Feminist SF Wiki talk:Categorization/Defaults

The basic issue is how to categorize things. Categories create automatically-generated alphabetical lists of things with that category label, and they fit into a hierarchical structure.

The question we have is how to categorize very basic categories for people. As demonstrated on Wikipedia, the numbers of categories for people can grow very rapidly and become less than useful, so it's better to take a cautious approach and be circumspect about creating new people-categories.

Here, we have a very large and growing category for "Writers". Most of the writers included are SF writers, but are just tagged writers. Writers of non-SF --such as, writers of feminist theory, journalists, and so on -- show up in the writers category, too. So one question might be:

• Should we have multiple categories for all the types of writing one might do, or the most significant which might be of interest here on the FSFwiki? Such as, SF writers; Feminist theory writers; Women's history writers; Essayists; etc.
• Or, if our "default" is "SF writers", how would we mark writers who do not write SF?
• We could categorize redundantly, but that adds to the total number of categories, making them less useful on an individual page, and harder to maintain.

What would be the most useful way to use the categories? --LQ 13:25, 20 March 2007 (PDT)