User talk:Anoted

Archive page
Fixed. Should work normally from here on out. Just make sure that you actually select something to archive in future. You appear not to have done so in the creation of your first archive, which had a knock-on effect for later attempts at archive creation. But /Archive 2 created normally after manual population of /Archive 1. 03:16: Sun 28 Apr 2013
 * Well, my goal is just to make the feature work for you. I leave it up to you to decide what bits you want to keep where.  As your correspondent, though, I don't really need the previous conversation on this page to keep up.  I can just summon a diff if I really want to read previous posts.  Or I can hop over to /Archive 2.


 * I did see the diff of your first attempt at the archive and, well, it just didn't take. You could have hit a very temporary internet outage that screwed ya.  The Wikia network could have temporarily gone down, so maybe we weren't able, in that moment, to establish contact with the remote wiki providing the archiving javascript.  It's hard to say.  What's pretty clear, though, is that diffs on /Archive 1 establish you only successfully brought over enough characters to establish the  note, which is typically read as an "error" by later attempts to create new archive pages. The important bit, I'd say, is that /Archive 2 created without a hitch after /Archive 1 was fixed, so you look good to go for the future.


 * If it helps, this kind of error is rare, and has only happened to one other user in the entire time the archiving script has been active. I really don't expect it to affect you again.   04:46: Sun 28 Apr 2013

Food cats
I'm very troubled by your statement at #8. Of course we wait around for the DWU to define things for us. That's the point of the wiki. We absolutely do not go forward with real world classification unless there's absolutely no other choice. I think there's plenty of choice with food stuff. Consequently, I'm not bothered at all by anything you've said in #7. They don't have botanical classification because their culinary classification is much easier to establish within DWU sources. No biggie.

I think your comments at #4 are where your whole theory of separation (which you still haven't explained, really) falls apart. Fine Jellied eels are one culinary use of eels, so in that case maybe you can think of eel as the animal and jellied eel as the food. But fish? Nah. Fish is the zoological and culinary. So is shellfish. If i'm understanding your separation theory, it falls down at the water's edge. It also falls down with lasagna. Lasagna is both the type of pasta and the meal. I've got a package of lasagna in my pantry right now. The label says lasagna. The noodles are lasagna. It's a word with dual meanings. I mean, if we wanted to be really pernickety, I guess we could go lasagna noodles and baked lasagna, or something' like that. But why? It's easier to have one article defining the two meanings, especially if that's what DWU texts tell us to do. And I'm really not understanding your Fruit thing. Is there a culinary word for fruit that's different? If not, you're going to end up with category:fruit under both botany and food. So how is that "separation"?

Overall, that's one of the big flaws in your proposal. You've made a special emphasis of your desire for "total separation", but you've provided little evidence that it's possible. You also originally said you were going to simplify and reduce the number of categories, but you're proposing a ton of new ones. (I don't oppose the notion of creating new categories — it's necessary — but I don't understand where the simplification claim fits in.)

But the biggest thing that's still worrying me is that you seem so cavalier about whether valid sources allow for category names. And you seem to have a misapprehension about the text that should be on a category page. You refer to them as "category articles" and that scares me. They're not articles. They're merely descriptions. They're only there to help editors find their way. They're not supposed to be elaborate affairs. Think of them as signposts only. And the thing is, most users don't read 'em anyway. I mean, it's important that they're there, but the far more important thing is clarity in the category name. That's what gets used. That's what 13-year-old kids using the site find through the category module. One of my category failures that I've not yet corrected is that I started using proper taxonomic names for some of the zoology categories, and it led to confusion. Category names need to be simple, direct, and as unambiguous as possible. Because of oddities like tomatoes, I really think the way forward is just to create category:fruits and vegetables from the real world. Combine the two; don't split them apart. It's just easier than fighting the "is it a fruit or a vegetable? battle". I'm with David Mitchell on this one: botanists' turf battles to justify their grant funding mean nothing to me. As I've said before, this isn't Wikipedia. This is a wiki about Doctor Who, where exact categorisation ins't as important.

Finally a technical note. Could you do the grunt work? Maybe. But it's gonna be faster for us to just keep talking about this for a while and then for me integrate what you're saying into a plan and knock it out in an hour or so. Then you can finish off with writing category descriptions and suggesting follow-up actions. I may have said no about a lot of your proposals, but I do basically agree with you that this area of the tree needs a bit of a spring cleaning, as it's grown considerably since the category structure was first laid down. 04:33: Sun 28 Apr 2013

I know I've gone out of order, with your points, so let me just quickly give a yay or nay to your stuff by point number:
 * 1) I assume you're talking about T:CAT NOT here. If not, please provide link where you encountered vague language.  I really don't see it as vague, but I'll try to give it another pass soon.
 * 2) Answered above
 * 3) Answered above
 * 4) When you roast a whole pig it's called a pig, not pork. And I'm sure there is a DWU story that has roast pig in it.  So even pig is another thing that flummoxes your separation theory.  Also, I think a "foods by meal" approach is a non-starter, as it's far too subjective. Way too many cultures and times in the DWU to definitively call anything a food for a specific meal.  Where you gonna put bacon or spam or eggs, just for a start?  Those are "every meal of the day" foods.
 * 5) Answered above
 * 6) Addressed above (should just be category:fruits and vegetables for simplicity
 * 7) Answered above
 * 8) Answered above
 * 9) Hmmm, I think that by adding categories that have no real DWU support, we'd be adding meaning to an article, too. If we only add the culinary cat then what we're saying is that in the DWU, only the culinary meaning is known. We can only add the botanical cat if we know that meaning is given in a DWU story. (Except when there's no other possible category it could go into.  Again, articles have to have at least one category, and if the mention of a thing is so brief that we have no in-universe identification of a category, then, yes, we can use common sense there and only there to attach to the category tree.  But that's a relatively rare case.)
 * 10) Well, strictly, fungi aren't even part of botany at all, are they? Fungi are their own kingdom, as I understand it.  The error is probably with fungi, not fruits.
 * 11) I'm not super happy here. Flowers seems a non-starter to me.  The common sense of flower is that you're just talking about the bloom.  I can't see us having articles just about the rose bloom.  I know that's not properly botanic, but I think we could just as easily go "plants and flowers" here to avoid this false distinction.  Roots, okay, fine.  But seeds?  Nah, that's a little too precious.  We'll start another border war with that.  We should just add it to existing cat, making it Category:Seeds, nuts and Legumes, maybe.  Finally, I don't think we need a new category to keep fruit trees and tree fruit separate.  I really doubt that we have a lot of instances of fruit trees specified in the DWU.  Remember, we need a specific reference to an apple tree; we can't say, "Because apples are grown on trees in the real world, apple trees must therefore exist in the DWU because there are apples in the DWU."  We need at least a picture of an apple tree to start an article called apple tree.  So I honestly think category:Trees from the real world will be able to handle the load without adding anything new.