WikiPOBia talk:Community Portal
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TOC Project
What exactly are you planning with a table of contents project? --LadyShelley 00:59, 2 July 2008 (BST)
Speaking of Being Perplexed
After reading the first few titles of the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian, I went in search of a WIKI that almost certainly must exist for it and found this one. The first thing that I usually consult in a new-found WIKI is its Statistics Page. That of this WIKI reports an incredible disproportion of total pages (over 6,500) to content pages (just 250)—a rate of less than 4% actual content to total pages. (The English Wikipedia has a 17% rate with over 2.5 million articles, and the Lord of the Rings WIKI—a smallish WIKI with just over 3,000 content pages—boasts a 40% rate.) After probing around a little, I realized that there may be a problem with the WIKI's namespace array. In order for pages in a WIKI to count toward content, the namespaces in which they reside must be included in the MediaWiki canonical namespaces and content namespaces arrays. Perhaps someone needs to make additions to the $wgContentNamespaces variable in the LocalSettings.php script. (This variable can be added if missing.) What suggests this to be a problem is 1) the low content page count, and 2) the absence of many pages from the All Articles list. None of the Lexicon pages, for example, appear in this list, and these I understand to be in a separate namespace.
I also find that there is a bewildering number and complexity of categories here. There are almost 2,000 categories in this WIKI. I wonder whether the actual number of content pages is in a desirable ratio to the number of categories. The previously mentioned Lord of the Rings WIKI has 360 categories for its 3,000 content pages. For the same ratio to exist in this WIKI, there would have to be about 16,500 content pages. Now, I do not hold up LOTR WIKI as a particular standard—although not an active contributor, I do regard it as a particularly well organized WIKI—but it does seem to me that there is an extraordinary use of categories here. I notice that there is an odd multiplying of categories with many pages appearing in multiple category trees. This is not particularly unusual, but in the words of William of Ockham, "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." Almost 1,500 of the almost 2,000 categories here are part of a multitude of Guide for the Perplexed category trees, and pages are cross-linked in these trees in a myriad of ways. One entry, Lexicon:Quackeens is a leaf in five trees in which four of these trees it is deeply nested. The English Wikipedia has an enormous number of categories, but many of them, perhaps most, do not quite satisfy the site's own guidelines for categorization and overcategorization. (Many of its categories have only one page, for example. Is the Fourth Council of the Lateran the only thing of note that happened in Italy in 1215. If so, then perhaps there should not be a 1215 in Italy category. Wouldn't it be better to roll it up under the 1215 category, from which this important event happens to be strangely missing.) Of course, that site is somewhat of a free-for-all. Wouldn't things be much easier to find here if there was a simplification of the categories? Couldn't the forest be felled and replaced with articles that arrange things together neatly?
Regards, Opus 13:46, 28 December 2008 (GMT)
