- Here are my 9 proposed top-level topic categories-
- Water
- Food
- Public health
- Culture and community
- Communication and information technology (maybe just "Information technology" or "Communication and information")
- Energy (notice not Power and Energy as energy implies both)
- Land, materials and construction
- Transportation (most debatable, could fit some under energy, some under culture and then just have a Transportation portal)
- Metaconcepts (these will mostly be concepts that are implicitly incorporated in many different pages. They will be mostly definitions, that are linked to inline from the text of other pages)
- These 9 top-level categories are based on 8 basic human needs-
- Water
- Food
- Health
- Community
- Knowledge
- Energy
- Shelter
- Transportation (arguable)
- An example category tree based on these 9 top-evel categories follows.
Please note that many subcategories will be in multiple higher categories.
Water
Water conservation
Rural water supply in _______
Greywater
Garden box
Planter box
Rainwater harvesting
Rooftop rainwater catchment
Stormwater catchment
Swales
Pumping
Hydraulic ram pumps
Solar pumps
Rope pumps
Hand pumps
Water quality
Water storage
Wells
Cysterns
Storage tanks
Ferrocement tanks
Plastic tanks
Wood tanks
Wastewater treatment
Primary wastewater treatment
Secondary wastewater treatment
Tertiary wastewater treatment
Physical wastewater treatment
Chemical wastewater treatment
Bilogical wastewater treatment
Constructed lagoons
Community scale wastewater treatment
Water sanitation
Filtration
Slow sand filtration
Distillation
Desalination
Solar desalination
Water transportation
Water jugs
Food
100 mile diet
Companion planting
Food preperation
Macrobiotics
Raw
Vegetarianism
Omnivorism
Food preserving
Canning
Dehydrating
Storing
Seed saving
Organic gardening
Double digging
Composting
Vermiculture
Pit compost
Spinning barrel compost
Agriculture
Crop rotation
Crop drying
Crop storage
Growing _______ in a ______ climate
Fertilization
Pest management
Aquaculture
Agroforestry
Biointensive gardening
Greenhouse
Pit greenhouse
Lean to greenhouse
Attached greenhouse
Freestanding greenhouse
Hoophouse
Animal husbandry
Chicken tractor
Animal health
Beekeeping
Public health
Pest control
Health care in _____
ORT
Cysts
Prevention and treatment of _____
Bacterias
Prevention and treatment of _____
Viruses
Prevention and treatment of _____
HIV
Sanitation
Hand washing
Pit latrine
Improved pit latrine
Humanure
Bucket composting toilet
Double vaulted composting toilets
(Many topics from water sanitation)
Septic tanks
Disabilities
Human dignity in public health
Refrigeration
Vaccine refrigeration
Food refrigeration
Health paradigms
Homeopathy
Aleopathy
Herbalism
Culture and community
Active citenzry
Collaborative meeting tools
Effective lobbying
Environmental justice
Multiculturalism
Builiding partnerships
Cities
Community organizing
Cooperatives
Intentional communities
Communes
Ecovillages
Social artistry
Male contraception
Banking
Microfinance
Triple bottom line
Sustainable accounting
Accounting practices
Decision making techniques
Pugh diagrams
Delphi method
Decision making structures
Hand clasp
Democratic
Consensus
Minority rule
Majority rule
Unanimity
Communication and information technology
Internet
Open source
GIS
Repeaters
Short wave radio
Wikis
Education
Service Learning
Teacher training
Curricullum development
Teaching materials
Computer based education
Education paradigms
Piaget
Montessori
International programs
Intereducation
Energy
Electrical energy
Batteries
Hydrogen fuel cells
Microcapicitors
Grid intertie
Photovoltaic power
Solar pumping
Solar vaccine refrigeration
Microhydro power
Wind power
Wave power
Pedal power
Heat
Cookstoves
Refrigeration
Thermodynamics
Solar thermal hotwater
Hydronic radiant floor heating
Insulation
Stawbale insulation
Fiber board insulation
Fiberglass insulation
Thermal mass
Passive solar design
Fuel
Biogas
Ethanol
Biodiesel
Materials and construction
Natural capital
4Rs
Supplies
Alternative materials
Lechugilla
Hemp
Bioplastic
Smartwood
Material science
Solid statics
Solid dynamics
Fluid dynamics
Bioremediation
Surveying
Compost
Alternative building
Bamboo
Papercrete
Cordwood
Earthship
Tires
Strawbale
Ferrocement
Living roof
Earthen construction
Adobe
Cobb
Bajareche
Earth bags
Earthen oven
Earthen plaster
Rammed earth
Wattle and daub
Stone and brick
Transportation
Greenbelts
Busses
Trains
Light rail
Bicycles
Recumbent
Rickshaw
Bicycle parking
Electric bicycles
Critical mass bike rides
Fuel
Multiple occupancy vehicles
Single occupancy vehicles
Metaconcepts
Poverty Reduction
International development
Appropriate technology
Sustainable development
Permaculture
Biomimicry
Natural capital
Triple bottom line
Comments
Place comments here.
