All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part VIII

[robkelk]

I think what I'd like to see on the creators category is:

• Every page with Category:Creator or Category:Creators in the main namespace gets {{creator}} added to the top (if it isn't already)
  
• Category:Creator should be a hidden category, or maybe just deleted, because we always have backlinks to the {{creator}} template.
  
• Everything that used to be a subcategory of Category:Creators needs to go back on that page.  We used to have one organized list and one disorganized list, and now we have only the disorganized one.
  
• Everything currently in Category:Creator needs to go on a subcategory of Category:Creators.
  

I think we can both agree that pages that have more than creator in terms of who they are is a good thing, in that particular case that would just require the "page that needs more categories" category, and I've been personally working on that.

I would strongly protest against the deletion of the creator category, or even to make it "hidden". If we were to do either what would we do in the case of Tropes and Works? Would we delete them or make them hidden too? They are important for both categorising and navigating, especially as I haven't gotten the navbox idea off the ground yet. People have and will use the Creator category to find out our pages on the Creators themselves like they would Tropes or Works.

I'm not necessarily against the idea of having a category for Creators themselves and another category that has the subcategories that Creators used to have, but there needs to be something that sorts out the seeming duplication, as normal users will likely just dump actual creators into the creators category per what they would do for tropes and works.

I have what I think is a solution to that issue, instead of "Creators" for these sub-categories, we use "Types of Creators" this sorts out both the duplication problem and the confusion problem for those who want to make pages and add categories. Whether you want Types of Creators to be in Creator or not is not something i'm particularly fussed on.

There's a design question here: how flat do we want these categories to be?

At one extreme, we can make the Creator category perfectly flat: everybody who is a creator is tagged with "Creator". At the other extreme, we can make the category completely hierarchical: we only use subcategory tags, nobody who is a creator is tagged with "Creator", and the Creator category becomes a container category for the subcategories. Neither extreme is really useful on a wiki that has as many editors as ATT does. However, I have no idea how to design the category tree... Any ideas, anyone?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012