User:GK/Lists vs. Categories

Comment made at Talk:List of poetry anthologies

Although it would seem like the newer Category capability of the Wikipedia should replace the large number of Lists that were already on the Wikipedia, there are three features of lists taht I think make it so that both are probably necessary. One of those features is the fact that Lists can be annotated, but Categories can not (although I hope that is one feature that does eventually get added to the Wikipedia). Unfortunately, too many lists on the Wikipedia are just lists without any other information -- no dates for the entries on a list, no reason why an entry is on the list, no explanation for the source of the information in the lists, etc.

On a List you can also categorize the data by using using new Sections, thus allowing you to have lots of organized information on a single page, where as with subcategories, you have to look at different pages to see each different subcategory. You could, for example, divide a list of Japanese poetry anthologies by Era.

The final feature is the ability to include things that are not currently in the Wikipedia, but probably should be. Then one can look at the red-colored links in a List to see what needs to be added to the Wikipedia. But this feature is highly dependant upon the quality of the List, and I've see too many lists (I'm not pointing at this list, but just lists in general) that mix the important and necessary, with the obscure and trivial. <end rant mode> [[User:GK|gK ¿?]] 05:42, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I guess that I should also mention that there are good points to using Categories as well. First is that they are easier to add to (although just like adding to a List, they do require that the person writing an article know that a particular category exists). Second is that when you look at a particular category, it only includes articles that already exist in the Wikipedia. [My list of some of the proplems that I've seen with Categories is much longer, so I will leave that until some other time.] [[User:GK|gK ¿?]] 11:07, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)