User talk:Anoted/Archive 2: Difference between revisions

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: Tree fruits are fruits that grow on trees, not trees themselves. The categorisation I'm proposing would keep these separate. We could also whip up some stubs for actual tree articles so [[Lime tree]] could be categorised as a Tree, [[Lime (fruit)]] could be categorised as fruit, and both trees and fruits would be considered plants.
: Tree fruits are fruits that grow on trees, not trees themselves. The categorisation I'm proposing would keep these separate. We could also whip up some stubs for actual tree articles so [[Lime tree]] could be categorised as a Tree, [[Lime (fruit)]] could be categorised as fruit, and both trees and fruits would be considered plants.
:I think I've answered all of your questions. Let me know what you think. [[User:Anoted|Anoted]] [[User talk:Anoted|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 02:16, April 28, 2013 (UTC)
:I think I've answered all of your questions. Let me know what you think. [[User:Anoted|Anoted]] [[User talk:Anoted|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 02:16, April 28, 2013 (UTC)
{{Christmas greetings}}

Latest revision as of 07:33, 25 December 2013

Archive.png
This page is an archive. Please do not make any edits here. Edit the active conversation only.

Leave incarnation exposed[[edit source]]

Before you get too far in your appreciated efforts to link things, please do take note of T:DOCTORS (and for that matter T:ROMANA and T:K9). Where there are multiple, numbered versions of thing, you generally want to leave that number visible to readers. We shouldn't assume that readers will know that Donna travelled with the Tenth Doctor, because not every reader will have the same level of knowledge about the series as fans do. So:

the [[Tenth Doctor]]

is preferred over

[[Tenth Doctor|the Doctor]]

Thanks :)
czechout<staff />    00:40: Tue 23 Apr 2013

Image deletion[[edit source]]

diff of the following message on CzechOut's talk page

You deleted Painting of Clara-merchandise.jpeg, and I'm not entirely clear on why. It was under 250px which I can fix, but you said that there were other problems? I'm not entirely clear on the jpeg thing, T:ICC says that they are fine. Was there anything else? Anoted ☎ 00:26, April 24, 2013 (UTC)

Well T:ICC says pretty bluntly ".jpg only for photographs" not .jpeg, .JPEG. or .JPG — just .jpg. This precision is important to a number of automated processes. Also, it's unclear what exactly you're going to use it for. Are you planning on starting a page about the merchandising item? That's the only acceptable use for it. I think I deleted it mainly because there was no real evidence that you had started such a real world page, and I didn't want it spreading out to an in-universe page like Painting (The Bells of Saint John). If it's on an in-universe page, it must be drawn from Bells and it must, perhaps ironically, not be in portrait orientation. Widescreen only.
czechout<staff />    00:53: Wed 24 Apr 2013
diff of my reply on CzechOut's talk page
Ok, I see what you're getting at. There really is no in-universe use for it because it can't be considered cannon, but if there was a way for it to be considered canon (would the actual prop count, if it were sold or on display) it's still in the shape of a portrait, being that it's, well, a portrait. I find that insanely frustrating. Is there a reason behind that? Images can come from books as well as tv, are those allowed to be in portrait alignment in-universe? Also, is there a particular reason that some pages don't have an "in-universe" or "real world" tag on them? Anoted ☎ 00:58, April 24, 2013 (UTC)
Heh, lotta questions there!
This isn't the Eleventh Doctor. It's Matt Smith dressed as the Eleventh Doctor.
  • Even if a picture was taken of the actual prop, it still wouldn't be usable by us, because it's not in-narrative. We consistently enforce this in a lot of circumstances. Colour imagery of the black and white error isn't allowed, because it obviously wasn't taken with the cameras used to film the series, and therefore can't be in-narrative. Promotional images of actors in costume aren't the same thing as images of the characters they portray. A concept image of a sonic screwdriver isn't the same thing as a picture of the sonic screwdriver. And so on.
  • There is indeed a rationale for preferring widescreen. You can see some examples at T:GTI of what happens when portrait orientation is allowed to run amuck. To explain further, widescreen orientation, and at the very least 4:3, is always possible with material sourced from TV, and so is an easy standard to set. Since the bulk of our pictures in fact come from TV, TV should naturally control the setting of the standard. Comics can almost always be cropped to at least 4:3 as well, and then they can't, they can usually be cropped to 3:3 (square). Square is also the orientation of audio covers. So that really leaves book and magazine covers. Since these are almost always used on pages that will have text which exceeds the length of an infobox, it poses no layout issues for them to remain in portrait orientation. But for in-universe articles, portrait orientation would too frequently mean that the length of the infobox would exceed the length of the accompanying text. And finally, as regards pictures of art specifically, preferring widescreen means that we often cut off parts of the finished product, and thereby don't offend whatever copyrights might still be in place on the artwork. Remember, the point of pictures is identification, not replication. It really doesn't matter to identification that you can't see the whole picture, as with The Church at Auvers or Mona Lisa or what have you.
  • There's no such thing as an in-universe tag (tophat). A page without a tophat is assumed to be in-universe. Since the beginning of the wiki, in-universe pages have been considered to be "articles" whilst {{real world}} pages have always been called "real world articles" or "in-universe articles". {{real world}} and {{notdwu}} have always been deemed to be "exceptions to the norm". If you think it would bring clarity to the wiki for in-universe articles to actually bear a tophat, please bring it up at the forum and get others discussing your proposal. It's certainly a technical possibility, but no one has ever, to my knowledge, proposed such a tophat.
    czechout<staff />    01:36: Wed 24 Apr 2013

