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# HomePage/Talk

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See Wikipedia FAQ to add general questions about Wikipedia; use Wikipedia chat for highly idiosyncratic questions. See Wikipedia category schemes/Talk for discussion of the category scheme on Wikipedia's HomePage. See also Making Wikipedia more accessible to the blind.

### Change requests for HomePage

Please restore the food category! Now is the time for all good people to fork over culinary content. --Isaac

I've removed the earlier comments on this page, as they have already served their purpose, or been responded to.

I also removed the following from the HomePage. I'll give a reason why in each case. This is followed by a proposal.

- Countries of the world: the HomePage category scheme is a scheme of arts and sciences. Geography includes the study of countries of the world.
- Electronics: a subbranch of both engineering and of physics, or so I have been told.
- Anomalous Phenomena: an ill-conceived category (I think), and not a discipline: the closest discipline is parapsychology.
- Biography: this is a category scheme, perhaps, and it's listed under category schemes already; it's not a discipline (or is it? Argue the point, if you like)
- Computing: the field is called "computer science"
- Religion and Mythology: this makes it sound as though the study of myth should receive top billing with the study of religion, which is patently ludicrous, and it also makes it sound as if religion should be accorded about as much respect as religion, which is also ridiculous. The field is [religious studies]? but we're mainly interested in what religious studies is about, namely religion itself.

--LMS

I think we should greatly expand the HomePage category scheme--make it about quadruple or quintuple in size, but suitably organized so as to distinguish fields (such as geography) from topics (such as countries of the world). In doing this I think we should try to combine something like my (failed) attempt at making Wikipedia arranged by topic together with what we have at present. What do ya'll think of that? If there's some support for this, we can think further about what principles to follow in establishing top-level disciplines and subdisciplines, as well as topics. --Larry Sanger

You do realize, Larry, that Brittannica used to take a whole volume to 'organize knowledge'? I think the current scheme is an o.k. portal (not perfect, not great, but it gets me where I want to go faster than using the search function). Maybe it should lead to a bajillion other organizational pages, but wikipedia needs *something* that will fit on one screen at a time, or with at most one "page down" button to get to the rest of it. Otherwise we have to scroll for knowledge, and isn't that just the worst thing in the world? By the way, educated Southerners (no jokes, please!) spell it 'you all,' pronounced like 'yawl'. --MichaelTinkler

Thanks Michael, this is very helpful. --LMS

I think a home page organized using particular principles is easier to use than one which is ad-hoc and without any principle underlying its organization. One organization principle for a homepage might be the categories of [Rogets Thesaurus]?. Another principle might be to quickly direct traffic to the most commonly accessed pages. Another might be a general ontology of the universe. What organization principle do you see the current home page is using?

I don't see the distinction between geography and countries of the world. in fact, the term "Geopolitical entities" was coined because there isn't a lot of distinction in people's minds.

hmm. I thought it was spelled y'all ...

Well, English is a semi-ideographic language, hence the ability to spell monosyllables with six letters and an intermediate space. (by the way, in my native dialect, "Well" is disyllabic).--MichaelTinkler

You know you've been adding to Wikipedia too much when you go to some other site, see an error, and look for the "edit" button so you can correct it...--Belltower

Absolutely true.

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Last edited August 16, 2001 2:20 pm (diff)
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