Category talk:Currency

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April 2018[edit]

{{Fill this category}} I've tried to avoid listing articles that are already in Category:Euro and Category:United States dollar unless there is a non-Euro or non-dollar element. Please also consider removing these articles from Category:Economy and business if they are categorised as such.

Cheers. Green Giant (talk) 02:55, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I would prefer writing the reason to do so after each bullet point. I saw the list; and the demonetisation article does belong to Economy and business. Adding a category is not in itself a sufficient reason to remove another category; especially when when they are partially disjoint.
223.237.248.42 (talk) 03:36, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Relating some general principles to this specific case. There are two different, well, classes of en.wn article categories: those that encompass the union of their subcats, and those that don't. Or, more precisely, two classes of child-parent relations between article categories, because a category may encompass all articles in some of their children, but not all articles in others of their children. The classic case is that a geocat contains all the articles in all of its descendant geocats, but might not contain all articles in non-geocat descendants. With topic cats, too, both kinds of relationships may occur. Category:Economy and business is a section category (think, sections of a newspaper); section categories are (as I recall brianmc remarking) the topic equivalent of continents in the geocat hierarchy; so it's especially likely to contain all articles in many of its children. Categories that function as unions are used in DPLs, for which there must be a reliable logical proposition that if an article belongs to the child then it belongs to the parent. So it seems to me anything belonging to Category:Currency belongs in Category:Economy and business, and anything belonging to any of the specific-currency categories belongs in Category:Currency.

I have mulled for years over whether there is a clean way to deal with the distinction between those child-parent relations that imply inclusion of all articles from the child, and those that don't; and I still haven't found one. I've managed an interesting arrangement on en.wb, which has been in place for some years, but that depends on some special technical properties of the situation on that project that do not apparently apply here. So, thus far, the way we're doing things here is still the most effective solution identified. And it can, after all, be made to work reasonably well. --Pi zero (talk) 03:44, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The reasoning for creating the category was that I could see a linking topic i.e. currencies. I don’t think there enough articles to warrant most currencies having separate categories yet but I think 21 articles and 2 subcategories makes a case for a separate category. To answer the IP question above, they are all specifically to do with a currency (mostly non-Euro or non-US-dollar) or currencies in general. I don’t think there is a need to write an individual reasoning for each one. Also, the point about removal is a suggestion to the admin, not that it has to be done compulsorily. Green Giant (talk) 03:54, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
primary aim to create that template was to minimise time an admin had to spend. It wasn’t long ago when I realised that just listing doesn’t help. There should be an explanation — because it helps on the requestor’s end that they don’t end up adding articles without proper evaluation of articles and at admin’s end that if they are in doubt, they can see the reasoning to make the call. Also, this request is more of an action than a suggestion. So if it is a non trivial issue, make a separate request.
103.254.128.130 (talk) 04:05, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, I agree there should be an explanation where necessary but almost all of these articles have the word "currency" or "coins" or the name of a currency, which is pretty self-explanatory for why it belongs in this category. I’m not sure why you understand it differently but "consider" is a suggestion not an action. Green Giant (talk) 04:13, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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let me rephrase it for you; requesting {{Fill this category}} is more like an action than a suggestion.
103.254.128.130 (talk) 04:16, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I’m not going to delve into semantics here but my point remains the same: the article names are pretty self-explanatory and don't need individual rationales, although I agree there should be explanations where necessary. Green Giant (talk) 04:41, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I am new to category maintenance, but not sure about removal from category 'business and economy', is it against the policy to keep in both? I'd think currency is a part of economy and is a subcategory in a way. Just like all Victoria, Australia articles are tagged with Australia. Gryllida (talk) 04:17, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It's the de facto practice as far as I'm aware but my preference is to avoid overcategorising articles if possible. Currency is so obviously intertwined with the economy that I don't think it is necessary to categorise most articles under both categories. Green Giant (talk) 04:41, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That reasoning about filing articles in categories is apparently based on an expectation of how categories on an article would be used, in which a human information-consumer looks at an article to see what categories it belongs to, and reasons from that about what the article is related to. But, that's not how our categories are primarily used. Instead, they're used in the other direction and with an important element of automation. The information-consumer starts with a set of parameters for articles, wanting to see the set of all articles satisfying those parameters; and when they ask, as one of those parameters, that the set should only include articles related to Economy and business, that constraint should not exclude articles related to Currency. Therefore, every article in Currency should also be in Economy and business.

