User:Rodhullandemu/How should categories be ordered?

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 This page is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Commons contributors.
It is not a Commons policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it. Please update the page as needed, or discuss it on the talk page.

Basics

This is my opinion. But it's not baseless or unsubstantiated, it's based on a lifetime's experience of presenting knowledge to people who may or may not be familiar with a universe of discourse, and 13 years working here seeing how categories are used, misused and even abused. Per Commons:Categories, the principal purpose of categories is to apply a structure to our media so that it may be more easily located, understood, and used. A major part of this structure is how categories are ordered on a page or within a category itself- the rationale is that readers want, and should be able, to see the more important data immediately and are less concerned with information less relevant to their needs.

  • It follows from this that organising categories alphabetically isn't helpful. It may be that those with OCD might find that useful, but per Pareto efficiency, they are not a major sector of our audience.

Perhaps this example, found recently, may assist:

Deprecated

- the roundabout is planted, so we categorise that

- that's the roundabout dealt with. But there's an important structure in the background, and although it may not be the best image of it we have, it may have to do until we have a better one so

- there are yew trees in the image. Almost certainly we have better, but we'll keep it for now.

- that's not to say we should apply categories for absolutely everything we see in an image- that's not categorising, that's tagging, which Commons does not do. Remember categories are definitions for an image, not a ragbag list of everything, particularly if it's not a usefully usable image in respect of that part of it. Common sense and judgement should prevail. - finally, provenance and meta-information

- I would put things like Valued image status and Quality image status here.

Caveats

Some categories are applied automatically by other processes (Wikidata, for example) and some may be hidden. Maybe we could look at that, and have some control over it. This discussion is more about manual categorisation for now.

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