What is the purpose of categories?

Question

To provide important information and structure:

Example:  Chicago, Illinois is in Cook County, Illinois, which is in the state of Illinois, one of the states in the United States in North America a region of the world.

 

To group individuals or things that have something in common and where grouping them adds information.  A member of category Farmers would have something in common with other farmers, but would not be adding information – so Farmers is not a category that is used.

 

Examples of Categories that are used -  

Companies that existed in Cook County, Illinois. - Cook County, Illinois, Companies

 

Individuals that attended a family reunion. - Nathan Baxter and Anna Dodge Family Reunions

 

Group of individuals that worked at a particular location of a specific company. Jahncke Shipyard, Madisonville, Louisiana

 

Individuals that participated in a specific event. Signers of the United States Declaration of Independence

 

Those that were buried at a specific cemetery. Pleasant Valley Cemetery, Farmington Township, Tioga County, Pennsylvania

 

A group of profiles that one manger is working on. Smith-40964 - a personal ID

 

If you want to learn more about categorization see the Categorization Project page.

 

Questions on usng a category on a profile? Add the Categorization tag in your G2G question and include the profile ID - if possible set the privacy to open so it is easy to make changes.

 

Comments

Hi Philip, there are plenty of profiles in Category: Farmers and subcategories for Farm Workers, Flower Growers and Fruit Growers.

---

Maryann,

Unfortunately this is an example of the miss use of categories.  The categorization project members have consistently stated that the category Farmers should not be used simply because there will be millons of records in the cateory and that accomplishes nothing.

Categories are not the solution to every problem and learning when not to use them is just as important as when to use them.

Just as managers have the freedom of creating profiles with no sources they have the freedom to miss use categories - we can try to educate and inform - the purpose of this post - but it remains up to the individual manger to learn how to use categories and to use them properly.

---

Philip,

Where has the categorization project consistently stated that the category Farmers should not be used?  I read a conversation about it in the Categorisation Google Group which occurred before I joined the project, but I just searched the G2G and couldn't find anything about it.  I searched the category style guides as well, this is what I came up with:

Profession/Interest

 

This doesn't have to be limited to what a person did for a living. It could also be military service, hobbies, sports, etc.

 

These category names should be plural. For example, we use Category:Veterans, not Category:Veteran, and Category:Artists, not Category:Artist.

And:

In addition to regional/geographic categories, there are categories for professions and military service, historical events, etc. See Categories to browse the hierarchy.

Why is Farmer any different from the 200 plus other profession categories eg Merchants, Truck Drivers or Teachers?  I see little value in these top level categories, but I do think there is value in categories for Queensland Peanut Farmers or Australian School of the Air Teachers.  

I believe the issue is people not subcategorising profiles.  For example there are 4254 profiles in Category: The Dutch Cape Colony 1652-1806 which is a subcategory of Categories: Immigration | Dutch Emigrants | French Emigrants | Scandinavian Immigrants | Palatine Ancestors, so all 4254 profiles are Dutch, French, Scandinavian and Palatine Ancestor migrants, which is of course not the case.

Also some projects templates add profiles to the top level category, eg 975 profiles in Category: US Southern Colonist and 1,238 profiles in Category: RMS Empress of Ireland in many cases for the last project these profiles have already been added to the type of passenger subcategory so they are in both.

---

Maryann,

The discussion was between members of the categorization group.

 

Yes it is technically possible to add enough sub categories - so now you would have all farmers that lived in some small geographic area.  Of course you already have the fact that they lived in the area if you have used categories for the residence and as perhaps 90 percent of the male population were farmers they are all listed there as well.  What have you gained?  What additional and valuable information was added by using the category?

 

If you still think that is useful, perhaps you should add farmer's wife - an incredibly difficult and important job but still not a good category.

 

The question is not if it can be done but should it be done.  Certainly it can be done, that does not make it the best way to do it.

 

Unfortunately there are many more examples with lots of discussion that use poorly thought out categories.

 

Answer 1

This is a wonderful combination description/illustration of what categorization is all about.  Is there a help page that has all this written out just this way?  If not, how about just putting the entire question onto a help page about categorization?  I remember - just a few short months ago - scratching my head trying to figure out what categories are about and why we would need them ... now I can't imagine doing without them.

Thank you for this post, Phillip!

Comments

Gaile,

I am working on a reorganization of the Categorization Project page so that there are plenty of examples and links to more examples.  Hopefully that will make using that first category a little easier - that first step is by far the most difficult.

Answer 2

Categories make an instant index of ancestors from a particular place or with a particular job or any other important grouping. I love categories, use them constantly and I know wikitree would be a lessvaluable resource without them.

YAY CATEGORIES!!!!