As I mentioned, I've got an infrastructure set up over on en.wb that allows for both. For perspective: In that arrangement, there's a hierarchy of what, atm, are called "subjects". The main page of each book calls a template {{subjects}} that specifies a few narrowest subjects the book belongs to; usually, just one or two of them. For each subject, there is a subject category containing just those books that explicitly file themselves in that subject. But then, there is also a shadow category of all books that belong either to that subject or to any of its descendants. These shadow categories are populated automatically, taking advantage of the convenient circumstance that books are added to categories using this special template, so the complexity of adding a book to lots of shadow categories can be handled by hidden machinery. It also helps that the subject hierarchy is particularly static, rarely changing and with very limited variation. In fact, the use of the {{subjects}} template was already universal before the shadow-categories were created, so when first created they took advantage of this handy infrastructure already in place. --Pi zero (talk) 12:19, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the impression I get is that categories here are treated a little bit like the hashtags found on social media websites for example. I’m familiar with the Subject/Book category system on WB. If such a system was used here, I'm guessing it would be a distinction between Section categories (similar to Subjects) and Topic categories (similar to Books)? So for example, there might be an Economy and Business section category within which a Currency topic category would be listed as in WB? Green Giant (talk) 13:29, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Each time I've thought about such a system for en.wn, I've found two obstacles that are probably each individually prohibitive.
  • It isn't practically implementable, I think. At en.wb the {{subjects}} template calls were already in place; there is no such thing already in place here, and, moreover, we currently do pretty much all our category work using HotCat, which isn't compatible with any such indirect arrangement. Although it's possible to imagine more complicated arrangements — such as, each article has a subpage where one places topic categories for the article — all of those more complicated arranements are, well, more complicated; and more complicated is anathema for news production , where greater simplicity is always wanted. (In the future, if it becomes easy enough for us to add semi-automated assistants, that readily available semi-automation would change the implications of these various options.)
  • The category system itself would become more complicated, which is bad too. And, the moment one starts contemplating a somewhat more complicated arrangement, like this, there's a temptation to elaborate in various ways, such as distinguishing between an article that's centrally about a topic versus one that peripherally touches on a topic. Which very rapidly leads to something even more complicated, when what we need, always, is to make things even simpler.
--Pi zero (talk) 15:00, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Green Giant: I like the hashtag comparison a lot, actually; while the reasoning is different behind each system, tje effect is the same. Great way to explain it to people.
The way our system works, the correct way to exclude such articles would be, if needed for some reason, to create a DPL or somesuch that includes all business and economy articles except those in the currency cat.
@Pi zero: recently formulated it in that "if I was researching the topic of this category, would (or might) I be interested in this article?" (Grotesquely paraphrased by me)
I have used a rule of thumb that goes "if I was running a news source dedicated to every newsworthy event on this topic, could I write an article on the info in the Wikinews piece?" It is only a rule of thumb and nothing more but I hope it helps illustrate when things should have categories.
Organising categories themselves, of course, is more in line with what's appropriate for a project like Commons or Wikipedia. So deciding how to subcategorise a category works in a more familiar way.
I'll try to get this populated fairly soon after my new laptop arrives. In the meantime, I hope this makes sense and is helpful. Enwn has repeatedly found news reporting to require surprising differences between itself and more familiar WMF wikis that can be a real headscrew until one gets used to them. Not least because they aren't always easy to articulate clearly. Well, I tried my best. BRS (Talk) (Contribs) 19:04, 1 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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This cat might also be a useful test for the strategy I've been talking up for some years now, of having some whole set of categories on a common theme, most of them too small to warrant their own categories in the traditional style, and somehow providing a common splash page for the whole collection of them (in portal space, perhaps?) with means to, somehow, expand particular categories of interest within the collection. I've also wondered if this sort of structure could be made to work for time zones (which also draws in another set of concerns, to do with keeping track of as-of-when information was right and detecting discrepancies with information on other projects, such as Wikidata or even Wikipedia, when the discrepancies arise). --Pi zero (talk) 19:36, 1 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]