Categories[[edit source]]

Please don't add category:human whatever to pages that are already in category:whatever from the real world. If a person is "from the real world", he or she is definitionally a human. You're actually introducing category recursion, which is contrary to T:RECURSION.
czechout<staff />    00:02: Thu 25 Apr 2013

diff of the following reply at CzechOut's talk page
Yeah, I noticed that a few minutes ago. I made Artists from the Real World a subcat of Human Artists because it wasn't already. I'm in the middle of fixing the dupes. Anoted 00:04, April 25, 2013 (UTC)

Date pages[[edit source]]

Consequent to your recent bug report at The Drax Cave, I've had occasion to review your work on year pages. It's important that you follow standard procedures even on these types of pages. You'll notice that Shambala108 has sort of quietly corrected your work to the correct standard.

Your way Shambala's way
{{timeline}}

==Events==

In 2604, [[Enlightenment]], in the form of the [[diamond]], was offered to [[Bernice Summerfield]] by two [[Eternal]]s, [[Ramond Hardy]] and [[Barron]]. ([[AUDIO]]: ''[[The Heart's Desire (audio story)|The Heart's Desire]]'')
{{timeline}}

In '''2604''', [[Enlightenment]], in the form of the [[diamond]], was offered to [[Bernice Summerfield]] by two [[Eternal]]s, [[Ramond Hardy]] and [[Barron]]. ([[AUDIO]]: ''[[The Heart's Desire (audio story)|The Heart's Desire]]'')

See the difference? All articles must have leads and the topic of the page must be in bold text. It is incorrect to start an article with a section head. And besides, "events" is a horrible section head for a date page because everything is an event on a date page. It's a complete waste of space.

Will you occasionally find some pages that still have this older format? Yes. But remember that a rule is not invalidated simply because it is violated. Just because you go 75 doesn't mean you've magically raised the speed limit from 65. It just means you're speeding.

Additionally, please note that a page which is wholly comprised of uncited statements, like 1847, is subject to immediate deletion, which is why it has been deleted. Please do not start pages unless you have a valid source for at least one of the statements. Really, you shouldn't be making any statements without a source, but there are times when you might leave in someone else's statement and flag it with {{fact}}.
czechout<staff />    13:36: Thu 25 Apr 2013

Museums and libraries[[edit source]]

It may just be a matter of preference; some people like lists and others prefer paragraphs. But in general, it's better to have paragraphs whenever possible.

The museum page, as you can tell from the lead sentence, is about any/all museums in the Doctor Who universe. If any are missing, it's just because someone hasn't added them to the page. If you know of any that are missing, feel free to add them.

