Forum:"Category-like" articles

I have noticed several "category-like" articles, which is articles that only list things that are otherwise in a Category, maybe organizing them a little. I think this articles are hard to mantain, and are redundant with the definition of a Category. We should be better improving the category (with subcategories or other ways to add attributes), rather than mantaining this articles. Some examples:

• Organizations / Category:Organisations (for example, making a subcategory for each game would achieve the same grouping effect the article has)
• Bestiary / Category:Creatures (the article is arguably nice, but looong, hard to mantain, and it is re-doing something the category already does automatically. Again, subcategories or something similar could be used to group articles)
• Ultima Books / Category:Books (adding subcategories for strategy guides, novels and manga is easier)

I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones I can remember for now. Any opinions?--Sega381 02:45, August 25, 2010 (UTC)

Organizations and Bestiary are intentionally made this way, since it otherwise would either look ugly, disorganised or create a mess of sub-categories. I actually at first did toy with using the category, but then decided that it would be too much of a hassle.--Tribun 02:54, August 25, 2010 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with Sega381; I understand what the Bestiary page is trying to do (and I've ironically been trying to make it somewhat prettier lately!), but it does seem like the category/subcategory route would handle it better. I don't see what would be so confusing about monsters with multiple categories... it should be easy for visitors to be able to say, "now, what was the name of that monster in Martian Dreams...?" and look it up. In fact, I would even vote to re-name the "Category:Creatures" category as "Category:Bestiary" instead. It sounds less "monster"-centric for a category that includes humanoid enemies. Maybe it's just me <shrug>. --Polygoncount 06:16, August 25, 2010 (UTC)

Collectables & Trinkets would be another example of this, although there isn't really an acceptable existing category right now. Dungy 23:10, August 25, 2010 (UTC)

"Collectables & Trinkets" and "Ultima Books" are the best candidates to become categories, with subcategories if needed. However, it is true that there are some limits to what can be done with categories. For example, if I want to find all the NPCs that are fighters and lived in Jhelom in Ultima V, I would have to create the category "NPC Fighters in Jhelom from Ultima V". But if I want to to a smaller search, I might need "NPC Fighters in Jhelom" and "NPC Fighters from Ultima V". This quikly leads to thousands of categories.

I think that some of the articles can easily be converted into categories and subcategories, but others cannot. Probably the best way to do that is either to do something similar to what the Template:NPC_list does with DPL (I'm not sure how it works), OR use the Semantic Wiki extension for our wiki, in which you annotate attributes for each article, and that can be used later to auto-generate lists or to perform searches.--Sega381 00:23, August 26, 2010 (UTC)

Merged Cancelled Games and Category:Unreleased Games. As we fix more of these, lets list them here. Dungy 14:40, September 19, 2010 (UTC)

I feel like we actually have two problems here. Not only "Category-like" articles but also "Article-like" categories. Categories should only have brief descriptions of the type of article that belongs in them. So, things like Category:The Companions of the Avatar, Category:The Professions and now Category:Unreleased Games (Sorry) need to be revised. This is pretty clearcut for me and the hard part is not whether these need to be cleaned up but what should be be done with the article like stuff in these categories. Perhaps simply removing the stuff there currently, perhaps by moving it off into related articles or create new articles for the information.

For "Category-like" articles the situation is a bit muddier and decisions need to be made. Do they provide useful additional information? Does the organization of the list provide improved usage over the category? And even then you have to ask yourself "Should this be removed or should it be improved?"

Looking at Organizations it is providing some information the Category isn't. But this is information that could be provided with sub-categories or with the use infoboxes and DPL. I don't see anyway this article could be improved to provide useful information if the sub-categories are added and thus I'd go for a redirect to the category.

Looking at Cancelled Games it does (or did) provide some useful information. There are cancelled games listed in there that don't have articles of their own. I see three solutions; leave it alone, create articles for the cancelled games without articles (even though they'd be really tiny articles), or create an "Other Cancelled Games" article which lists all the games that don't have articles of their own.

Bestiary gets very complicated. I admit I've avoided that page like the plague. :) Some of it is arguably useful... But some of it I don't find useful, like, "Only in Serpent Isle". I'm curious what is in Serpent Isle but not what is only in Serpent Isle. And I feel like what is in Serpent Isle would be a useful category and thus wouldn't need to be on the page. (In fact I feel like Category:Creatures needs an overall to be more like Category:NPCs with it's use of sub-categories).

Anyways things seemed to be heading in the wrong direction to me so I thought I'd better throw in my two cents. -- Fenyx4 16:25, September 19, 2010 (UTC)

Just wanted to address cancelled games first. Is it really so bad to have categories that also serve as articles? In the case of cancelled games, there seems to me no point in having one page that lists and briefly describes 5 or 6 cancelled games, and then having a category page that lists 5 or 6 cancelled games. It's the same thing twice, and really only serves to make it more difficult for someone to find the information they're looking for.

Next, I wanted to address the debate more generally. I think the biggest problem is category pages don't allow us to list additional information within the category section. Take books for instance. What I want is a page nicely laid out and formatted like Ultima Books, but also serves serves as a category page at the same time. We can't have a link in a category page that says "Ultima: The Avatar Adventures, by Rusel DeMaria and Caroline Spector (Prima Publishing, 1992)" unless we name the page that. My other major complaint is that the category section insists on listing everything alphabetically, which is GREAT for NPC lists, but can be terrible in the case of books or cancelled games, where we probably want to lay things out chronologically. I have the same complaint with other categories. Why must Ultima IX, Ultima Underworld, and Ultima Online always come between Ultima IV and Ultima V? It's not doing anyone any favors.

To summarize. I agree completely that Organizations, the way it stands now, could easily be turned to categories with no loss. All it does is organize links. It's pages like Ultima Books, where the system breaks down, and I don't think just categorization is the solution. Maintaining formatting and chronological order here is essential, or the page beccomes unusable. Dungy 17:05, September 19, 2010 (UTC)

I'll ignore the problematic categories/category-like articles in this reply (for now), just to mention that, in the Cancelled Games case, I think that creating articles for the cancelled games without articles (even though they'd be really tiny articles) is the way to go. I'm not so sure on how to handle the other cases, yet...--Sega381 19:27, September 19, 2010 (UTC)}

Ok, I've turned Collectables & Trinkets into Category:Trinkets, and Organizations to Category:Organizations and other subcats.--Sega381 16:42, 21 November 2010 (PST)