Curt's first comments
Looks good. I see this mostly as a major tuning of categories, but not something strikingly different (except that perhaps placing the top 9 categories under fundamental might be called "striking"). Here are some random questions:
- I am happy with whereever you would like to place those 9 top-level topic categories. --Lonny
- Sort of a general question about singular/plural. I see a lot of plurals, but Earthen oven is singular. Perhaps "earthen oven" is a concept, and not just an object, and that could explain the singular. (This question is really with respect to category naming policy of course, and not category structure.)
- Earthen ovens (plural) is great and we should change it. But as far as a plural/singular policy: I added some more comments at Appropedia talk:Policy discussion#singularizing categories. --Lonny
- It's still okay for some subcategories to appear in multiple higher categories, right? Fuel, for example, seems to belong in Transportation as well as in Energy, especially if a fuel serves dual (or more) purposes.
- Absolutely. Fuel is in both of those categories. (I did not place the subordinate subcategories of Fuel on the second instance in the outline above only to save redundancy, clearly Fuel has the same subcategories beneath it in both instances.)
- Since the table representation or presentation seemed well received, presumably this could also be placed in a table format. Would that belong in the Fundamental category page?
- Table format would be great, I love it. I acquiesce to wherever you feel it should be placed. My only need is that it is linked directly from the Navbar. I think Category:Topics, where it currently lives, is the best place for it. --Lonny
Gotta run. I'm sure to think up some more questions, but there's nothing really surprising about this to me. --CurtB 07:46, 19 December 2006 (PST)
Curt's second comments
- There is a threshold where category name length becomes painful to me. Consequently, I prefer "Information Technology" as the category name over the longer option.
- I don't readily see the "land" connection...perhaps it's about "land use"? I can see Land as part of farming and agriculture..., but that would be under "Food". Where I'm going is that "Land, ... construction" is pushing my comfort zone on category name length, and I'm looking for a way to shorten the name, and "Land" doesn't fit naturally for me. Is "Land" a prominent enough category to participate in the name? I guess this is similar to me to the "refrigeration" topic. A useful category, but not really top level. (Having said all that, Lonny is going to give 12 examples of the importance of Land, and that's fine, I'll learn :-))
- I agree that we should make efforts to keep category names succinct (if a name can be "succinct"... okay how about "short").
- I think Aaron likes "Communication and Information" better, but I am okay with either, or even just "Information".
