Let's write catalogs!

[Larry Sanger]

This will be fun!!!  Please read!!!

I'd like to suggest that we create a new sort of reference page, distinct from encyclopedia articles and also from mere lists of articles: for lack of a better term, "catalogs."

Two examples already in existence are "Countries of the world" and "Catalog of religions":

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_world
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Catalog_of_religions

For geographic entries, I think we could use the term "gazetteer."  See:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Geography_Workgroup/Gazetteer

(So, one suggestion that someone made was that we rename "countries of the world" as "world gazetteer.")

If I have learned one thing in my time leading encyclopedia projects, it's that people love making lists.  I don't know why :-), but they do.

Wellll...so I had an idea.  I will restrain myself from naming the idea "The Big" anything.

Let's (1) decide on some appropriate titles for "catalog" entries, and (2) link to them from the front page, and (3) start cataloging!  As to (1), I have started a list of catalogs myself, here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page

Obviously, we need commentary on this list and on the methods of cataloging, listing, tabulating, etc.  Please do that here, on this forum page.  Then I hope some enterprising soul(s) will sum up the results on [[CZ:Catalog Policy]] (it doesn't exist yet, because I don't know if the community is going to go for this--but I hope so!).

[Chris Day]

re history workgroup discussion and no categories.

Is the goal here to ease navigation? And are they any different to lists?

From my perspective I can see two reasons for this being useful. The primary reason is that page names can be identified and be made consistent prior to their creation.  There was a healthy debate on the proposed page names for each country.  From a taxonomy (tree of life) perspective this debate also needs to come before masses of atrticles are started (and it has been initiated in other threads in response to the viper articles).  Secondly, it allows red links to be indentified at a glance and will hopefully be useful to avoid duplicated efforts.

I wonder what others think?

[Larry Sanger]

What exactly is a catalog?

The American Heritage Dictionary (on dictionary.com) says it is "A list or itemized display...usually including descriptive information or illustrations."  But as I'm using it, it's a general term for the sort of summary displays of information that one finds in handbooks and almanacs.  In general, it lists facts in brief, tabular fashion, that makes it easy to scan and find information.

As to what knowledge to include, that depends entirely on the subject.  Generally, if there is some significant category of information that can be tabulated, common to many items in a set, then it can (in principle) be included.  In a catalog of planets and moons, we would list information such as diameter, distance from sun (or earth), elements in atmosphere (if any), etc.

For display, generally, we should use tables.  We should probably design special--but still easy-to-fill-in--table templates for different sorts of information, somewhat in the way Wikipedia does.  But these tables need not be narrow; they can fill the width of a page (not more than ~600 pixels, though, I'd say, if there is some reason to make them a set width).

Since the same item might be catalogued in several different lists, it is worth thinking about whether items in a catalog should themselves be made into templates which can be inserted at will.  Then we can have both a big catalog of all planets and moons, and a catalog of the Jupiter system, without duplicating effort.  We could also have a catalog of African-American novelists and a catalog of Southern novelists, with some overlap, without duplicating labor.

The idea then is that each catalogable item has its own template, perhaps placed on the article about the item.  One complication of this idea is that there are likely to be different requirements for different catalogs; for example, for actor catalogs, we might have one template, and for singer catalogs, a different one; but David Hasselhoff, of course, would needs both!

[Larry Sanger]

Excellent points re the advantages.  I hadn't thought of those.

Is the goal here to ease navigation? And are they any different to lists?

The main advantage I had in mind is simply that it is useful to the public, after all, to have facts tabulated.  This is not that different from encyclopedia article writing, and by golly, we are a "compendium."  Why not?  In other words, it's not just navigation.  Sometimes what you're interested in is comparing things.  I'd embarrassed to admit how many hours I have spent looking at maps, almanacs, and other reference books and just comparing things.  This is the sort of information that one can get from a "catalog" but not really from most (traditional) encyclopedia articles.

[John Moffett]

Hello All,

Catalogs don't have to be distinct from the sections, but in fact could be used to organize the sections.

In many ways, catalogs can also act as tables of contents or primary link pages if organized correctly. E.g., a catalog of insect orders (coleoptera = beetles; hymenoptera = bees, ants, wasps... etc.) would provide a great organizing page for people researching types of insects. A catalog of organs in the body, and subheadings with cell types in each would be a useful organizing system. A list of geologic eras would be ordered sequentially, whereas other lists would obviously require different organizing principles.

As such, I think that a properly organized cataloging effort could logically preceed fleshing out each area more fully. They could then be used as a tables of contents for the sections.

I think that a master catalog/list of proposed catalogs/lists would have to be done in order to identify how many areas of knowledge would benefit from this type of organizing endevor.

Of course, catalogs could also be done independently of the sections, and added to them to provide related links.

JRM

[Robert Winmill]

Lists of Lists.

I was starting to write down a list of lists that could be used in the engineering area.  This would allow for lists to be removed from specific articles and the list to be maintained as a "kernel of knowledge" by itself.  Also, making it easier to have cross reference items within an article.

Keeping even a list of the lists will be greatly simplified if a list article / entry begins with "List_of..."  Then if we use workgroup categories in the article a reasonable structure could be created from these lists.

[Larry Sanger]

Keeping even a list of the lists will be greatly simplified if a list article / entry begins with "List_of..."  Then if we use workgroup categories in the article a reasonable structure could be created from these lists.

Except that there's a difference between a list and a catalog.  We might want to have a lists of articles (or not) in addition to catalogs.  A mere "list of countries" for example is very different from a gazetteer that gives populations, land areas, GDPs, literacy rates, and so forth.

