Thread:The S/@comment-232990-20190620183512/@comment-995426-20190621105422

One of the primary issues about overcategorization, in general, is avoiding excess cluttering of parent categories with entries that can be better placed in subcategories. In years past, Turtlepedia had a habit of routinely putting articles in every applicable subcategory and parent category, with the result that many parent characters had hundreds of entries and were far less efficient to browse by category. It is the established practice of certain large wikis like Wikipedia to keep parent categories as free as possible from entries that are better placed in subcategories. From the perspective of any librarian, it certainly does make sense to manage categories in a sense that not only makes them efficient to browse, but also efficient to maintain. At first when I brought it up with The S he was skeptical about it, so I let it go at the time. Then, one day, The S started decluttering parent categories in much the way I had suggested, and increasingly the category structure has become much easier to browse and maintain.

As an example, yes, the bo is a weapon. But many very different objects are also weapons, and they can have very little in common beyond being weapons. So sometimes it's easier to sort weapons not just by continuity or inventor, but also by basic type of weapon&mdash;whether they stab, bludgeon, shoot projectiles, etc.

Of course, if a particular category entry can be considered important and iconic enough to merit a discretionary placement higher in the category hierarchy, it might be appropriate to place it there in addition to its subcategory placements. An example is Category:Humans. They are also technically Category:Apes, Category:Primates, Category:Mammals, Category:Reptiles, Category:Amphibians, Category:Fish and Category:Vertebrates. But which of those categories seem like natural places to look for them? That would be Category:Apes because that's one of their most direct parent categories, and Category:Mammals because they are often thought of as mammals in relation to other non-mammal characters, and perhaps also because their unique status of dominance among vertebrates makes them of noteworthy mention alongside fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Humans may have evolved from fish, amphibians and reptiles in that order and technically are them, but are not as immediately associated in the reader's mind with being any of them, which makes a direct placement in those parent characters look like unnecessary clutter.

Of course, sometimes there's such a thing as too many subcategories. In the past, I went a little nuts with taxonomical classification of species, and created categories like Tetrapods, Amniotes, Squamates, Eutherians, Laurasiatherians, Supraprimates, etc. These are of interest to geeky molecular biologists, but they seem rather hypertechnical for the most useful everyday purposes of Turtlepedia categories. I later rearranged them for more direct placements in familiar categories like Mammals, Birds, etc., and kept a few particularly recognizable group categories like Category:Ungulates (most hoofed animals), Category:Carnivorans (dogs and cats and their nearer relatives), etc. While it may be an occasional obscure plot point that rats are frequently used as laboratory animals specifically because they and humans are more closely related to each other than either is to most other mammals, this is usually considered obscure trivia, and it wasn't absolutely necessary to have a Supraprimates or Euarchontoglirans category (the two terms are synonymous) just to put Category:Rodents, Category:Rabbits and hares (Lagomorphs) and Category:Primates together.