Please Stop With The Category None

Whoever is doing this, please stop. At first I thought this was a joke because of the recent revival of the various category discussions, but it's gone on way too long. This pseudo-category is contaminating the entire C2 with useless edits and a false and misleading "category."

Hey, we have useful categories in abundance around here. Look at some of the discussion about categories before you just slam a non-functional tag on a page! We use categories to make finding pages related to a particular topic easier. Categories allow the Wikizenry to group ideas related to a topic together without necessarily binding them tightly. This is why lots of pages have multiple categories assigned to them; their multiple inheritance and multiple parenthood is useful to the C2 community.

Sadly, the "none" category doesn't do any of those things. In fact, it appears to group pages together without regard to content at all! This is harming the C2 Wiki, not helping. Please, let's not do that.

Agree! CategoryNone seems pointless, and its addition clutters RecentChanges.

Also, please don't remove ImplicitTopics.

Those who anonymously talk about categories and are not even able to assign a meaningful category to their rant can not be taken seriously.

Really? Why? There's no obligation to sign anything here.

Please stop trying to impose your personal view of how you think Wiki should work. See PersonalChoiceElevatedToMoralImperative.

The only one trying to "impose their lack of understanding" is you. You are adding a needless category, purely because you think the category should be added. At the same time, you've been removing ImplicitTopics, incorrectly re-categorising some topics (e.g., CategoryOffTopic), and making a mess of RecentChanges. It's nice that you've decided to do some gnoming, but we really don't need that much zeal. It would be far more helpful, and less disruptive, if you'd add categories to pages that come up naturally in discussion.

My name is DaveVoorhis, but what does my name have to do with anything?

I'm not sure why you think I'm trolling, but I'm not. Please try to contribute here in a cooperative and collaborative fashion. This Wiki is about PeopleProjectsAndPatterns in SoftwareDevelopment. So far, you have contributed nothing to what is OnTopic. If you are unwilling to do so, please leave.

I'm not sure how that's "bad luck for me", but if you continue to be disruptive -- and if others agree that you are disruptive -- it's a trivial matter to revert any edits you make. We'd be delighted to have you participate and contribute, but if you are disruptive, we will ask you to leave.

By the way, why are you removing ImplicitTopics?

The title is perhaps a misnomer. They're not created any more, but whether they're used or not is a different matter, and at least one comment suggests that they are.

I made that page because I had been maintaining these by creating new ones and they were not being used. Think of the page as having a query at the end of the name. It is NOT a reason for deleting the old information. As there is more discussion now there is a reason for using them again to note what is going on. I have created the ones for the current months. -- JohnFletcher

As a WikiZen, I vote to allow the "none" category if it aides in categorizing topics down the road. I applaud those who attempt to improve the finding/categorizing of pages. Nobody is deleting anything or shuffling content without permission such that any harm done by adding that tag is small. There are bigger things to fret over, like book titles that don't have "book" in the title. Those irritate the living [bleep] out of me. -TopMind

I have over a number of years done quite a lot of work to develop categories here. Usually I work on a set of pages which are on a topic which has developed in a piecemeal way and there are related pages which are not linked. Links can be put in and pages added to a category. -- JohnFletcher

[Yes, the creation and maintenance of new categories has vastly improved the organization of the C2 for purposes of finding related discussions and dissertations. There are several categories I find quite very useful. I have extracted much writing from the C2 for professional papers and training material. "None" provides no useful organization or grouping of information, unfortunately. -- MartySchrader]

Categorizing of pages is a sizeable and difficult task. As of November 2014 there are greater than 16000 pages which remain uncategorized, mostly because their creators did not find it necessary to place a category on them when the page was first introduced to this wiki.

It would take several months to simply add CategoryNone to such pages, and if done in even six months, would make RecentChanges almost useless during that period. I still wonder who would find the category useful? It would be possible to make a list of such pages without the irritation of the normal change page process.

If you need such, it is an easy matter to produce it. I am not a professional programmer,(meaning I do not produce income from my programming efforts) even though I program in many languages and practice SelfDogFooding. I produced program to search for pages offline in a matter of several minutes. (less than 100)

I see as wise, neither an automated or manual solution for adding CategoryNone to pages.

