat:Physics) through narrower categories (e.g. if you choose cat:Physics ---> then you may chose among cat:Optics or cat:Quantum mechanics, etc. ---> if you chose cat:Optics than you can see cat:Lenses, cat:Optical instrument, etc.). Finally, the possibility of creating a new category should be given if any suitable category is found. This could be done in a simple way using the existing wikisyntax: like the tool inserting the tag [[Category:...]] in the page. Categorisations should be multiple and recorded like contributions (in the way it is useful to know how many people thinks that article "Lens" should go in cat:Optical instruments). I think a not-too-complicated way to do this is to add a flag for "categorisation contribution" so that a simple bot can count them and make a report.

Motivation

This would improve the categorisation and classification of articles giving the possibility to non-expert users and passers-by to categorise articles in an easy (few clicks), intuitive (very similar to human logic reasoning) way. This could also lead to a greater homogeneity and less overcategorisation. All this while keeping using the existing wikisyntax which is (way too much) simple!

Potential Costs

Development of the new tool and integration in MediaWiki.

References

Proposal:Smart_category_browsing

Community Discussion

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