Thanks for making the opportunity to make public comments.
Source Guides have been an unofficial project for over five years now. Many projects now use Source Guides originally created by our unofficial project.
All Source Guides were formerly linked at the top of Category: Source. They've been removed. I would like to request the links to Source Guides be restored. If we can't use the Category, then a top level way to access Source Guides is needed.
Categorization beyond the Source level has made it harder to find these guides, burying them in a subcategory.
Source Guides exist to make it easy for a researcher to find genealogical sources on their surname, in a project, or in a geographic region.
Source Guides organize sources and provide crucial context to the use of sources.
No sources are not also on a Guide.
Additional levels of categorization below Category: Source do not help a researcher to find genealogical sources.
The proposed source by name and source by location categories will make it less easy to find sources.
A source category by location will take the user to a multipage set of bulleted titles, with alphabetization the only context. There is no benefit to the user to navigate a category structure for sources.
Originally Source Guides were just a list of sources. Over time, we added context to the guides, organizing sources by County. Now, mature Source Guides highlight primary sources separately from other published works. They also typically includes links to content that doesn't have a space page. More than a list, the organization of sources helps the user to create a research strategy. Jumping to a source page, they can quickly scan all sources available in context.
Some guides are more developed than others. A mature source guide will sort sources not just by title, but by type of source.
Take a look at the New York Source Guide
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Sources-New_York and let me know how a category structure will make it easier to find sources than what's set up here.
The guide links to databases like NY State Newspapers, which doesn't have a space page. If it had a space page, it would be under N, and not show up on the first page of results. NY State Newspapers is arguably one of the *first* sources you would want to check if you were researching Ny State. Burying it in a category is not going to make it easy to find.
There is no equivalent, consistently updated set of source guides on the internet besides what we've done on WikiTree. I think we can all agree, as amateur genealogists, that finding and quickly retrieving known sources is nothing but a good thing. Putting this effort into a wiki ensures longevity and depth. Before I developed the guide I use most often, I had an elaborate set of bookmarks on my computer and often "forgot" a source. I never use bookmarks now, everything I need to research a New Jerseyan is on the Source Guide. I use the Source Guide at work, and it's been shared in webinars and to genealogical societies. I get about an email a month from non-Wikitreers for a lookup in an item unavailable except in print.
I would love to see additional development of Source Guides. Whatever you end up doing with categories, please center the Source Guides over the categories.