The library page, I feel, would be improved by changing the list to paragraphs, with a description and sources for each library on the list. Since I don't have all the books/audios/comics involved, it will take a bit of work to click on each link and find info about each one. So I will probably put that one off for a while. Shambala108 04:21, April 26, 2013 (UTC)

For the official policy on lists v paragraphs, you can visit Tardis:Lists. Shambala108 05:23, April 26, 2013 (UTC)
diff of the following reply on Shambala108's talk page
You mentioned that it's better to have paragraphs are frowned upon. When exactly are lists appropriate? I'm finding a lot of variation and it's a little confusing. For example Type 102 has a "See Also" section that links to two other TARDIS types. But there are lots of TARDIS variants that aren't linked. Some of those pages have small See Also sections, some don't. This is more than a little confusing. Is it just people adding what they know or is there some method to this (seeming) madness? Anoted 15:49, April 26, 2013 (UTC)

Dates[[edit source]]

diff of the following message on Shambala108's talk page

Since you've been doing a tonne of editing on years pages, I figured I'd ask you about a recent edit of mine. I edited the page to make it more readable, adding ths, sts, and rds, but before I went off and continued doing this I figured I'd ask if there was a reason that you hadn't done this when you edited the page before me. Anoted 15:20, April 26, 2013 (UTC)

If you look at Tardis:Dates, you will see that date page titles have to follow a specific guideline, but within the article itself, the format is a matter of preference. So to answer your question, I didn't change the dates for two reasons: it was extra work that had nothing to do with what I was fixing, and I prefer the way it was written. Shambala108 15:31, April 26, 2013 (UTC)

De-orphaning[[edit source]]

Hey, since you're on a de-orphaning kick (thanks, by the way!), give me about 1 hour to let the bot do an updated round. I haven't done one since 3Q last year. Some of the stuff on the list, like slow bowler isn't actually orphaned at the time you're encountering it. I'll let you know when a fresh list is available for use.
czechout<staff />    17:43: Fri 26 Apr 2013

diff of the following replies on CzechOut's page
Does the bot update Special:Lonely Pages, or Category:Please add to this page in other articles? Is it better that I work from one or the other? Anoted 17:51, April 26, 2013 (UTC)
On the subject of orphans, is a transclusion enough to keep something from being orphaned? Anoted 17:55, April 26, 2013 (UTC)
Hmmmm, that's a good question. Transclusion is really unusual for a normal page. I honestly haven't ever tested whether that wards off "lonely" status, because normal pages aren't transcluded. As for which is better, there's no doubt that the bot-generated please add links to this page in other articles is more accurate than the MediaWiki-generated report. However, it does depend on me actually running it for you. For instance, it's correctly rejecting a number of pages that Special:Lonelypages is currently saying are lonely. (The difference between the two lists is about 10 pages.) So any time you want me to refresh the list, give me nudge and I'll give you a fresh list.
This time took longer than usual just cause I hit a little snag my end. Normally, it's about a 15-20 minute job. We're all done now, though.
(By the way, there's no need for you to actually go back and strip away {{orphan}}. As long as you keep track of where you are on the list, and give me a nudge every now and again to clean it up, you can safely focus on just the not-doable-by-a-bot work of creating links.
czechout<staff />    18:26: Fri 26 Apr 2013
54 was on the lonely pages list even though it had a transclusion. I did link it a few more times for good measure, but that's what prompted the question. It seems that years are the type of pages to be in this position not-infrequenly.
Also, when un-orphaning, I don't actually go in order. I click on pages that I know I can un-orphan or just ones that sound cool...that still good? Also, Special:Lonely Pages, how frequently does it update? I thought it was once a day-do you tend to update Category:Please add to this page in other articles more frequently than that? Anoted 18:34, April 26, 2013 (UTC)
MW reports (Special pages) purport to be on a daily schedule. This is, however, a lie. You'll note that the top of these reports say that the pages were updated at precisely 02:00 on April 26. It always says 02:00, but it almost never really is. It's roughly daily, but there are many days where it's just flatly broken. The bot can generate a list that is absolutely current. Special:LonelyPages is almost never truly current. Just ask me to run the bot again and I'll do it. Provided I'm here, I'm definitely the source of the most current list. And as we just discovered, the MW list was about 10% wrong.
As for the transclusion stuff, okay, I guess that's a kind of transclusion. That just means the link is created by an automated process, and the template with that automated process is then transcluded. In other words, there's not a hard-coded link to 54 in {{timeline}}; it's a mathemagically generated link. So yeah that doesn't count towards de-orphaning. But really the thing being transcluded is the template, not the page. Transcluding a page typically means that you dump the contents of one page onto another page, and it's done like this:
{{:Pagename}}
So a true transclusion of 54 would be
{{:54}}
What's meant by (transcluded) in the WhatLinksHere report is that the link is transcluded, not the page.
czechout<staff />    20:01: Fri 26 Apr 2013

