Category talk:Volcanology

Volcanism subcat of Volcanology?

In my opinion, the science itself should be the dominant category, not the object of the science.Reykholt (talk) 22:04, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Right now, Category:Volcanology is a subcat of Category:Volcanism (with child cats having the same relationship). Should it not be the other way around? Volcanism is an object of study of Volcanology, so it should be the subcat (per Reykholt comment above).

Pinging @Joshbaumgartner who has been organizing child cats. — hike395 (talk) 16:02, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

@Reykolt and Hike395: This is a very good question, and it has been asked about a few science categories in the past, never with any real resolution that I've seen. It does seem though that the various ideas pretty much boil down to a few primary approaches:

1. The science-centric approach: This is the approach I think you are proposing above, where sciences are at the top of the hierarchy and what is studied is organized under the science. Since practically every topic on Commons has a science that involves the study of it, this ultimately leads to science being at the top of the tree with all of Commons essentially organized in order as the sciences.
2. The topic-centric approach: Here, the idea is that topics exist, and the study of those topics is just like the history of the topic or any other facet of the topic and should be categorized under the topic.
3. The flexible approach: This approach is to take each topic-science relationship and evaluate it based on the nature of the specific relationship, instead of rigidly following a science-topic or topic-science rule. In cases where the topic exists regardless or whether there was a science for it or not, and the science essentially only exists because the topic pre-exists (i.e., the topic is an input for the science), the science is done as a sub of the topic. In cases where the topic is the result of the science (i.e. the topic is an output of the science), the topic is a sub of the science.
4. The break-the-rules approach: Or the are loops really that bad? approach, in which you could employ both topic under science and science under topic together. This completely breaks the Hierarchic Principle  but maybe an exemption to or revisiting of that principle is warranted. This has myriad technical consequences that would need to be solved.

The de facto result of no real settling on one of these has meant that #3 is kind of the way things end up going as often as not, though of course many categories have been set up under the #1 or #2 approaches. #4 would be one I definitely would not agree with without a very good demonstration of how we would deal with the several problems that would cause for the categorization system in general. I have more or less gone with #3, but generally, I just try and work with however a particular topic-science pair is arranged unless it is particularly egregious for some reason.

It isn't really appropriate to set the course for the whole of Commons here with this one category discussion...it would take a CfD with strong participation to pick one of those approaches to apply universally. Thus we have what we have which is a bit of a each-topic-for-itself kind of situation.

For this category, I am fine with Volcanism being the parent; after all it exists at a much larger scale than our study of it, Volcanology. Thus I agree with Volcanology being organized as a facet of Volcanism. Essentially, Volcanism exists whether Volcanology ever existed or not, but Volcanology cannot exist with Volcanism, and it is from Volcanism that Volcanology arose, thus Volcanism seems the natural parent here. Josh (talk) 18:21, 9 December 2023 (UTC)