Talk:Shelving Units
Wood & Metal catergories
Shelving units are more or less always made from wood or metal, and are thus woodwork & metalwork. I'm sure more articles in said categories will turn up later on. So I dont see a reason to remove these categories.
Why the terms metal & wood instead of metalwork & woodwork? Because there is more to each subject than -work, there is also sourcing and choosing the materials, and asstsd other matters relevant to the materials that would not really come under the headings woodwork & metalwork NT 09:54, 22 April 2007 (BST)
I would be inclinded to categorise materials (wood, metal, plastics etc) separately from techniques for working. There's probably more in common between working with soft metals, hard plastics and medium-hard woods than there is between working with two different woods such as oak and balsa. So maybe we should have categories for 'wood' and 'woodwork[ing]' etc, and articles on, say, drills could be in categories woodwork[ing] metalwork[ing] etc. I think we might also be able to have a heirarchy of categories so, say, 'woods' and 'metals' could both be sub-categories of 'materials'. Wikimedia commons uses such a scheme for categorising pictures (and other media) so a picture of a penny-farthing might be in category 'antique bicycles', and that category is itself in categories 'antiques' and 'bicyles', and so on ...
What's the point of this all? Well I was looking at list of Special:Categories: it already scrolls off the bottom of my fairly hi-res screen and so I was wondering if it could be made more compact by reducing or grouping together categories. What do you think? Is it worthwhile even trying to do this?
How this relates to shelving units I don't know: since you discuss choice of woods I was probably wrong to remove that category (so I've put it back). Since the article isn't about choosing types of metal to work with in the same was as for wood I'd be inclined to leave that out but I'll leave that call to you.
--John Stumbles 13:11, 22 April 2007 (BST)
I cant think of any problem with there being many categories, if and only if the articles in the categories are relevant to their categories. I know this place is small now compared to 'pedia, but it probably will grow, and I daresay many of the now busy categories had only one entry for a while.
Categories are just one of the ways users can find information on here, and will grow, so personally I wouldn't want to remove valid cats.
You raise a fair point about plastic, metals and woods, yet we need to categorise them all somehow, and I think we need end users not to have to do work to undertand our category system, just so they can use it to find things. Hence I've been trying to stick with a simple, visible and immediately understood system.
I guess there will always be some amount of differing ideas on what categories to have, but I dont see a big problem at this earlyish time in having semi-free-range categories, and article contributors can choose to use them or not.
"What's the point of this all? Well I was looking at list of Special:Categories: it already scrolls off the bottom of my fairly hi-res screen and so I was wondering if it could be made more compact by reducing or grouping together categories. What do you think? Is it worthwhile even trying to do this?"
Personally I'd rather fill the useful categories up with links to relevant articles. In fact I can already think of another article that qualifies for the noise reduction category.
A busy categories page could be added if it is thought it would help. NT 16:41, 22 April 2007 (BST)
What about the heirarchical categories idea? Worth trying? --John Stumbles 17:36, 22 April 2007 (BST)