food and beverage categories[[edit source]]

diff of the following message on CzechOut's talk page I really want to go through the food and beverages category pages and fix them up. Write pages for the cats, categorise the articles properly, work on some of the articles and write missing articles. However this is a place where the extensive subcats are very confusing. I'm not really sure why they are all there. Pickled onions can be a condiment from the real world, but also a vegetable from the real world. Lasanga is a pasta from the real world, and a meal from the real world. Processed foods overlap with multiple categories, sweets are a subcat of processed foods, dairy products overlap with sweets and drinks, and so on. Every single subcat has articles which are or can be in another subcat and in a lot of cases one cat isn't obviously the dominant. Some of the subcats are particularly problematic; cats where almost every article in the cat can just as easily be in another one. From my reading of policies this seems like a problem of vast over-categorisation and using categories instead of writing articles. A lot of these categories aren't fully supported by the Whoniverse. My instinct is to minimise the number of subcats and delete the ones that aren't helpful to the organising process, but it's a big undertaking and I wanted to touch base with you before I started. Anoted 01:35, April 27, 2013 (UTC)

Well, you've only been with us for less than a month, and you're proposing a fairly big structural change to the wiki. Prudence probably demands that I ask for a few more details before I sign off on your request. I'd like to talk with you a bit more before you do anything. I'm not at all sure I know what you mean by "fully supported by the Whoniverse" or how exactly you plan to minimise things To my mind, sweets — not desserts but sweets — are obviously processed foods, and it's completely natural that some foods might be in multiple food categories. Milk, for instance, is obviously both a drink and a dairy product. And, if anything, I think we need to have more categories, not fewer. Could you maybe provide a few more details — with some sample category branches — so I can get an idea of where your mind is on this?
czechout<staff />    02:00: Sat 27 Apr 2013


diff of the following reply on CzechOut's talk page

Category change proposal[[edit source]]

There isn't a lot of category deletion. It mostly involves renaming categories and combining categories. My overall goal is more precision. A lot of the changes involve setting up fully separate botanical and culinary categories. There are only a few articles that don't have this problem. For example, salt, is clearly categorised in terms of it's culinary usage and it's proper mineral definition. But this is a massive problems for almost every food derived from plants. So most of my changes revolve around creating two clearly separate category trees. This requires a few changes to botany categories, but the food categories really need to be overhauled. Here's an overview of what I was planning to do:

Botany changes[[edit source]]

I'd completely separate botany and culinary definitions. So in botany, Fruit would be a subcategory of Flowering plants, and mint would be in Flowering plants. In culinary, Fruit would be a topcat, and mint would be in Herbs and Spices. Mushrooms would be in the botanical category Fungi, but the culinary category Vegetables. Black pepper would be in the botanical category Fruit and in the culinary category Herbs and Spices.

This would involve renaming Spices to Herbs and Spices, and combining the categories Nuts and Legumes and Grains and Pasta into Legumes and Grains. This would also involve renaming (and possibly deleting) some botanical categories. This would also involve writing proper category pages for these botany and food categories. It might also involve writing and editing some articles we don't currently have.

Meat[[edit source]]

I'd add the category meat. So the category tree would look like this:

  • Food
  • Meat (already has an overarching article) - would include articles like cash cow, chiggocks and sneg
  • real world

Items within meat I'd put in proper zoological categories, and I'd subdivide the Meat category in culinary terms. I do not believe that this requires any changes to zoological categories.