- Although I am tempted by the challenge (12 examples of the importance of Land in under 1 minute)... I think I will concede to "Materials and construction". Please note that I have changed it above. --Lonny 15:05, 20 December 2006 (PST)
More comments from CurtB
(warning, this is a "thinking out loud, stream of consciousness" comment)
This is a "metatopic structure" page, but while we're talking about topics, I want to open the discussion of hierarchy / topic depth. Basically, do we want a tree-like structure with 17 levels, with 6 items per level? Or do we want a tree-like structure with 6 levels and 17 items per level? (I realize that the math doesn't completely work. If the structure is a pure tree, then the capacity of a tree is (NitemsXlevels). That is, it's an exponential relationship, not multiplicative, and therefore not symmetrical in terms of ordering. That is, X^Y != Y^X (in C-speak).)
But my point is, assuming that we will have, say, 15,000 articles (my swag for a moderately mature article count) we are faced with the choice of many (many many) levels with a few articles or subcategories per level, OR, not so many levels with a lot more articles or subcategories per level. And we assume, of course, that one of the (or the only?) main purposes of topic categorization is navigation. (Even then, we must consider the "use cases": User starts from the root of the tree; User starts from article, clicks upward to topic category, then follows category structure..., is there another use case?)
Of course we (yep, I) must recognize that not every layer will be sweetly balanced, but let's see if we can target a range. (This, actually, is the critical,driving question. The structure will/shall/should be driven by the number of subcategories/articles at a given level.)
Cutting to the chase, I would really be bothered if the root-to-leaf path required more than 5 or maybe 6 clicks. I am not uncomfortable with 10 or 20 subcategories per level. If we choose that, and if the "average" span of a level is 7 (because we decide to split when we get to 14), then the capacity of a 5-click tree with 7 items per level is: 16,807. The math whizzes in the class will recognize what the capacity is if we "average" 10 per level.
What prompted this diatribe is that I am interested in porting the "Solar distillation" Tech Brief from Practical Action. I couldn't recall if maybe I had already ported this Tech Brief, so I searched and found the category "solar distillation". My gut reaction is that the category is too narrow. How many articles are expected under "solar distillation"? Hmmm...
Okay, after wandering around in the desert for 6 paragraphs, I think there is another factor. Perhaps there are only 3 articles related to solar distillation. Given the combo-linkage with water and solar, this is tricky. It's easy to categorize the articles under "distillation" on the water side. But where do they get categorized on the solar side? I guess we could put them under "solar hot water" since basically we are heating the water in order to distill it... But I need to be intellectually honest and say that such an approach "might" work here but doesn't handle the broader case....
Okay, so what I've realized is the need for some kind of topic categorization policy that includes the depth (from "root" to "leaf") and breadth (articles and/or subcategories per level) of the topic tree. I sahll go forth and work on a policy. (There is a larger "policy" discussion...basically, we need policies that are semi-established and not just on talk pages. I'll sign up to attempt that as well...someday after my first swing at non-profit incorporation.)
Lonny, this brings up a nagging question for me. How do people find our articles? Internet search? Topic tree? Link from other article? With subsequent questions: if no one uses our topic tree, does that mean we need to fix it? Or do we change our approach?
Warning: I promise to cogitate on this for a while, then come back and subject everyone to some more thoughts.
Signing off from the Big Island of Hawai'i, this is Approholic, --CurtB 18:33, 28 December 2006 (PST) (In my own self defense, my dream holiday would include many hours per day of Appropedia... What can I say? It's the pay, the benefits, the work environment, the team.)
Response
Hi Curt,
(warning, this is a response to a "thinking out loud, stream of consciousness" comment)
- Our category tree is not really a tree.
- We are not building a strict taxonomy. For example, our categorization is not one-to-one (isomorphic), a subcategory can show up under more than one category.
- Our not-really-a-category-tree will change weightings.
- We cannot predict how many pages will be categorized under a category. For instance, Category:Solar_distillation could easily contain many organizations, projects and environment-based how tos.
- Our not-really-a-category-tree will grow and change shape. New subcategories will continue to emerge from users. Over time new subcategories will develop and old subcategories may become obsolete.
- Our not-really-a-category-tree is not really all that useful.
