Shaking up the category tree

[Michael Shiloh]

Minh Ha Duong wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Building upon Ferenc's work, I just went trough some reorganization of the 
> category tree. Notes: 
> - Trying to keep the tree only one levels deep: categories and subcategories. 
> - Trying to fit with the implicit mental model that people had in mind when 
> tagging the pages.

(I took the liberty of ^shacking^shaking^)

Not sure this is a good idea, since the existing category structure may 
  have been quite a mess at the time of tagging, forcing people to 
categorize in less than ideal ways. Also we have observed that even 
well-meaning authors don't always categorize well.

Better, I think, is to come up with a category scheme top-down, then 
visit each page and rationalize relative to our category scheme.


> 
> That implies "Intended Audience" and "Maturity Level" (words borrowed from 
> Freshmeat classification), and "Distributions" as top-level categories.
> 
> - I see "Community" more as "Social groups" than "Everything that is not 
> Openmoko Inc.". So I want to move "Openmoko Inc." there too.

Not sure I agree with this. What will A visitor to our website expect to 
see under "Community"? I don't think they're looking only for social 
groups; primarily, they are looking for community contributions, either 
to access or to contribute to.

I would expect the community category to include local groups and user 
contributed projects, instructions on how to get involved, etc..


> - I want to rename "Technical" to something like "Environment" 

Hmm. What goes in here? Isn't almost everything technical? I think this 
category is meaningless.


> - I want to rename "Hardware" to something like "Functional subsystem" 

I might go along with this, but I'd like to understand your thinking. 
What goes in here?

If people think of this as "hardware" then best to use the common name.


> - "Software" can go 

Agreed. Too big a category. Pretty much everything that isn't explicitly 
  hardware or social groups becomes software. A category that is 
"everything else" is not a valid category, IMHO. Was this your thinking?

M