User talk:65.11.218.81

Hi - Thanks for the great work. If you're Daína or a fan, can I ask why you are taking off the Category:Year of birth missing category? It's a maintenance category we use until we are able to include the year of birth. --LQ 20:31, 27 April 2007 (PDT)

I am the person who created and keeps this author's Web site. I know from her agent that they don't want to show the author's year of birth. That is why it does not appear in any of her books. So this is an information that probably won't be available any time soon ;-))

Okay, good to know. Maybe you can note that on the Daína talk page so we don't include it until and if it is made public. I can make a new category Category:Year of birth private. But can we at least specify 20th century births? It would help with automatic sorting when we ever get that going. --LQ 22:35, 27 April 2007 (PDT)

Well, I think your idea of creating a category for Year of Date Private will be useful in more than one case. I have noticed lately that many writers (both women and men) do not include their year of birth on their book covers. I guess we could add that she was born in the 20th century, although I think this is obvious after seeing the dates in which her books were published.

Okay, I created and added the private thing, and I'll do a 20th century births as well. ... btw, the Category:Esp tag is a language tag. Eventually everything should be tagged by the languages that it's in, including Category:Eng ... --LQ 19:35, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

creating a category

Does that Esp & En tag mean that you could have information of the same writer in English and Spanish?

We're just not sure how to handle multiple languages right now, so for now we take stuff in any language, and just try to tag it appropriately. --LQ 20:16, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

Another thing. I am trying to create a new category: Latin American SF writers. But even though I create the link at the end a page, and write a small introduction in that page, I can't find that category later among the list of Categories. Hoy can I include the new category in the list?

When you add a category to something, you just add [[Category:Latin American SF writers]]. If there is no preexisting category by that name, it will be a red link. You can think click on it, and you have to add appropriate categories to that category itself so that it will be embedded in the category tree. So for instance you would add [[Category:Writers]] to that category. ... if you're doing all that already then it might be a caching thing. ... or it might be because you are using an IP address; IP addresses have fewer rights in the mediawiki software. You can create a userid -- it actually gives you somewhat more privacy, because you can use whatever userid you choose and then people can't backtrack your location off your IP address.

There are some basic pages about FSFwiki:Categorization where we (mostly me) have started setting out some basic criteria and category structures. It's all still draft-y for now but might give you some ideas and also of course feel free to weigh in on the talk page about categories. --LQ 20:16, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

Great! It works! But now I have a question. I was thinking that if I create this Latin American SF writers category, authors from Spain will be left out from that list. Writing "Spanish American SF writers" seems too complicated. Or not? In Spanish (my native language) I would simply say: "CF hispanoamericana". If I write "Spanish American SF", do you think it will be clear this category is refering to authors?Or do you think it will be better to have 2 categories: Spanish SF AND Latin American SF? The thing is that there are not many women authors in both regions. That is why I thought it would be better to comprise all these authors who write in Spanish under the same category.

Ah, the problems with categorization. I have been increasingly frustrated with the limitations of categories, and have begun doing lists instead -- using categories just for very basic and almost universal things that will intersect later on with other features. Like every writer gets "Category:Writers". Instead, I've been making lists for all kinds of other stuff -- see, e.g., List of queer women writing SF. So, you could make one list with subheadings, and then as it grew if necessary you could split it. Or you could make multiple lists to start with. Lists give infinite flexibility, and they're actually easier to maintain that categories (you can watchlist a list and if someone adds or deletes you can find out). So you could do List of Latin American SF writers and List of Spanish-language SF writers and List of Portuguese-language SF writers. Within each list you could have an alphabetical listing and sections that list by country or language or gender. You can also include aliases and variant names for cross-reference purposes, and you can add explanatory notes for the writer who is born in Country A, raised in Country B, took citizenship in Country C, but lives as an expat in Country D, and writes in three different languages.  ! Anyway -- I started out making lots of categories but am slowly migrating them all to lists because the lists are so much better. Let me know what you think. I should probably write something up about FSFwiki:Categories, lists, infoboxes, and navigational boxes. --LQ 20:53, 28 April 2007 (PDT)