Beverages[[edit source]]

Rename Non-Alcoholic beverages to Beverages. Rename Food and Beverages to Food. Make Alcoholic beverages a subcat of Beverages and Beverages a subcategory of food. The category tree would look like:

  • Food
  • Beverages
  • Beverages from the real world
  • Alcoholic beverages
  • Alcoholic beverages from the real world

Other changes[[edit source]]

I'd also change the Diary category to Eggs and Dairy. I'd limit the meal category to things that could only be described as meals, like Chop suey, Fish custard, Kedgeree. Scrambled eggs and sandwiches would not be in the meals category. I'd get rid of the Processed foods subcat Sweets, and I'd limit the Processed foods category to things that by their nature were Processed. I'd also write the category page up clarifying what does and doesn't belong there. I'd draw the distinction between Processed foods and Preserved foods. Jam and pickles are preserved, not processed. Let me know what you think. This involves more renaming than deleting. You're right, it's a lot of structural changes. I'm really just trying to make things more coherent and fully separate botany, zoology and food. Anoted 04:01, April 27, 2013 (UTC)

Category language[[edit source]]

diff of the following message on CzechOut's talk page] Also, I don't fully understand why Category pages do not need to use Britspeak. The guides state this but never explain why, or what would be used instead. Anoted 04:39, April 27, 2013 (UTC)


Response to food category proposal[[edit source]]

Here's the deal with categories. There's no such thing as renaming. Literally. No. Such. Thing. It's not a power you have. It's not a power an admin has. It's not a power a bureaucrat has. It's not even a power a Wikia Staff member has. It's just not a power offered by the MediaWiki software.

So when you say "rename a category", what you actually mean is to manually depopulate one category, create a new one, manually populate the new one, add {{delete}} to the old one, and then obligate an admin to finish the job for you. And if the admin doesn't like what you've done, then they've got to manually undo your work. Quite obviously, if you move without admin permission, you run the risk of seriously pissing them off.

Easy categorisation changes can only be done with a bot. But even a bot is just doing the manual depopulation, repopulation, creation and deletion schtick. It's just doing it faster than humans can.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but, practically speaking, I would have to be involved in this project, because I'm the only one who has a bot here.

And, although I do deeply and genuinely appreciate the time you've taken to explain your proposal, I ain't, as they say, sold. I'll be re-looking at the categories in due course, but they're not that far off-base to me.

So let me ask you some specific questions to see what I'm missing. For ease of answering, I'll number them.

