Category talk:Science
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To the new reader:
If you are new to Wikipedia, and you have just selected the category:science for reading, you may have been surprised to have seen two lists:
- Subcategories of category:science, such as category:astronomy, and
- Article lists, such as the Wikipedia article on astronomy.
- When you are interested in an individual science, look in the second list (#2 above) for more information on that science.
- The first list contains categories, but not topic articles. If you already understand what the topic astronomy is all about, but you want to learn more, then you can use category:astronomy to find more articles, either more specialized, or more general. A category is a list which serves to classify topics; for example, the category:astronomy is meant to hold the individual topics, such as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
To find a more general category, look at the bottom of that page. Both the article pages and the category pages can have Categories:links at the bottom of the page. But to find a sub-category of a category, look at list #1 above.
If you are still confused, just stick with individual articles until you need to learn about the categories. You can think of the categories as lists which were machine generated, to be studied later.
In all of this, it helps to keep a specific question in mind, such as how can we understand the evolution of stars?, for which a specific article, such as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is useful, because the category system is meant to help you find topics.
Ancheta Wis 11:10, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Science collaboration of the week
If you wish to collaborate on improving a science article, you can nominate it at Wikipedia:Science collaboration of the week
New discussion: other methods of categorization
Salute, as you can see: I have been upgrading ten social and two applied sciences to this level, because I'm a top down kind of guy. This chance will make it more efficient to reach the different angles of science from the top, from the main page. - Mdd 21:00, 5 oct 2004
- From user talk:Mdd:
- I've noticed several of your edits adding things to Category:Science, most of these are problematic, since social sciences belong in Category:Social science. They should not be in both parent and child categories. Thanks for helping out with the categories in general, but just be a bit careful when adding categories to large numbers of articles, as it is easy to overlook these things. —siroχo 23:40, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
Dear Siroxo, I have a simple question: Is it forbitten in Wikipedia to put a subcategorie both in a parent and child categories...?? If it is... your arguments stand as an absolute order... If it is not... you have overseen my argument that I've try to increase the efficiency. There is a lot more to it, but I would like an answer to this first... Mdd 8:21, Oct 6, 2004
- Hi, Mdd, thanks for asking about it. As it stands, Wikipedia:Categorization reads "An article should not be in both a category and its subcategory". It also says "When a given category gets too crowded, consider making several subcategories. Group similar articles together in a meaningful way that will hopefully be easy for readers to navigate later." Which is what has happened with Category:science. You can always post on the talk page to propose a change to a policy, (ie policies are not absolute), however I tend to agree with this scheme, because otherwise almost all articles would seem to fit under a category in addition of one of its subcategories. There may be other methods of categorization that Wikipedians have yet to discover, but for now I think science should be set up this way to make it easier to browse. —siroχo 09:44, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)
Dear Siroxo, I agree with the principles of categorisation of articles from Wikipedia:Categorization. This source has more to say about categories requirements and usage :"categories (along with other features, like cross-references) should help users find the information they are looking for as quickly as possible, even if they don't know that it exists or what it's called". This is an argument for my attempts. But this is not the point I want to state...... The situation is that I started changing out of new ideas about the classification of society and science. I've introduced some parts in the top of the Dutch Wikipedia with succes so far. Now I tried it here, and you shoot it down... without even give it some time. My question is now: If I want to make some of these changes... must I first explain my ideas...?? Mdd 20:17, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)
- I guess it depends on the magnitude of the changes, collapsing subcategories into their parent categories or duplicating them within it will probably be changed back most of the time, since it takes away from the ability to categorize efficiently. In general, when making some major changes to the way the encyclopedia is set up, its often good to discuss the changes first, because they have more far-reaching effects than normal article-edits. —siroχo 05:08, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)
Maybe I have to make some things clear first: It was not my intention to dublicate the ten social and two applied sciences... I want to upgrade these. I want to bring these into the categorie science to get one level of, what I call, basic scientific disciplines. As concession I left ten of these items in the subcategory social science. If I would have deleted these ten out of there, then we would have had another discussion...!?
