User:ElanHR/WikiProject:WikiLoop/WikiCategory Labels
Categories serve an important role in the Wiki community both for organization and as a ad-hoc system to store semi-structured information (similar to infoboxes).
While they are inherently flexible, there have been a number of efforts across wiki communities to label their usage when applicable.
Currently these labels are stored individual on wiki articles either in the form of templates or parent categories. Moving these labels to Wikidata provides a number of benefits including:
- Allows for editors to collaborate and share labels across languages
- Provides a safety check against bad interlanguage links based on translation (e.g. "Biography(genre)" vs. "biographical articles about people"
- Allows for Wikidata-driven category
- Helps editors interested in categories better scope and structure their queries
While reasonable people can disagree on what level of granularity is useful, the following labels are used across a number of WikiCommunities:
| Type | Description | QID | Template | Tracking Category | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Topic Category | Group articles about a particular topic (for which a main article usually exists). Child articles often involve important related articles about people, places, history, geography, etc. | Wikimedia topic category (Q59541917) | Template:Topic category (Q13413959) | *Category:Eponymous categories (Q6962850) | |
| Set Category | Group articles sharing type and potentially | Wikimedia category (Q59542487) | Template:Set category (Q24817459) | Category:Set categories (Q8732942) | |
| MetaCategory | Define properties that each subcategory must define. These should only contain categories. | Wikimedia meta category (Q30432511) | Template:Container category (Q6101956)/Template:Meta category (Q104831861) | *Category:Container categories (Q4048796) | |
| Maintenance Category | Used for maintenance of the Wikipedia project and is not part of the encyclopedia. Contains pages that are not articles, or it groups articles by status rather than subject. | Wikimedia administration category (Q15647814) | Template:Maintenance category (Q5618182) | Category:Wikipedia administration (Q2944611)? | |
| Tracking Category | Used to group articles for administrative purpose that have a strict definition. These are often populated by templates (template or module that populates category (P4329)). | Wikimedia tracking category (Q67131190) | Template:Tracking category (Q6210093) | Category:Tracking categories (Q6964088) | |
| Template Category | Used to group templates about a topic/group of entities. | Wikimedia templates category (Q23894233) | Template:Template category (Q5620257) | Category:Wikipedia template categories (Q3760) |
Topic Categories edit
As their name implies, Topic categories group articles (and sub-categories) related to a particular topic rather than by a defined set of properties. These have been described by some as a 'knuckle' in the category hierarchy and have caused headache for those who wish to explore consistency checks for category memberships. For example, we cannot say Seth Kinman was a President of the United States (Q11696) despite being a descendant of Category:Presidents of the United States (Q7130129) via Category:Abraham Lincoln (Q8218705). By recognizing and labeling Category:Abraham Lincoln (Q8218705) as a topic category we can make sense of when transitivity is valid for statements such as category contains (P4224).
In general Topic categories describe discrete things (people, books, films, etc.) or abstract concepts (History/Geography of X, Astrophysics, etc.) that do not have strict definitions for membership. This encompasses the majority of the following heuristics.
| Heuristic | Description | SPARQL | Precision* | False Positives | QuickStatements Batch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chemical Element Categories | Categories who's main article is an instance of chemical element (Q11344) | link | 100% (reviewed) | Batch #1 (120 manually reviewed items) | |
| Country Categories | Categories who's main article is an instance of country (Q6256) | link | 100% (reviewed) | Batch #1 (164 manually reviewed items) | |
| Facet Categories | Categories who's main article defines facet of (P1269) | link | 82.2% (~100% of reviewed) | Batch #1 (12360 manually reviewed items) | |
| People Categories | Categories who's main article is an instance of human (Q5) | link | ~99.25% (397 out of 400 sampled) | todo | |
| Organization Categories | Categories who's main article is an instance of organization (Q43229) (or a subclass of) |
|
todo | todo | |
| Film Categories | Categories who's main article is an instance of film (Q11424) | link | todo | Incorrectly associated with first film rather than film series | todo |
| History Categories | |||||
| Video Game Categories | Categories who's main article is an instance of video game (Q7889) (or a subclass of) | ||||
| Political Parties Categories | |||||
| Organizations Categories | |||||
| Companies Categories | |||||
| Children of 'Eponymous' Categories | |||||
| Academic Disciplines Categories | Categories who's main article is an instance of academic discipline (Q11862829) (or a subclass of) |
|
~97.45% (422 out of 433 sampled) | Batch #1 (422 manually reviewed items) | |
| Uses Topic Category Template | |||||
| Geographic Regions Categories | |||||
| Cities Categories |
- This is the precision that the queried elements are correctly labeled as Wikimedia topic category (Q59541917). This does not penalize fuzzy matches such as Category:Republic of El Salvador (Q6309785) which is not a country (Q6256) but is a Wikimedia topic category (Q59541917)
Set Categories edit
| Heuristic | Description | SPARQL | Precision* | False Positives | QuickStatements Batch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Set Category Template | Categories who use the Set Category Template on any language. | 28707 items | |||
| Positions Categories | Categories who's main article is an instance of position. | link | 0-hop: 8675 items | ||
| Occupation Categories | Categories who's main article is an instance of Occupation | link | 0-hop: 2205 items | ||
| Wikidata-coherence Categories | Categories who's who have a high instance of (P31) coherence. |