Wikipedia talk:Category classification templates

Should be a feature of the software

I'm not saying this is a bad idea, but I think implementing more than a few of these without software support is likely not to be a good idea. Categorization is NOT static, and these categorization links are meant to expose the current category hierarachy meaning they need to be changed if anything above them changes. Like a "come from" statement in a programming language, this results in one change ("above" in the hierarchy) requiring other non-local, unobvious changes in other places. This also means changes at higher levels of the hierarchy might end up affecting lots and lots of lower level categories. Another potential problem (not sure if this would be a real problem) is the number of "paths" to category:fundamental a given category might be able to follow. If each category is parented in exactly two categories, as we go up N levels we expand according to 2**N, but we end up at a single root so clearly the 2**N explosion breaks down at some point (I'm sure some geneticist knows the number of paths to a single root, seems like it should be 2**(N/2 + 1) or something). In any event - nice idea, but crappy to hard code. -- Rick Block 04:34, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Unstable categorization is a problem for Classification. Because of this, I have recently only been using templates to classify. If the categorization scheme changes, (especially for the foo categories), it will probably be easy to modify the templates to change an entire set of subcategories. -- Samuel Wantman 22:36, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia user classification

WP:CBTF is a table that will attempt to classify Wikipedians by place, interest, and the Wikipedia content they work on. -- CQ 19:15, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Sub-Categories

I have had difficulty is finding people classified in sub-categories and sub-sub-categories when I have been browsing wikipedia. Could it be possible to write some code, so that the sub-category lists appear in the category lists as this would be very helpful. Either that or a way of classifying people in sub-categories and categories together. e.g. [Category:Chemist [Subcategory:British Chemist] [Subcategory:Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry]]. This would make be a great help when browsing to find particular facts. - Curious Gregor - Synthesis for all 15:08, 26 March 2007 (UTC)