Categorising the growing Shakespeare resources

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Hi Mark,

I noticed your work on this and other pages related to the Shakespeare plays -- some very good additions.

One of the areas of WikiEducator that I've been working on is categorisation (see our project pages at Workgroup:Categories. (Some basics about categories is available at Help:Category.)

I'm wondering if we should build some categories for the Shakespeare resources.

One option for categorising is to use the categories generated by the content infobox template (currently listed at the bottom of the Macbeth page). I don't think these are the best options. Categories are designed to show the relationships among resources, and are a useful tool for browsing. With that in mind, I'm thinking WE should have a category for each of Shakespeare's works, e.g., Category:Macbeth. The result would be a set of categories listing all of the pages relevant to each work. Then each of these categories is categorised into Category:Shakespeare, which is further categorised into maybe Category:Drama and Category:Literature. And maybe Category:Macbeth should be directly categorised into some of these as well.

This approach would set a precedent for categorising according to the work of literature. Is there another way of categorising that would make more sense?

Adding a category to a page is simple. Add the code [[Category:Macbeth]] to the page, typically at the bottom.

But this can be quite tedious if there are a lot pages. Another option is to have the category transcluded to the page via a template. So if you are planning to make a header or navigator template specific to each of the Shakespeare works, you could include a category on the template that would be implemented for each page. (You are using a navigator now, but having a template containing the navigator info specific to Macbeth has some distinct advantages)

You could add something like the following code:

<includeonly>[[Category:Macbeth|{{SUBPAGENAME}}]]</includeonly>

The section after the pipe is a sort key that specifies that the order of the category listing should be according to the name of the lowest level subpage.

One of the action items for the categories workgroup is to figure out how to work with authors to implement categories. What do you think of this approach? I'm happy to do the categorisation, but wanted to discuss with you first, in particular because my expertise is not in English literature. Thanks for your thoughts on this.

Regards, Alison

ASnieckus (talk)10:49, 12 December 2009