  1. Why is it wrong to have "Nuts and legumes" and "Grains and pasta"? I think that's how most non-foodies would lump things together, cause that's how most grocery stores arrange their aisles. Perhaps more importantly, that's four words that a person could enter into category module and get a hit. If we lumped all four things into "Legumes and grains", the two most common words pasta and nut wouldn't return a result. Remembering that many of our users are barely pubescent, and still others don't use English as their first language, is there a good reason to take away the simpler nouns?
  2. I don't understand what you mean when you say you'd "completely separate botany and culinary definitions", because you then go on to immediately talking about putting the same category under both branches of the category tree. That's not separation; that's conjoining. From a technical standpoint, you are linking botany and food through a shared category. So where's the separation?
  3. Take lime. I don't see how that would go under "flowering plants", because it grows on one of the trees from the real world. At the very least, some fruit would have to be described as coming from plants, and some from trees, so "flowering plants" is a kind of non-starter. But the overarching problem is that we don't know, from DWU sources, how certain foods are derived. We know from our "common knowledge" that a lime comes from a tree, but whether we have a story telling us that is something I'd doubt. Certainly, we can't possibly know from a DWU source that pepper is a fruit. What we have from sources is that it's a spice or maybe a condiment of some kind. See, the basic deal is that T:CAT requires us to put at least one valid category on a page. And we really don't want to go beyond what the DWU tells us, unless there's no other way. I accept that in the zoology pages there is sometimes a need to go with common sense, because otherwise we don't even get as far as "mammal" or "reptile". But I think with food, we always have some kind of idea, if only by what the text tells us was the way something was used, how to categorise it culinarily. Getting into a botanical classification is highly speculative in terms of what is allowed by T:VS, and it's simply unnecessary by T:CAT and T:CAT NAMES. So my question would be, why is making up a T:NO RW-offending category name just to categorise botanically a good idea?
  4. What's the advantage to putting beverages under food, rather than just having "Food and beverages" being the top level cat, and then breaking off food and beverages underneath there?
  5. Animals are not necessarily meat. It has to be established as an eaten meat before it goes in the culinary category. For instance, ostrich is eaten for meat in some parts of the world. But unless we have proof of ostrich being eaten in the DWU, it wouldn't go in category:meats from the real world. What do you mean by "subdivide the meat category in culinary terms"? That's pretty vague.
  6. I'm a li'l confused what you mean by "category language". Are you talking about the category names themselves, or the category description pages? If the former aren't using BrEng, please provide a link so I can change them. If the latter, it's a decision based upon restricting the length of time it takes to run T:SBOT. To be able to enforce BrEng spelling at all is a fairly major accomplishment. But to do it in all namespaces would simply be an overwhelming burden on the admin staff. So T:SPELL applies only to, as it were, the front of the house. The decision also has to do with being able to write the policy in a simple and straightforward way. Obviously, we're not going to enforce BrEng spelling in discussion areas or in templates (where colour is actually, functionally, wrong). It's just easier to say, "BrEng in namespace 0" rather than "BrEng except for templates, discussion areas, file descriptions, MediaWiki pages, property pages, board pages, Game of Rassilon badges and whatever other exceptions we can think of".