- Most users will find our content from a link or an external search engine. Some users will find our content from the internal search engine or by browsing up the category structure. A few users will find our content by navigating down the category structure.
I think that more than building a perfect tree, we are seeding a folksonomy and building a categorization that we find useful. We should pick subcategories based on their existence in the world, and on their existence in Appropedia content. Instead of focusing on the not-really-a-tree, let's focus on the content. If you are looking to develop a policy, let us work more in the direction of user and content directed subcategories... something like: If a category has ____ number of pages related to the same topic, consider creating a subcategory for them and retagging the pages with the new subcategory.
Some additional reading:
- The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems
- Google's War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders
- Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
- Ontology of Folksonomy: A Mash-up of Apples and Oranges (in part a response to Ontology is overrated)
What do you think? --Lonny 22:42, 28 December 2006 (PST)
Response to response
(not sure about your formatting above...I removed line breaks from the external links, but not from the other lines)
I wasn't clear in my ramblings, but in the end I had decided that "Solar distillation" was an acceptable category. At the same time, your comments have definitely shifted my perspective on topic categorization. I must say that I'm not all that jazzed by the tagging stuff at, say, del.icio.us, but still recognize the value. It's one of those "not perfect, but better than all the alternatives".
My sense of the "strict tree structure" came from the early Topic page, where, under Water, the "Solar distillation" item said "see Solar". My bias was away from that strict tree structure, but a "tree-like" structure. Now I see that you're even less tree-like, and suddenly the larger Topic label makes more sense to me, and the metatopics as well. We may well have 500 topic categories. You can find them all under "Topic", or you can look in the subtopic categories (also fundamental categories) of water, energy, etc, etc and sift through a large number of "leaf" categories. Or something. Seems like max 2 or 3 layers of categorization with 50 subcategories per metacategory, then how ever many articles per subcategory. I think this math works. Another example of this is the way that Practical Action sorts their Technical Briefs. They don't have that many, so they all fit on a page. But they have about 7 larger buckets, and some articles fall into more than one bucket.
This will take me a bit to re-assess. My first sense is that I'll spend a lot less energy on topic category structure, since it seems to be relatively less important than I thought. At some point there is benefit (to contributors) in articulating our topic categorization policy, and so I'll approach it from that stand point.
If my newly developing understanding is near the mark, then navigation using topic categories is still valid, but it's accomplished more by performing a search for, say, solar distillation, then finding both a list of articles, plus a category. Choose the category or an article. From an article, you can click "upwards" to the category and find related articles. This is as opposed to walking the topic category pseudo-tree from the top.
--CurtB 09:20, 29 December 2006 (PST)
- (thanks for pointing out those wierd linebreaks)
- Your understanding seems close to the mark.
- A couple of small tweaks -
- Categorization may go deeper than 3 layers in some cases.
- Search will bring you to the page you describe, but Go should bring you straight to the category page. I.e. all topic category pages should have a same-name page in the main namespace, which directs to the Category, e.g. Greywater goes to Category:Greywater, try Greywater Search vs Greywater Go.
- Thank you for your continued efforts on refining both your understanding and the structure of our topic categories. --Lonny 02:13, 3 January 2007 (PST)
Sample table of category structure
Here is a table that talks about category framework a bit more, based on extensive exchanges Lonny and I have had via email. Since this is a structure comment, I'm not sweating the plural/singular decisions here.
