A good while back, now, @Flickety
posted here and in other threads about category requests being on hold, and that’s still the case (there have been a few exceptions, but I’m speaking generally). I know folks have continued requesting new ones anyway, and I understand why (old habits die hard, and the input may well still be useful in due course!). But I’ve had a number of questions about the categorization project, so it seems worth updating on the progress/state of things, to explain/remind why these posts aren’t all being acted on at this stage. Of course, I’m totally stepping on toes in posting about it when it’s not really my main domain (it’s mostly Flickety, working with @Chris-H
, who’s been doing all the heavy lifting here, so the kudos for progress goes to her!), so you two please do correct me if I’ve got anything wrong. But here’s my current understanding (and I’ll come back to update if I find out I’m wrong or outdated about any of it!):
Thanks to Flick’s amazing hard work, many areas of the tree have been revamped super thoroughly in the last few months (thank you Flick!!). A few others are still WIPs or not yet addressed. However, the task has proven to be, well, huge - much bigger than any of us anticipated at first, I think. At this stage, Flick’s been asked to hold off on going much more deeply into category restructuring for the moment (she’s focusing on some other behind the scenes wiki tasks instead). The reason for this is that, given what a huge project this turned out to be, we need to take a good, ideally data-driven look at what depth of category tree *most* helps readers find what they’re looking for. The answer isn’t necessarily as straight-forward as it seems at first.
Most sites like ours out there have dozens or maybe few hundred categories. Because of how we’ve historically approached category creation (only requiring a minimum of 5 pages per category - which did make perfect sense at the time), we have thousands and thouuuusands. Some are repeats/cross-categorizations, but our Category Tree page has over 18,000 lines in it; that’s a ton! It’s totally fab that we have all that helpful content, for sure. What we aren’t sure of, yet, is whether finding those pages all in very
niche, distinct categories is really what’s best for readers, these days.
Anecdotally, I get a lot of newbie editors asking how to find areas they’re looking for and seeming somewhat confused by the deep categories (I assume because they end up doing lots of clicking in and out of them - and maybe going down a rabbit hole when they want something broader), so if that holds true beyond the anecdotes, that’s a factor to consider. I also see a lot of editors categorizing articles in broad categories that make sense; they’re not aware of just how specific our tree can get, presumably since that’s fairly unusual on the web. From a reader perspective, there’s also the fact that readers landing on categories with only a few very pages on them isn’t a great user experience, especially if a number of them are stubs - if they land on a specific category from search or a wiki link or similar, they tend to see we have ‘nothing’ in that area and back away quickly! If we had mostly broader categories, they might browse and scroll further to find what they need. Our category redesign helped this problem a little for broad/top categories but not for the more specific ones.
Perhaps like many of you, I’m personally inclined towards neat subcategory creation… I like a neat and tidy house, as I think many wiki editors do! And of course, having only the broadest categories would be bad - that’s not anyone’s goal. But I do think signs are suggesting there’s such a thing as too many subcats, and I know folks at the Haus are keen to find out more about the “Sweet Spot” in due course. We at least need to investigate that with better data about what readers want and how they navigate, and that’s a back-burner project for now. Once we have developed more answers to the question of what kind of category depth is best for readers, we’ll know more about what to do with potential category creations - we may end up consolidating some very niche categories into broader ones, and then setting a higher number bar for the creation of any new ones (eg think 40 or 50 articles, rather than 5). I’m not saying that’ll certainly
happen, but it’s def a possibility, depending on what answers we get in due course by looking at reader preferences, best practices in web page setup/navigation, and so forth. Having those answers will still help us, like Flickety said in the original post here, ensure category tidiness in the long run - it’ll just take us a while to get the answers and get there, I reckon.
Hopefully this context helps, for those of you who are curious about the state of things here. What I don’t want is for anyone to spend a lot of time on category requests and then end up frustrated that they’re not being handled - hopefully knowing why we’re in a holding pattern helps you out. If you still want to make category suggestions to be considered one day, that’s probably fair game (as long as nobody puts any pressure on the likes of Flick, when it’s not all in her hands!). But if you’re only keen to make requests if they’ll be handled right away or in the short term, then it might be best to spend your energies on something else, instead… Fine-tuning this area is definitely the looong game; it already has been, and will continue to be, so just keep that in mind as you go
And, as always, rest assured that no pages can hide from Special:Search
, so if you’re looking for something you can’t find by browsing and are antsy about knowing everything we have on a given topic, the combination of that and our regular search bar can do wonders!