Sharon Troy Centanne

Comments

Wikitree, like other genealogy sites, has enough problems built in, what with name mispellings, aristocratic titles of all sorts, lack of birth or death dates of any kind, and the like.

Putting someone in a category gives the person who visits Wikitree another link in their attempt to find a particular person. Putting someone in multiple categories gives the visitor MULTIPLE links to the person, any one of which might give them the connection they are looking for.

As I read some of these posts, I feel like I've been putting way too much time into adding categories to profiles. But, then again, I verfied which country the person came from, which region within the country was home, which town they were born or died in, maybe which cemetery they are buried in and, if it's a foreign country, I probably also have the same categories with names in the foreign language, as well.

Personally, I can't ask for anything better than a variety of ways to compare and contrast profiles to find the one I need. I have more problems with profiles with little or no information in them, other than a name, which may or may not be correctly spelled.

I'm also more concerned with duplicate categories, justifiably or not (example - Category:Bavaria, Category:Bayern, Category:Bavaria, Germany, Category:Bayern, Deutschland), not to mention higher level categories like Category:Germany and Category:Deutschland.

As I move around Wikitree, I see far more profiles with NO categories than I see with TOO MANY categories. I haven't added a profile to Wikitree in weeks, but I have plenty to do "tweaking" the ones I have, and categories is just one tweak I can make.

Answer 3

Why has our Dutch Cape Colony (1652-1806) project suddenly been degraded to a (sub?)-category of immigration while the context should be history - WikiTree is not (only) about immigration ... ?

Comments

I don't see any degrading going on. I see cross referencing.

How I would find this helpful is that if I was looking at the Dutch Emigrants category, I'd find the link to the Dutch Cape Colony category, informing me of one major destination point of Dutch emigrants.

The point of category structure/hierarchy is, if I understand it correctly, to offer different helps for finding groupings of profiles that someone might be interested in. Some of us might look for that connection through the lens of history. Some -- especially those studying the emigration patterns of our ancestors-- might be more likely to be looking through the frame of immigration. The way DCC is now categorized, it can be found through both frames.

---

Philip,

I do not know the hierarchy for Dutch Cape Colony (1652-1806).  I suggest that you make up a diagram.  I am suggesting that you do it because I suspect that you have the most knowledge about the category.

The diagram should look something like the one done on this post: Do you know how the category hierarchy for towns and cemeteries is set up?

I think that having the diagram is the only way to be certain that profiles are properly categorized.  Without the diagram I do not think it is possible to know which category is low.

I would hope to see diagrams for all project and all countries.  If that develops they will be cross referenced from the categorization project.

---

The Dutch Cape Colony was a Dutch colony that served the Dutch East India Company but which had employees from all over Europe and traded all the way from Brazil to Japan and Indo-China, importing many goods and also many people from different islands and other african regions as slaves who then inter-married and created a mixed legacy of dna and culture. I saddens me to see my culture reduced to ''as from the Netherlands''. I have Dutch, Swiss, French, Danish, Swedish, Khoi, Indian (Sri Lanka), Polish, and Frisian blood in me, as have most South Africans. This is from the first 50 years alone. The English, Irish and Scot blood came after 1900. It was '''not''' the ''one major point'' of destination of Dutch emigrants; it was the one '''major meltpot''' of '''European''' adventurers, refugees, and those who were unfortunate to have to serve as slaves from all over the East and Africa itself.

---

Thanks Philip, I'll have a go. History > Africa > Dutch Cape Colony. That's it. Nothing else needed. See the facebook page The First Fifty Years to get an idea of the richness of this history that will not be encapsulated in categories.

---

I saw other ____ Emigrants mentioned on the category page, besides Dutch.  

By limiting the Dutch Cape Colony only to a history "branch" you may completely miss people who are researching their ancestors through an immigration branch.

Why would you want to exclude that?

---

Jillaine,

I think your origional comment about cross referencing is what matters here.  I don't think we are suggesting that the cross referencing should be removed.

All the hierarchy does is to determne the low level category.  That is needed to determine which one should be used on the profile.

There may  be other hierarchies (probably are) that also have a low level category that can be applied.

For example - hypothietical - We might have a hierarchy for German Emmigration where the  low category is the Dutch Cape Colony.

Unfortunatley we have no tools available to look at category structure so we are foreced to diagram them manually.  Most of us can not keep multiple hierarchies straight in our heads at one time (or at least I can't)  so we must diagram them.

---

As a librarian and information specialist with some knowledge of archiving, I do get the importance of cataloguing and categorization. However, I saw http://www.wikitree.com/g2g/146633/you-know-how-category-hierarchy-for-towns-and-cemeteries-set and it may be important somewhere in the bigger picture for WikITree, but for me it is totally over the top, way to complex to even want to comprehend.