cells below contain category pages | cells below (under the headings) contain article pages | |||||
Cat:Topic(s)are below /// Areas are to the right | Cat:Projects | Cat:How tos | Cat:Principles (?) | Cat:Organizations | ||
Cat:Water | Cat:Rainwater harvesting |
Cat:Swales | Portland example | (empty) | Beyond dams article | Bob's swales |
Cat:Rooftop catchment |
Ersson project | Catchment how-to | Beyond dams article | Rain Harvest Association | ||
Cat: Greywater | Cat:Garden box | (empty) | Grey box how-to | (empty) |
In the table above, I propose the "Principles" area name for articles that are not quite Projects or How-tos. "Basics" seems too constraining, "Musings" seems too glib or lightweight for me. The need for this area category is not entirely clear yet, but if someone wants to see the list of such articles, it would be good to look here. We have several examples of such articles, like many from "Beyond Dams", as well as the "Power and energy basics" article. --CurtB 11:04, 20 December 2006 (PST) (sig line added by Lonny to break up conversation)
- Power and energy basics seems more like it could be in a new area, such as Category:Lecture notes, could be Lonny's power and energy basics or Engr305 power and energy basics.
- I based "Musings" on the following definition "to comment thoughtfully or ruminate upon."[1], and the incredible and very carefully worded Tech Musings of Don Lancaster (did I mention incredible). The "s" is used to signify the usage (and definitin) as a noun. But I hear what you are saying. I think that we should continue looking for the right name(s) for the area(s). Let's move this conversation to Category_talk:Topic/Draft_of_areas. --Lonny 15:05, 20 December 2006 (PST)
Content in Category pages
How much content information belongs within Category pages themselves? Some are nearly empty, some have a lot of content. One view on the "principles" notion is that all that content could be placed in a category page. (Then the natural next question is, what about the principles of some subject that is too narrow to be a category?) My bias (just from my gut, without clear reasoning) is that Category pages should not have substantial content, except navigational content (like the table on the Topic page). What do others feel about this?
What are the benefits of placing the Topic category pages in Category:Topic? In part, if there are benefits, do we want to have a Category:Area that includes the area category pages? (The answer could easily be "no", since the Topic category pages are subject to much more growth than the Area category pages.)
What are the benefits to categorization generally? Are there more than those listed below?
- Navigation
- especially for the topic categories
- Context
- this benefit seems doubtful for me since category is very low profile, unless it is done through maintenance
- Maintenance
- admins can sort thru groups of articles
- Intersections of categories (in future) seems like a very cool thing!
Enough for now... --CurtB 11:04, 20 December 2006 (PST)
Request for Commerce/Business/Trade and Manufacturing categories
Hi Lonny! Happy New Year. You "threatened" to spend some more energy on the topic structure (and maybe even area structure) soon. (If you're essentially, done, that's fine, I'll start moving forward with what you've laid out above.) If you're going to make another pass, I want to request the insertion/addition of a commerce or business or trade subcategory, presumably within the community area. (May impact Banking? Is banking a valid term in Muslim communities? Lending?) Similarly, Manufacturing may go under Commerce. Commerce or trade seems more neutral than business, so could include cooperatives, I guess? (I bring this up since there are several apparently valid and useful Tech Briefs at Practical Action that deal with Manufacturing...). --CurtB 16:15, 2 January 2007 (PST)
Not-so-dramatic Major Categorization Suggestion
Our current categorization scheme starts at "Fundamental", and then higher categories under there, of course. But not very many of the categories seem attractive from a navigation perspective, IMHO. What I would like is for the Fundamental category to be a highly usable for navigation purposes, and then have everything else tucked in a branch labeled (not really) "Uninteresting categories".
The categories that I think are most interesting for navigation are metatopics. Area categories are less interesting to me, but are at least moderately interesting. So my proposal is that Fundamental have only navigationally interesting categories, plus 1 catch-all for all other categories. Actually, I think this has been an implicit goal for others as well, and perhaps I'm just articulating something that's "out there."
As mentioned, interesting categories are, for me, the 9 metatopics, the 6 (or whatever) areas, plus one other high level category that holds everything else. Maybe that's "Appropedia management" or something. Alternatively, (and I'm just as happy with this option) would be 9 metatopic categories, one Area category (with all the areas underneath it), and one Management (or whatever) category for everything else.
I'll invest a bit more energy on this, but I wanted to get off my duff and at least articulate this much. --CurtB 09:58, 9 January 2007 (PST)