Help talk:Categories

Pseudoscience - what do we mean?

I was a little confused when trying to add categories to other pages-- how is "pseudoscience" as a category defined? Should it be more like a top-level or "meta" category? Because a lot of the other sub-categories also can be described under pseudoscience.
-- Av8rmike (talk) 20:49, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm unsure of where the limits on this are too, and it's not entirely clear from the Rogues Gallery either. I haven't included definitions on the category pages, but I think they would be valuable in the long run. If anyone would like to add some, please go ahead - I just haven't been brave enough yet :)

A quick google seems to emphasise the presentation of something unscientific as scientific. It's not the only definition, but it's useful for our purposes (and closest to what was in my mind, for whatever it's worth), so perhaps we could go with that?

You're absolutely right that there's a lot of overlap with other categories, and quite a bit of overlap between categories in general, so I was thinking maybe a Venn-diagram type approach, rather than a hierarchical one, would be easiest to implement. Then we have more flexibility, and won't run into trouble if something clearly belongs to one category, but not the parent category.
What do you think, is there a better solution I'm missing? is pseudoscience a redundant category?
--Teleuteskitty (talk) 21:59, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

I think the hierarchical layout of categories still makes sense, but that's only because that's how I know to categorize pages in MediaWiki: categories can contain pages and other categories, and so on. "Pseudoscience" can encompass everything in Alternative Medicine, Paranormal and New Age (as a parent category) and still contain its own pages for other things. Can you think of an example for something that belongs to a category but wouldn't be considered pseudoscience? Or, we could just use pseudoscience as more of a catch-all, as it seems to be used on the Rogues Gallery, but without making it a top-level category.

The other thing I'm mulling over: what's a more descriptive term for the last 5 categories than just "Other".
-- Av8rmike (talk) 14:18, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm guessing you would include Alt med, Cons, Scams & Hoaxes, Conspiracy Theories, Myths & Misconceptions, Paranormal and Prophecy under pseudoscience, is that correct? I guess it comes down to the definition of pseudoscience again, too. Examples of sticky areas where individual subjects may or may not be presented as scientific could be faith-healing, paranormal encounters (e.g. without measurements) and superstitions. Whilst I understand that parent categories can contain pages that are independent of their sub-categories, I think the problem would be with pages in sub-categories that don't necessarily fall under the parent of the sub-category. So, personally, I prefer using pseudoscience as a catch-all without sub-categories. Would you be happy with this?

I now notice I haven't actually updated this page well, I created an 'Other' category basically for topics we haven't thought of yet, so we can create them later if enough turn up. However, I didn't include it here, and didn't mean for the last 5 categories on this page to be included in that, it's just unimaginativeness on my part when writing this up (I'll update it now). The layout in the Browse Categories draft probably makes more sense. Please suggest better grouping names if you can, I ran dry. :)
--Teleuteskitty (talk) 18:30, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I think I agree with you about the pseudoscience thing. We can easily cast the net so wide that it covers everything, so it probably makes more sense to have it as a catch-all category.

I like what you have on the Browse Categories page; I didn't even think to look for that! Hmm, other groupings: Interviews and Guest Rogues under "People"? Live Recordings and Year in Review under "Episode Types" instead of Episode Categories? That's the best I got. =)
-- Av8rmike (talk) 19:06, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

New category ideas

I don't know if you're still monitoring this page, but last time I was categorizing pages, I thought of two more potential categories. One is History, for topics like Huygens in Episode 361's SoF, but not necessarily for "This Day in Skepticism", which is a regular segment. The other is for when the panel talks about the show itself, such as SGU Full Circle in Episode 360 or in any of the anniversary shows. It could go under Entertainment or Other, but I thought maybe it deserved its own category. I just can't think of what to call it. "Meta"? "The Show"?
-- Av8rmike (talk) 13:45, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I like those. Cos they do talk about historical discoveries and figures etc. I don't know whether to exclude all 'This Day...' segments tho, cos some are pretty informative. Perhaps we could leave out the page categorisation, but when they address something notable in depth we could include a categorised redirect. What do you think?

I thought 'meta' too when I started reading your 2nd suggestion, but that's probably just due to my love of 'Community', and tho I like it, it may not be explanatory enough, how about just 'SGU'? We can swap the 'Year Review' category out for it, as that would only have 7 entries (so far) anyway. Plus, you're probably right that it should be a sub-category of Entertainment, which will probably be a lesser use category anyway.

I also think it would be good to include a brief intro on each of the category pages, just a sentence or two before the layout explanation. I don't know if you're up for helping with that? They'll probably get updated as the categories grow, but I'm not sure I have the copywriting skills for starting them.  : /
--Teleuteskitty (talk) 18:36, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

The segment redirects for "This Day" sound good to me, but as always, it's a bit of a judgement call as to which discussions are "in depth" enough and which aren't.

I wasn't intending to replace "Year in Review", but as we're not yet using that category, it's not such a big deal. Once we get a few of the year-end episodes done, we can see how needed that category might be. I was intending to write up some category descriptions at some point anyway. I wouldn't exactly call myself a "copy writer", though. =)

Oh, I guess I could have checked out the Rogues Gallery before I mentioned it-- There's a category there called "SGU" for the podcast, so it makes sense for us to use that name as well.
-- Av8rmike (talk) 19:47, 29 June 2012 (UTC)