History Of Wiki Categories

When were categories invented? Who invented them?

August 27, 1996, StanSilver.
- http://web.archive.org/web/19961129234150/c2.com/cgi/wiki?AboutCategoriesAndTopics .

How were they invented? What was the reasoning/inspiration that led to them?

The reverse index technology is WardCunningham's - he created Wiki with the capability to click on the title of a page to see which pages pointed to it. Stan then stood on his shoulders and added the concept of categories and topics. Then everyone else stood on his shoulders and ignored topics, so we ended up with just categories. See ShouldersOfGiants.

What was the early history of categories? What's this about there being two separate systems? What were topics?

Initially, there were categories and topics (WikiTopics); categories were about the kind of thing a page was (book, person, discussion, pattern, pattern language, etc), whilst topics were about the content of a page (Java, extreme programming, Smalltalk, etc). However, people didn't seem to need this separation, and so topics were collapsed into categories.

What knock-on effects did categories have on the wiki?

One thing they do is to give wiki the illusion of an being organized, which may make it harder for newcomers to see the real wiki, which is more like a recorded conversion.

Did people argue incessantly about categories from the start? :)

That requires at least two contentious people.

CategoriesDiscussion, FaqForCategories.

This page was deleted as an orphan on 2003-12-03. While it might be an orphan within the WikiWiki page graph, there are several external sites (not least of which is Meatball) linking to this interesting piece of wiki history. It is historically interesting because it credits Stan, but also because of the failure to maintain the distinction between categories and topics.

That's because the initial Categories were a static type system which nobody needed in our dynamic wiki, like distinguishing a movie by whether you saw it in a theater, from a DVD, or on television. In retrospect, it's obvious that any static type system was a dumb idea and doomed to failure.

Further, while the name Categories stuck, it was the small set of useful Categories (Book, HomePage, Author) that was collapsed into the ever expanding set of Topics.

Wikipedia uses Stan's system

Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the world, uses the category system Stan has invented at C2 and for C2; it has been in use here for many years and Wikipedia has adopted it. Why doesn't Stan have his page on Wikipedia like Ward has? His category invention certainly deserves a page, it is at the bottom of every one of their pages! In the same breath, why don't we have a look at the C2 wiki page on Wikipedia and see what we can be added?

Copied from a deleted entry on StanSilver's homepage. -- JohnFletcher