czechout<staff />    18:41: Sat 27 Apr 2013

diff of the following reply on Czechout's talk page
I think I was aware that categories can't be renamed but thanks for the reminder. When I refer to renaming a category I'm referring to the end result of creating a new category, moving articles from one category to another, and deleting the original category. Most of these cases don't involve editing that many articles, so I can easily do this grunt work, no need to involve a bot. The majority of the work that's required is actually in terms of putting articles in categories that they aren't in yet, not in moving them from one to another. But yes, I'm aware that I'd need you to do deletions, and even if I didn't, I'm aware that it's a large undertaking and that I should run it by someone first.
  1. I was reading category guidelines and the guideline said that the text of a category article didn't have to be in britspeak. I didn't get "britspeak isn't enforced on the text of category pages" from that, I got, "huh? what should they be written in?" from that. The distinction of not necessary, or rather, not enforced was not clear to me.
  2. The legume thing...you're right. It should stay the way it is. I still think that pasta shouldn't be in a category title though. Either just grain, or grain and cereal? I'm thinking about it in terms of writing the category. If pasta was in the category title, we'd basically have a large portion of the text from the pasta article in the text of the Grains and pasta category. Sure, we can lump pasta with grains, they're often located near each other in stores, but we can lump pasta with baked goods just as easily. More easily actually because pasta has more in common with bread than it does rice. At the moment, we only have pasta and lasagna, and lasagna is really a food made with pasta, not a type of pasta.
  3. I know that animals are not necessarily meat. I've been keeping a list of animals where the article specifies that they are considered food but that aren't yet in a food category as well as a list of animals which are frequently eaten in the real world but the article makes no mention of edibility. We also have cases where we have separate articles for the food and the animal, and I've got a list of those as well. Jellied eels are the food, eels are the animal. Eels shouldn't be in the food category unless their non-jellied edibility gets discussed in the Whoniverse.
  4. I'd divide up the meat category if there was a good reason. If we had enough fish that a fish subcat made sense for example. Or enough pork products that a pig category made sense. Like bacon, ham, sausage, spam...oh wait, that's more than the number of obviously edible fish. This isn't the first thing I'd do, I'd wait to see what the category looks like once the proper things were removed and added. I'd also probably eventually write a Breakfast article and maybe also a category for breakfast foods and foods served at tea time. But that's not at the top of my priority list for things to do with food.
  5. The advantages to making Beverage a subcategory of food is that the current way of doing things defines all beverages in terms of alcohol. Milk isn't defined as a beverage from the real world, it's defined as a beverage from the real world that does not contain alcohol. And even though all beverages are in a beverage subcategory, they're defined by the top level category Food. We bother to separate beverages from food but if I want to see all non-real world beverages I have to go to two subcategories of Foods and Beverages. Now a lot of this could be fixed by creating the category Beverages and making the appropriate real-world and alcoholic subcategories. The changing of the name "Foods and beverages" to "Foods" simply reduces redundancy a little and makes the category articles easier to write.
  6. We organise some foods in terms of what they are when they aren't being eaten. Chicken is a food and an animal. Salt is a food and a mineral. Artichokes? A food, but not a plant. This probably happened because people think about the chicken with feathers walking around as separate from the chicken on their plate. People think of the salt that season the chicken with as one of many uses of salt. But vegetable means the same as plant to them. They're those leaves that you pick, wash and eat. I don't think it's an accident that someone bothered to add Fruit as a subcategory of Botany, but didn't bother to do that with the vegetables.
  7. We have a lot of foods (most of them plants but some animals) that are organised only in terms of culture. If you randomly land on a page for an edible plant chances are that if you follow that subcat up, you will never encounter the words plant, or botany. I think that that's a problem. Right now we have the Fruit category hanging around under botany, we have Mushroom categorised as fungi and we have Raspberry and Mint categorised as plants from the real world. That's it. We have over 20 articles about foods that are plants that have no botanical classification. Cabbage, potato, tea, truffle, cocoa bean, rice and more. Most of the articles for these food items mention that they are plants, or talk about the growing process in some way. And we do not classify them as plants. Full stop.
  8. To me, this isn't something that we're waiting around for Doctor Who to tell us. Doctor Who doesn't need to tell us that water is an inorganic substance. We have a real world classification for water and we apply it.
  9. There are also a fair number of food categories that mean something in terms of plant classification. When edible plants aren't categorised as both a plant and food, the category can mean more than it intends to. When the same words mean two different things depending on the context and we don't bother to define the article in both contexts we end up lazily adding meaning that we don't intend. A herb (used to cook) is not necessarily an herbaceous plant.
  10. Fruits are plants. I want to remove the Fruit categories from botany and add some sort of plant category to the articles in that cat. Right now, this is simply incorrect. Fruits are not a different part of botany akin to fungi.
  11. Whether we say it's plant or flowering plant isn't that big of a deal. It's one possible way to divide up the category plants, but it isn't necessary to my plan of categorising foods as both plant and food. I think the best would be something like this:
  • Category:Roots
  • Category:Roots from the real world
  • Category:Seeds
  • Category:Seeds from the real world
Tree fruits are fruits that grow on trees, not trees themselves. The categorisation I'm proposing would keep these separate. We could also whip up some stubs for actual tree articles so Lime tree could be categorised as a Tree, Lime (fruit) could be categorised as fruit, and both trees and fruits would be considered plants.
I think I've answered all of your questions. Let me know what you think. Anoted 02:16, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

Christmas cheer[[edit source]]

Happy holidays!

As this fiftieth anniversary year comes to a close, we here at Tardis just want to thank you for being a part of our community — even if you haven't edited here in a while. If you have edited with us this year, then thanks for all your hard work.

This year has seen an impressive amount of growth. We've added about 11,000 pages this year, which is frankly incredible for a wiki this big. November was predictably one of the busiest months we've ever had: over 500 unique editors pitched in. It was the highest number of editors in wiki history for a year in which only one programme in the DWU was active. And our viewing stats have been through the roof. We've averaged well over 2 million page views each week for the last two months, with some weeks seeing over 4 million views!

We've received an unprecedented level of support from Wikia Staff, resulting in all sorts of new goodies and productive new relationships. And we've recently decided to lift almost every block we've ever made so as to allow most everyone a second chance to be part of our community.

2014 promises to build on this year's foundations, especially since we've got a full, unbroken series coming up — something that hasn't happened since 2011. We hope you'll stick with us — or return to the Tardis — so that you can be a part of the fun!

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