Template talk:Categories

I think in some ways the table of contents system we had back in the days of the old (uneditable) main page were better (although there are some improvements in the new toc too). In particular when I started the Template:wikipediatoc it looked like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:Wikipediatoc&oldid=2530290

It has a certain simplicity that we can draw upon (in particular the natural sciences and mathematics should be grouped together). I'm glad this page is heading in that direction. The current Template:wikipediatoc on the Main Page is overkill and looks more amateurish than the original, in particular stub articles like the unencyclopedic personal life aren't appropriate at the top-level and can easily be accomdated within a more encyclopedic subcategory. I do agree that links to the categories are the best way to go on the main page, but before we go live, we should ensure that each category linked from the main page has at least a lead paragraph summarizing the relevant article of the same name. --Lexor|Talk 15:11, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Merge from Wikipedia:Browse by category

Please see Wikipedia_talk:Browse by category for a discussion about merging Wikipedia:Browse by category with Template:Categories. —AlanBarrett 17:15, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Revision of this template.

I have greatly expanded this template to give a broader view of categories and to eliminate some of the problems I percieved in the old design. Summary of what I've done.

• Made entertainment as seperate section, as it is the largest section of culture.
• Made geography a seperate section, with each of the worlds continents.
• Turned abtractions into Mathematics and abstractions, with more maths related topics.
• Better category organization in general.

[[User:Norm|Nor^{m]] 14:43, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)}

Naming

I think its getting significantly better.

• 1. Should category Life be renamed category Personal life, or is it obvious
• 2. Do UK/commonwealth people really not know that math is mathematics (or maths)? Mathematics has so many letters.
• 3. To be consistent should there be an Entertainment on the Categorybrowsebar ?
• 4. Should these be alphabetized (as I have done on Categorybrowsebar)?
• 5. Should Nature and Science just be Science? (this would keep the naming and alphabetization consistent).
• 6. Can we flatten the categories so that the categories from the main page have lots of links ... (e.g. from main page, I get history, then history by topic, then actual topics, is history by topic necessary?)

dml 14:00, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• 1. "Personal life" would be better. I would expect "Life" to include all of biology.
• 2. We know that "math" is the american term for "maths", but we think it looks and sounds funny. Please use "mathematics" in full, so that we don't have to argue about whether or not there's an "s" in "math/maths".
• 3. It would be nice if the highest level categories here matched the list in Template:Categorybrowsebar, but I don't think it's essential.
• 4. The list is supposed to be fairly small (using less than half a screen of space on a typical display). Given the small size, I believe that keeping related topics together would be more useful than alphabetical order.
• 5. I prefer "Nature and Science". If you call it "Science", some people might not know to look there for nature-related topics.
• 6. I don't know what you mean by "flatten the categories". If you want this template to include more links, then I think it already uses enough screen space, and adding many more links would be bad. If you want to change the way the categories are related to each other (as opposed to how they are linked to from here), then I think i you need to ask elsewhere (perhaps at Wikipedia talk:Categorization).

—AlanBarrett 16:46, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)