Wiki Community/Category Pages

Category Pages are navigational aides that discuss a topic in general and have one or more lists of links to other pages that deal with specific instances of the root subject. This page has an automatic list of such pages that is created by adding ["Category Page" .] to a Category Page. Use this page to determine which categories are already covered and which might need to be created.

Recently, new category pages have been cropping up. Here are some questions to consider when creating a new category page:

• Are you changing the content of a page that exists already to become a category page?
• If so, consider why the page is the way it is. Perhaps it is that way for a good reason.
• Check to see what pages are already linking to the existing page. These links may no longer make sense after you change the content of the page. Be sure to clean up after yourself; but again, first consider whether this page might be working just fine if so many other pages already link to it.
• Is the new category page easily maintainable? Does it overlap other pages, so that many category pages will have to be changed at once?
• What purpose will the new category page serve for the wiki? Will it be a useful (or at least interesting) page that people will want to refer to?
• Does it have a distinct presence in Davis? Nearly everything can be found in Davis, but if you can't state a clear and direct Davis specific relation that is unique to the page (i.e., is not already stated elsewhere as an attribute of another topic), seriously reconsider the creation. Do not (please!) create pages without a clear connection, either planning "to come back later" or "let the community add the relevance".

2010-02-15 13:12:33   Re: unicode issue - I don't see any viewing problems with the Restaurant page right now. This is quite clearly hackish :) 7 months from now we will hopefully have something like this so we can enter "Category" with a value of "List." I'm generally of the opinion that anything short of some kind of easy-to-use "tag" interface (as discussed on that semantic wiki page) is too confusing to be worth it. —PhilipNeustrom

2010-02-15 13:38:15   If we are 7 months away then maybe this isn't worth creating at this time. I was trying to clarify an issue that another editor had and tried this.

I hope that the plans also include the ability to have derivable metadata sets. A set of fields common across all businesses (location, hours, phone), then another subclass of that for restaurants(entree cost, type), and then subclasses for sushi restaurants (eat all your rice policy, boat bar or not, wasabi fresh or powdered) under that. —JasonAller

2011-03-16 18:02:40   We are now thirteen months down the road. Should this be revisited as an interim solution at this point? —JasonAller