Dewey Decimal System

A proprietary system for categorizing books used in public libraries in over 135 countries.

Not in Denmark. We have our own system, which seems to be derived from the Dewey System. -- OleAndersen

This link gives the the most general one-thousand categories: http://www.library.illinois.edu/ugl/about/dewey.html Perhaps this will provide fertile ground for Wiki categorization efforts.

See also LibraryOfCongressSystem

I doubt that the Dewey system, as it exists now, would be very useful on Wiki: This site is focused on a very small portion of all human knowledge. While the ExtremeProgramming discussion bothered the DesignPatterns community here, you'd need to go much further than 3 digits in the Dewey Decimal system to find the difference between extreme programming practices (like CodeUnitTestFirst) and DesignPatterns.

Instead, see WikiCategories -- a categorizing system tuned to Wiki features. -- JeffGrigg

The point was that some words and phrases are well suited for use as categories while most are not. It is difficult to find category names that are broad enough to describe a useful cross section of knowledge without being so broad that they fail to make useful distinctions between differing bits of information. The DeweyDecimalSystem is a good source of examples of categories that are useful both for dividing information up and for finding it again later. -- PhilGoodwin

I argue in RealWorldHierarchies that it should be replaced by a list of key-words and give examples of where Dewey fails. Anyhow, for pondering, TopsWikiCategoryEncodingSystem has a rough draft of a "coded" classification suggestion for this wiki that is partly DDS-influenced.

CategoryOrganization