User blog:RRabbit42/Category cleanup

It looks like the next major project on this wiki is going to be category cleanup. I have already gone through and removed categories from pages that were only used that one time. To be useful, a category needs to be for a group of things, not just one or two. Otherwise, the categories just get cluttered with a lot of trivial entries, and unfortunately, some of these are probably being added to earn badges. We'll address that problem later.

Some of the other work I've done is to put our Templates into categories. This is in preparation for other updates that will be done, also later. We will have to go through those templates and see what needs to be changed.

I think the three biggest things that need to be changed in the categories are the year categories, the "sub-page" categories and the family categories.

For the years, we have "1994" and "1994 Episodes", which primarily cover the episodes released in Season 6, but that doesn't work because the Season 6 episode "Lemon of Troy" premiered in 1995. In addition, one of the category descriptions reads "Articles relating to episodes and other Simpson media and merchandise released in 1995", which further confuses the matter by overlapping merchandise released in a calendar year with that season. I plan on replacing those year categories with categories like "Season 6 episodes".

As a companion to that, we have some categories like "Season 22/References", "1987 Appearances" and a general-purpose "References" category. That's all going to be standardized to make it easier to find those kinds of pages. They will be something like "Season 22 references" and "Season 22 quotes".

For the family categories (and some similar categories), we have a mix of "X Family" and "X family" categories. Since categories and page names on the wiki are case sensitive, I will be changing the F in Family to lowercase. That will help distinguish it as a description rather than a proper name or proper title.

This is going to be a lot of work, but I'm willing to do it. I'm going to be doing a lot of it on my own initiative instead of getting community approval through a forum to speed things up. Just let me know what ideas you have on this, and if you think I'm going too fast or overboard, tell me so I can stop and/or make adjustments.

Keep in mind that this will be one of several improvements for the wiki that I'd like to put in place, and this is just part of the process to get there. Some of them will be announced in my Change ideas for the wiki blog.