[Thomas Simmons]

When I think of catalogue I get pictures of the Monkey Ward or Sears and Roebuck: Picture, label and brief description. And of course the source for the product is provided as well.
The medium we are in has a vast potential for guiding the reader to best sources as well as prooviding a overview of the topic--sort of a look at the forest before they are surrounded by the trees. The whole idea can serve to
1. Cut down on the reader's search time -- this is big and getting more important as the web expands to include inane and arcane minutiae;
2. Lead the reader to the better sources -- literally become a source for good sources;
3. Serve as seeds for future CZ articles -- would help coordinate focus, continuity and quality as well as provide sources.

So, yea, a catalogue would be an excellent device to promote and motivate CZ growth and public exposure. Imagine a list of health organisations. Which ones are world leaders or regional authorities in oncology or epidemiology and where can they be found? (Ran into one guy over at WP who was contributing to articles in the related fields of neurology, genetics and medicine who had never head of the CDC or Mayo Clinic.) What papers or statements have they released on the web? Where do they direct the reader for first class information and research?

Planetologists are always adding to the list of possibles. Instrumentation used by planetologist. New species. Extinguished species (that also means the catalogue would become a good site for a major issue in industrialisation, ecological disasters, political and economic ramifications and on and on). Plastics--uses and manufacturing and chemistry (more fertiliser for the ecological issues). Books and journals in a given fields or discipline--brief comments and impact and quality as seen by people in the field. (Who can tell us about the book review that Chomsky wrote of B.F. Skinner’s flawed ideas and what impact that had on Skinnerian based psychology?) UFO sightings?! Maybe not. Might draw a very peculiar crowd to CZ. Geology--actually that has already begun with the geology article we are writing to embrace the field as a whole with brief descriptions, give the reader a broad definition by illustrating the focus of subdisciplines and topics of research and resources and to motivate connected articles.

And lest we forget, a catalogue of lists.

The mind boggles.

The potential for off-the-wall silliness also presents so there might need to be guidelines or we'll be seeing lists of Romulans and Cardassians and encounters with the Borg.

[Paul Derry]

I really like the idea for purposes of identifying something such as a species of flower or good heavens, even making a close guess as to what kind of snake bit you in the woods. One thing that these catalogs should have is color, they should not only contain concise pertinent information about the subject matter but also provide an image or some other visual *fun*. After all, we're not really limited too terribly much in terms of the number of pages we can have.

Catalogs are a good place to start looking for information.
After all, we're not trying to write the terse, uninteresting Encyclopædia Britannica, this is supposed to be something everyone can use.

My two cents,
Paul Derry

[Joe Quick]

Can catalogs have multiple levels?

I noticed that [[Catalog of ethnic groups]] is listed as a suggestion for the Anthropopolgy Workgroup.  Good idea, but what a huge page that would be!  It might be better to have a catalog of culture areas (regions that consist of similar environments and related cultures) which would each include a link to a second level of catalog that would give ethnic groups for each culture area.

[Larry Sanger]

I'm working on an example:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Catalog_of_famous_philosophers

The entry about Socrates there is all generated by a {{Socrates}} template, which could be used elsewhere if need be; and that template in turn uses the {{philosopher}} template.

If someone could convert the template {{philosopher}} into a table, the concept could be better illustrated...

[Robert Winmill]

Suggestions:

A catalog contains more than 1 line of information and the article will start with "Catalog of ..."
or
A catalog contains more than 5 short form elements for the primary key.

A list contains only 1 line of information and the article will start with "List of ..."
or
A list contains a maximum 5 short form elements for the primary key.

or
any other suggestions?

Make creation of a list article standard policy, if an article list of 10 or more items, and it would not hurt the intent of the article.  This may keep articles cleaner and make maintenance of lists easier.  Especially if the list is, or could be, referenced in other articles.

Using a standard article title format may allow for search software to more quickly build trees of related articles.

[David Tribe]

A catalog is like a directory, I guess. A list is limited to one time of information but a catalog can tabulate many key facts about each item (value, weight, area, cross references (especially Citizendium internal links). The graphic specialists might devise some attractive subtle color codings. The search engine bots might get to classify them as hot pages to if the internal links are useful.

Template writers may help with creating tables that are easy to edit ?


Besides that, those with small amounts of time can add stuff that missing in dribs and drabs


On the other hand would verification of accuracy be a real challenge.?

[Larry Sanger]

A catalog is like a directory, I guess. A list is limited to one time of information but a catalog can tabulate many key facts about each item (value, weight, area, cross references (especially Citizendium internal links). The graphic specialists might devise some attractive subtle color codings. The search engine bots might get to classify them as hot pages to if the internal links are useful.

Template writers may help with creating tables that are easy to edit ?

Right, I think so.  See, for example:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Template:Socrates&action=edit

Pretty easy, I think.  Just fill in the blanks.

Besides that, those with small amounts of time can add stuff that missing in dribs and drabs

Exactly, that is part of the beauty of the idea.  And articles can easily grow out of those dribs and drabs.

On the other hand would verification of accuracy be a real challenge.?

That is perhaps the biggest worry I've had.  But presumably we will (for convenience's sake) refer to online resources, such as government statistics, where we can, and cite checkable material properly.  The approval of catalogs could be very arduous.

[David E. Volk]

I have been considering such a page for NMR Spectroscopy, in which many dozens (100?) of experiments exist.  Using a catalog of experiments with key atoms involved would make writing the NMR Spectroscopy main page much nicer.  I'm all for it.
~~~