An automated process for manipulating pages to add CategoryNone to the 16368 pages not yet categorized is a terrible idea. Categories should only be added with considerable thought and with the purpose that they will be UsefulUsableUsed.

There are 584 pages having the CategoryNone applied to them. Before you proceed in what I view as an unwise action to continue this, please tell me in what way will you or anyone else use this existing group of pages?

-- DonaldNoyes.20141106

ManorainjanHolzapfel, do you have any comments on DonaldNoyes' post? He makes a very good point. Do you really expect us to put up with months of RecentChanges clutter, only to wind up with a completely pointless category? What possible benefit can it give you, let alone us? Aren't there more productive, creative, useful contributions you could make here?

Furthermore, it must be an effort of utter drudgery. If the participants here agree that every uncategorised page should have 'CategoryNone' appended to it, I can trivially write a script to do so. As the author of the SharkBot, I already have mechanisms to automatically scan and edit pages. It could easily extend it to do this and it would process all the pages in one automated batch, so that disruption to RecentChanges would be minimal. However, I will only do it if it's generally agreed to be useful. If there's not general agreement that it's useful, then why do it at all?

That doesn't address Donald's post above, or mine.

{Nor have you answered the question above: please tell me in what way will you or anyone else use this existing group of pages? (the 600 or so)}

You appear to be persisting in an activity that a number of us active participants don't want, at least currently. If and when we do want it, it's a straightforward matter to automate it. Therefore, why do you continue?

At the very least, I think it would be a good idea to stop and engage in a discussion over whether continuing to add CategoryNone is worthwhile or not.

Please respond. If you do not, it would appear your intentions are disruptive rather than collaborative.

I suggest that we discuss use of CategoryNone and reach a consensus over its use, rather than risk unpleasantness. See CategoryNoneDiscussion?.

It would appear that we've come to a conclusion, if not exactly a consensus. DaveVoorhis has short-circuited the expansion of CategoryNone into every nook and cranny of the C2 by implementing a fix in the shark. That puts and end to that.

DaveVoorhis complained on my TalkPage that "It's making RecentChanges cluttered."

It's "cluttered" because it produces potentially hundreds of entries in RecentChanges every day for months, all alike, which makes it difficult to distinguish signal (i.e., contribution of content) from noise. I have offered to automate the process of adding CategoryNone, which would limit the RecentChanges activity to a few days. If the community agrees with it, isn't that a much better approach than months of manual editing? -- DaveVoorhis

Why do you think that? -- DV

If you think the community won't agree on CategoryNone being automatically applied to every non-categorised page, doesn't that suggest that the community doesn't want CategoryNone on every non-categorised page? -- DV

I think you're wrong. We're no longer as large a community as we once were, but this was never a large community. However, it has always been a close-knit community, and it still is. We are the curators of the content that spawned some of the most significant movements in recent SoftwareEngineering history: ExtremeProgramming and SoftwareDesignPatterns. It is a role we think is important, and so we take it seriously. In particular, we are careful to maintain the delicate balance between valued tradition and valuable change. I'm not sure we always get that balance right, but we do know when it goes wrong. -- DV

This site is not a left over dinosaur for you to play with and tell other people how silly they are when they comment. -- JohnFletcher

@John:

This wiki does not exist for you to do what you "like to do". Your role in it is ended. You have received a HardBan. -- DV

Hmm. It would appear that Dave has implemented a hard ban on the useless category of "none" through the shark. Oh, well. I had hoped that would not be necessary, but at least we have a means by which these unhelpful edits can be reversed with little impact. RecentChanges will still show the presence of the None drivel for a while, but the perpetrator will eventually tire of fighting a script and leave for other, less well protected, fields.

So be it.

20141123 Sunday evening. If there's a robot or shark capable of it, perhaps a reasonable compromise would be to automate the creation of a page which contains the names of all UncategorizedPages -- pages without the word Category. Gnomes et al. could then step in from there and add useful categories to pages that group together with other categorized pages. --ChrisGarrod

NovemberFourteen

CategoryWiki, CategoryWikiMaintenance

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