Thread:The S/@comment-995426-20160104232418/@comment-995426-20160807233811

Ugh, this has been nasty. I'm still not in the right place to fully discuss the issue in as much comfort and in as much detail as I'd prefer to, but I have been thinking of a few important points to consider.

First of all, I understand that you're someone who likes pretty much all kinds of TMNT. That's understandable. However, in my experience, that is for the most part also rare. I'm a very selective TMNT fan. Most of my TMNT fan friends are very selective. Our love of TMNT is not unconditional, but extremely conditional on it meeting certain criteria of interest. As such, for each of us, some things interest us, and some things might as well be completely off-topic to our interests at best and completely irritating to us at worst.

So, when someone browses a wiki's category trees looking for similar relevant topics according to a theme, there will certainly be those who want to be able to narrow the criteria to certain categories&mdash;a certain TV series, a certain comic series, etc. And if they navigate into broader parent categories hoping specifically to find entries not sorted into subcategories, it is distressing to find a vastly overpopulated parent category with duplicate placements of entries already in subcategories.

I very honestly cannot understand why you prefer it this way, but for me it has all the comfort and convenience of taking drawers full of card catalogues and scattering them all over the floor. It's an enormous mess that invites the more querying minds not to sift through it, but to run screaming in the opposite direction. This is exactly why Wikipedia and most other wikis go to great lengths to minimize this practice; it's considered extremely slovenly for good reason.

The category tree is a navigational tool. It is not a toy collection or a hall of fame. When maintained efficiently, it not only best serves its most practical organizational purpose, but remains fairly easy to maintain on the editor's side. Having parent categories that duplicate hundreds of entries already in subcategories is the exact opposite of this goal.

Now, I once sought consensus on the matter, months ago. For the most part, lots of users didn't answer or didn't have opinions, and they didn't seem to use or care about the category trees much. But power users tend to care more about the tidiness of navigational resources. Trigger009 was in favor of it. Yoshimickster was open to the idea. And I believe the category tree makes itself less useful to power browsing if parent categories are a chore to sift through.

Okay, I managed to say more than I thought I could. I'm still fighting bouts of dizziness. XD Thank goodness I type 120 words per minute. But right now, at Turtlepedia, this is really one of the single most important wiki maintenance issues to me. (I've also been contemplating specific ways to improve the clear separation of licensed vs. notable unlicensed vs. user-generated TMNT works, but I'll leave that for another day.)