Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-995426-20160105055942

Do you ever browse categories? Category:Mutants, Category:Allies, Category:Villains, Category:Weapons, etc.?

Turtlepedia uses a category tree, where general parent categories lead to more specific subcategories, and articles are placed in lots of these articles to make them easier to browse by topic. Currently though, it is common convention on Turtlepedia to put each article not only in subcategories, but also separately in every parent category. As a result, articles like Category:Characters have hundreds of entries.

The thing is, does having large parent categories make them harder for you to browse? Or do you prefer them to contain everything the subcategories also contain? Here's my concern: While many articles are currently placed in subcategories, not every article is appropriately subcategorized yet. In most cases, this means they straggle in a parent category. So, if you browse a subcategory and don't find that article, you may still be able to find it in a parent category...among hundreds of other articles that are also in that parent category. This is a potential burden both for readers and for editors, because readers have to sift through the large categories to find topics not-yet-subcategorized, and editors have to sift through the large categories to find stragglers awaiting subcategorization.

Respectfully, User:The S and I are of two different opinions on this issue. The S prefers large parent categories, because he sometimes likes to deep-browse large parent categories and wants to see everything that their subcategories also contain in that view. As for myself, I prefer parent categories to have as few immediate entries as is practical, with articles moved to subcategories, so that the parent category can collect newer sparsely-categorized articles to await browsing and future subcategorization edits.

I proposed a compromise. This wiki comes built-in with a tool, Special:CategoryTree. It allows someone to list a category's entries&mdash;and the entries of its subcategories too, available by mouse clicks&mdash;in one view on one page. This tool was designed as a companion for Wikipedia-style wikis, where the most common convention is that parent categories have most of their articles moved to subcategories, so that the immediate entries of parent categories are mostly subcategories and unsorted articles. An added irony here is, the CategoryTree tool actually works more efficiently if the category you're trying to browse does not contain hundreds of immediate entries.

Since The S and I, again respectfully, seem to be at an impasse, he suggested we gather more opinions on this from fellow users. And I truly hope I have not made this into a TLDR. XD 