User blog:Renaboss/Excessive Categorization

Hey, everyone, I felt the need to create this blog post as a means to help prevent the excessive categorization of pages on this wiki, a problem that has been debated a multitude of times and that is still on-going.

I hope everyone who is an active member of our community will take their time to read what is written below.

The thing is, there are too many tags, especially for the characters, tags that are often redundant and/or unnecessary. Therefore, we are trying to get rid of all the categories that are deemed excessive, for example, "Females" and "Males" (these ones of course aren't helpful at all because half of all characters goes under one and the other half goes under another one. Tags are supposed to help limit the search for a specific group of characters we show interest in looking up. There is not much interest in dividing up the cast of characters according to their gender, what we wind up with are category lists filled with hundreds of names. That doesn't narrow down our search at all. The 'redundance' argument accompanies, for example, the tags related to characters' marital statuses. The descriptions often imply that the tags apply to the character in general, and not their latest status. For example, incarcerated characters are those who have, at some point, been to jail or committed to some facility. It doesn't denote that the characters listed were last seen incarcerated, just that they were at some point in life. Well, applying that logic to the marital status of the characters, we get, for example, Bree, who has been single, married, divorced and widowed on the show. So she gets four different tags. Right now, we are only going with widowed, dismissing the other three. It is of somewhat higher interest to know what characters had spouses die, such as Paul and Dave.

It is, however, a work in progress, because a lot of tags need to be deleted from a lot of pages, and the wiki already has more than one thousand pages in it, most of them for characters. Therefore, the tags are being progressively removed from the pages as time goes by. Currently, I am the only person in charge of removing such tags, which is something that came up because I know which ones need to go, and to put other people in charge of such task could jeopardize the whole system, in the sense that some tags that need to go would probably be left intact, and some that should stay might get deleted.

In an interest of preservation of the wiki, everyone who adds a tag that is suggested for deletion will be warned. I realize this sounds forceful, don't worry, it doesn't constitute motive for alarm, we'll just tell people not to do it again and, of course, undo the edits. I will try to make it so that every category tag that is to be removed gets some sort of template that tells you that. Therefore, please DO NOT add tags to pages without reading their descriptions first.

Thank you for the attention. Sorry for the length of the speech. :P Best wishes.