Why are the town categories being removed?

+2 votes
203 views
People spent quite some time setting these up. Its really disturbing to suddenly find them gone with no explanation , It seems that me and quite a few other people are just wasting our time.
in Policy and Style by Living Belcher G2G6 (7.9k points)
retagged by Liander Lavoie

1 Answer

+12 votes
 
Best answer
The town categories are not being removed.  The towns are still there they are just not all linked to one huge category.

I'm sorry... this is one hundred percent on me.  I should have posted to G2G what was happening but I got so involved in the actual doing of it...  All I can do is apologize.  None of your work is in vain.  ALL LOCALITIES are still in place.  

The category "Towns in the United States" was getting too big to load.  It was also too big to be used effectively.  While we were making that change it was decided by the category project to also remove "Towns in (insert state).  

Let me repeat that all localities are still in the category tree.  Only two categories have been removed.  Localities that are in place are linking to the county in which they reside just as they always have done.

I feel terrible you have had concerns over this.  

gail cox
project leader for categories
by Gail Cox G2G6 Mach 3 (34.6k points)
selected by Living Thompson
Gail, I think I understood you, but could you post the resulting hierarchy now (for locations)?
Nothing has changed.  In the simplest form it is what we are all accustomed to in our daily lives:

United States

States

Counties

Localities

What was removed from the localities category pages were only two links that some of them had:  

Towns in the United States

and

Towns in (Name of State)

We really had no choice about removing the link localities to "Towns in the United States".  It was already starting to bog down the server and Dan was only about half done adding localities.  In addition it showed over 14,000 accesses which could have only been google bots hitting it again and again.  Not good.  It logs showed NO new users going to this category so it wasn't being used by visitors.

The other one "Towns in (Name of State)" was voted on by the project team and it was decided not to have it.  If it was going to be deleted it needed to be done while the other links were being removed.  Otherwise we would have twice the work.

Again, not one single locality was removed. Localities are the heart of our category system.  These were two categories that were really redundant.  We are trying to improve the category experience for the entire WikiTree community.

gail

ADDED:  When I said "bog down the server"  I meant that it was starting to load slower because of the huge amount of categories under that one category.
After reading about the category towns removal mission, I am so glad we are clearing that category bog up !

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