My point is, that I would like to see a gathering of basic scientific disciplines in the categorie science. This set can create a layer to reach most angles of science. This point is part of a larger picture for the categorization in Wikipedia, which I'm willing to explain... but I don't know if this is the time and place to do so...?? What do you think about the idea of one level of basic scientific disciplines...?? Mdd 12:37, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)
- I tend to agree with Mdd here, the hierarchy system should be flatter, and navigation is helped if you can reach things with fewer clicks. So just because Archaeology is in Social Science does not mean it should not also be in Science, and there is no reason Social Science should not be in Science as well. It is a navigation tool, not the organization of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia is not paper.
- I think there's a danger in cluttering category space too much. You can't have too many things at your fingertips, or else none are. In this case, yes, I think it would be nice to have a dedicated subcategory for "Basic fields of science", perhaps mentioned in the intro text. There are lots of articles about science in general, so the clutter danger here is high. -- Beland 04:29, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Beside Wikipedia is not paper I have found lot of interesting reading about this in Wikipedia:Categorisation FAQ, Wikipedia:Categorization , Wikipedia talk:Categorization and from Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 1 to Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 4. I Think that's also the propper place to continue this discussion Mdd 22:05, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)
Old discussion from Votes for deletion
Discussion concluded and article kept on June 18, 2004
- Seems redundant with Category:Academic disciplines and possible source of confusion. Perhaps these should be merged? --Eequor 04:18, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- keep. the science and academic disciplines sets overlap, but are not equal. Badanedwa 15:39, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC)
- I vote against deletion. I added scientific subcategories to this category, and made it a subcategory of Academic_disciplines. This is a good place for links to general discussion of science, such as the history of science, the philosophy of science, the scientific method, etc. -- Beland 04:31, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Keep. What Badanedwa said. --ssd 16:32, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Keep; category hierarchies don't seem fully finalized, so potential major categories like this one should be kept. Also, should have been on Wikipedia:Categories for deletion instead of here. -Sean Curtin 03:04, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Spiders
the page is a mess
Hello,
from a usability-point-of-view the Science category page is a horrible mess. Imagine that on the wikipedia front page you see the
- Browse: Culture | Geography | History | Life | Mathematics | Science | Society | Technology
list and choose "Science". What would you expect to see? I would expect this page to give an easy way to click my way through to an overview over scientific areas.
When I enter the page it is suddenly no longer clear to me what purpose the page serves: there are two lists, one containing entries like "Antropology", "Earth sciences", and "Physics", the second one containing entries like "Antropology" (again), "Natural Science", "Odology", and "Talk:atom". If I want to learn about "Computer Science" or "Mathematics", which list would I look in? It is not intuitively clear (and the entries are in fact absent).
My suggestion: could anybody who understands the purpose of the page add an explanation to the top like "This page lists ... (I would want to write "all broad scientific areas" here, but this seems to be wrong). Under such and these conditions take your pick from the first alphabetical list, and under these different conditions you should look in the second list." A page linked to from the front page should be non-confusing and an explanation as the one suggested above would help with this.
What do you think? Jochen 18:56, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- The individual contributors to this category can format only their individual topics; this page is generated by the category software. If you want an essay-style approach to all knowledge, you can start from the main page at "Article overviews."
- What you are looking for is in fact the way that it used to work, but which was superseded by the category system.
This page is, indeed, a mess
Many of the articles and subcategories need to be assigned to major subcategories. -- Beland 23:12, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
...and how am I suppose to fix this page? It cannot be editted (no "edit this page" tab.)--Conwiktion 20:24, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
- I've removed the protection, it's editable now. Bryan 06:59, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Commons
Template:Commonscat Commons has images on this category. HenkvD 13:01, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)