Add more subcategories[edit source]

Its fairly confusing when most topics are in the top category but some are in the subcategory. To improve navigation/clearness I propose adding more categories and redistributing the articles as the top level. Something like.....

• Agriculture
  • Composting
  • Organic Farming
    • Rotation
    • Organic Pest and disease control
    • Double digging
    • Seeds etc
  • Herbal plants
    • All the herbs listed in category level
  • Specific crops
    • Bananas
    • Maize etc
  • Production/Small scale production
    • Bees and wax
  • Livestock
  • Fish
  • Agroforestry
  • ????

There's still stuff which doesn't fit in anywhere - sawdust toilet, biogas, fermentation, general farming guides - so perhaps this can be expanded a bit more

Cgfoz 15:33, 31 January 2007 (PST)

You're right - it's currently a mess. This is because few changes have been made to these articles since the merger with WikiGreen. I agree that most or all of the top level articles should be moved to subcats. Perhaps some (such as biogas ones) shouldn't be in agriculture at all.

As there's so much categorization to do, I've been hoping that we could get some kind of bot to help (e.g. search for a certain phrase, and prompt to add to the relevant category). Doing it manually will take a lot of time that would be better spent on other things, like creating content. Perhaps our technically minded admins (Curt, Lonny, Gabe) can let us know if there's any progress on the bots? --Singkong2005 (now known as Chriswaterguy) · talk 22:59, 31 January 2007 (PST)

My two cents is that categorization is not the best tool for navigation in a top-down sense, if navigation means arriving at the home page and you want to find an article. (I think it's good for navigating from an article to a related category of articles, then back to the articles.) I've seen a few wikis (like Howtopedia and WikiGreen) that approached navigation differently and it worked well. I hope we can do something similar. Of course, categorization does help somewhat for nav, but I think it's more useful for maintenance and site management. Another way to think of it is that categorization is really essential for site management, and trying to optimize categorization both for site management (which is important) and for nav (also important) is difficult. I haven't fully figured it out, of course, but trying.

By the way, there has been a push (as Chris said) to make a lot of progress in categorization since the merger. See User:Curtbeckmann/Topic table where some prep work is underway. Will probably begin rolling out Water in the next few days..., then Food and drink after that, which is where Agriculture is going to live. --CurtB 06:01, 1 February 2007 (PST)

Cheers, for the link Curtbeckmann. Didn't quite realise the plan, or the historical reason for the current categorisation state. Using bots for a bit of smart categorisation sound a sensible (and an extremely cool) way to do it

-- Cgfoz 16:00, 1 February 2007 (PST)

seriously?[edit source]

umm Emesee