I have never used categorization to find my ancestors, quite the opposite, and I do absolutely not believe that most people will search that way. Tagging yes (surnames, subjects), and these need categorization. Not overly, there is no need to over-indulge in a Victoriansque fashion by trying to index everything and everyone in this world. I grew up in a society where one was categorized by the color of one's skin. Through WikiTree I discoverd that not only was I not 'white' or merely 'Dutch', but have at least 3 slave grandmothers many generations ago from Batavia and what is now India, and as already said blood from all over Europe. The only reason that I'm whiter than my father is because my maternal grandfather was a second generation Baker from Cornwall or Sussex in England.

There are thousands of profiles in this project and they hava one thing in common - they reppresent people who were there in the Cape either as settlers, indigenes, or descendants (2nd, 3rd, 4th generations for example) of settlers from different nationalities from all over Europe and from all over Africa and the Far East and they were in service of or had to deal with the Dutch East India Company, the first multinational company in the world. 

 

The Dutch Cape Colony is not about immigration, though it is an important factor as is the Dutch factor because it was a multi-national Dutch concern which as a governement could run territories, issue money, make laws, buccanneer and pirateer - WikiTree is not about immigration; the 4 subcategories are artificial classifications of immigrants from nation states that had only come into being after the Napoleonic Wars. See my G2G post of last year: http://www.wikitree.com/g2g/82071/frivolous-categories

I still have to fill out the main project page more with detailed info, but try reading Netherlands Seventeen Provinces. See the profile of Jan van Riebeeck (and there is a lot of contextual info missing and I still have to do his successor's). Also see: WikiPedia What I would like is the main category to be history (not immigration). We can then drop the rest.

 

---

Steven Mix has given me this advice:

You are missing a top-level category for your project

 

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:The_Dutch_Cape_Colony_1652-1806

 

You need a higher level category, for your categories, free-space pages, your templates, and your project members, etc.

 

the top-level category should also end in the word "Project"

 

And the top-level category should be categorized to Category:Projects.

 

The Dutch Cape name is a bit unwieldy, and you currently have two versions of the project name,

 

The Dutch Cape Colony 1652-1806

Cape_of_Good_Hope_-_Kaap_de_Goede_Hoop_(1652-1806)

 

I would not want to put "Project" on the end of either one of those for a top-level category name.

 

I would prefer to use the first name, but without the "The" at the beginning.

 

So I would vote for [[Category:Dutch Cape Colony 1652-1806 Project]]

 

If you are a bit confused by what I mean about a top-level category, see

 

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:New_Netherland_Settlers_Project

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:European_Aristocrats_Project

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Dutch_Roots_Project

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Mayflower_Project

 

The way he explains it, it makes sense, so let's go with his solution ...

 

Thanks Steven!

---

Philip,

Choosing to use categories is a choice.  Some want to use them, so do not.  That is fine.

Those that want to use categories find them interesting, fun, and worth the time.  I like being able to look at a town category and see several hundred names that I have learned are all closely related.  I find it interesting to see many of the same family names at a cemetery.  To use categories like any index requires a structure.

As a librarian I am sure you indexed books by author and subject and possibly by a whole host of other things.  Adding an index to something does not degrade it or remove or lessen its value - instead it does exactly the opposite.  You may never use the new index, but someone else may and then they will discover all the great material in a category they did not even know was there.  Isn't that what we all want ?- to share what we have found and written.

---

Hi Philip, I had a few Angst filled days mulling about this and other technical trending WikTree topics, fearing a bogged down WikiTree workflow proces and experiencing once more the draining effect of having to validate decisions taken nearly a year ago whilst at the same time trying to be open to improvements and new ideas, explaining context where it is near impossible to explain it because context also has an experiental element contained in it's very nature (case in point the at times Babylonian confusion and yet crucial discussions in the WikiTree G2G treehouse). Your reply to Maryann tells me that we are on the same page.

I too find categories useful, not only that - I'm a born analyzer and nitpicker. My point was exactly that there is a limit to sub-categories that one should strive for, else one's (my) time will be filled with categorizing every single fact in a profile (i.e. nationality, place of birth, residence, district, period, province, place of death, cemetry etc.). There is a time and place for everything, and I recognize the fact that deciding on a organizing principle a priori is much better than after the fact, when one then has to re-organize and re-catalogue and in fact destroy value (time / money / energy) in doing so ... - But in continually de-constructing a subject (however valuable an excercise this might be) to death - this to me is the frivilous part. I'm dead serious about the need for good categories and well ordened libraries and content, and with time I believe that WikiTree will self-learn and self-teach more and better and more effectively and efficiently. This is to me tantamount - spending my hours and my time doing the research, merging, editing etc. in an effectively and satisfying fashion.