Talk:William E. Carney

Required background knowledge

Seriously if you do not understand how Massachusetts Government is structured, perhaps you should refrain from editing pages relating to the commonwealth. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wmcewenjr (talk • contribs) 18:35, 19 September 2011‎ (UTC)

Along the same lines:

Before posting snippy personal suggestions on talk pages, it is wise to review the guidelines on properly signing those comments.

Before proliferating categories in an article, it is useful to have a basic understanding of hierarchies – or sets and subsets, if preferred – how they apply to the concept of sub-categories and parents, and the redundancy of including the same article in a subcategory and one or more of its parent categories.

Before flinging unfounded charges of vandalism in edit summaries, one should understand what it actually means and the difference between vandalism and bringing an article into compliance with guidelines.

Fat&Happy (talk) 23:51, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

The use of county's as a residence should either apply or not, if not then eliminate them all. In this case the use of Mr. Carney's County is appropriate because as a State Representative he represented Suffolk County i.e. The Fourth Suffolk District in the State Legislature. It is wrong to not use both a person's county and city in their page.

I will try to explain it as simply as possible. If for example a reader were to be looking for people from Suffolk County, say a state rep who represented the 4th Suffolk District, but the reader did not know which of the Cities or Towns that person was from and so they went to the People from Suffolk County category, well Mr. Carney would not be there because is is not specific enough for an editor who can not envision that it may be the only access point that a reader may know of. It is not about being specific it is about giving people, who are using the wiki, access points. These readers may not be aware for example, that a Rep from the 4th Suffolk district was from Boston or Chelsea or Winthrop or Revere, but they would know that the Rep was from Suffolk County. But because of some inane rule about redundant cats that reps name would not be in that category. Categories are a way for readers to find articles that may be of interest, they are data access points, they are like the index of a book. A book without an index is useless, the more detailed the better, so before deleting a category, an editor should first ask if doing so will reduce the usability of the article wm

If a reader is looking for people – or representatives, or councilmen... whatever – from Suffolk County, they start by looking in Category:People from Suffolk County, Massachusetts. There they can see all the people who are from places in Suffolk County not large enough to have a separate category for their residents (if any such places exist in Suffolk County; they certainly do in many parts of the country). There are currently 29 articles in that category. They also see a listing of the direct subcategories:

• Category:People from Boston, Massachusetts‎ (12 [sub]Categories, 2,134 Pages)
• Category:People from Chelsea, Massachusetts‎ (1 C, 22 P)
• Category:People from Revere, Massachusetts (3 P)
• Category:People from Winthrop, Massachusetts‎ (5 P)

They might even click to expand the subcategories of Category:People from Boston, Massachusetts‎ (which has a clear preponderance of the people from Suffolk County), and see the subcategory Category:Boston, Massachusetts politicians‎ ‎(4 C, 4 P)

This is certainly not the most efficient possible approach (*see separate comment below this one), but even such a drill down is easier than looking at each of the 2,193 pages (or more; I didn't count all levels of the hierarchy) that would be in Category:People from Suffolk County, Massachusetts if it were fully populated with all the people from all the subcategories representing component towns or cities. Actually, a better approach for your example would be to start with Category:Members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, which has only 817 articles to look at instead of the county's nearly 3,000. And arguably even that 817 is a large enough population to justify at least some areas being diffused into subcategories of their own (e.g., Category:Members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from Suffolk County,

Looking at the numbers for the relatively small and simple Boston/Suffolk situation, we again see at least 2,264 people who are, by definition, "from Suffolk County", but only 29 specifically listed in the category. This tends to indicate a clear acceptance by editors of those articles of the principle of not repeating lower-level categories in their redundant parents. If you look at larger, more complex counties (Category:People from Los Angeles County, California, for example), the total numbers would make the fully populated categories unusable in any meaningful way. Fat&Happy (talk) 06:07, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

^* Additional off-topic comment referenced above:

For optimal use of categories, I would say a "gadget" for finding category members needs to be developed. It would allow entry of up to, say, ten categories, then find and return a list of articles which are in all the entered categories – either directly, or indirectly as a member of a subcategory. This would make handling your example above trivial for the reader; a simple join of Category:Members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and Category:People from Suffolk County, Massachusetts. But that doesn't help right now. Fat&Happy (talk) 06:07, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

We have a fundamental disagreement, I believe that the wiki should be something that is well written, properly cited and accessible, using as many data points as possible,apparently there are others who look at it more as writing code for software, editors who are so bogged down in the minutia that they can not envision that it is actually beneficial to have added categories. These editors are apparently completely unaware of how people do research. Having worked for over ten years in a University I can say with authority that people will many times have only a small concept of the topic they are researching, and to have an extra category is not a small thing for the person who is only aware of that category, unless the point is to make the wiki less user friendly to remove the category was wrong. When systems become more complex and less flexible that is when they tend to fail, the insistence of some on ridged uses of so called categorization rules is unfortunate because each situation is different, and such a pointless application of the rules as was done here (by one editor based upon what is apparently limited knowledge of how people actually do research) can end up obviating the very purpose of the wiki. I also wish that those editors who were simply trolling the wiki to make edits just to juice up their numbers would at least avoid the articles that relate to subjects that they have limited or no knowledge of. WM Preceding [[User:| Wmcewenjr]] comment added (talk) 14:51, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

The "one editor" appears to be the editor so single-purposed in promoting a county that they don't bother trying to read and comprehend counter-arguments, who apparently has a limited experience in using technological tools for research, as opposed to the editors of almost 3,000 other articles about people from Boston who have not forced them into a completely redundant parent category. Categories overpopulated with thousands of unnecessary entries which must be filtered manually in a search do not help anybody. Categories of a reasonable population size, organized in a clear, easily navigated hierarchy do. Just because over-categorization may have been deemed the best approach in the 1950s, when following branches of a tree required time-consuming manual searches through multiple drawers of index cards doesn't mean it's the best approach when a category set can be expanded from the top or any intermediate level to the bottom in seconds – if the intervening categories are not filled with extraneous distractions.

And I wish "that editor" would stop with the ignorant uncivil personal attack accusations of trolling and vandalism. Fat&Happy (talk) 16:51, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

So fandh one has spoken and from no hence there shall be no use of any counties in categories wikipedia, All hail the fah one for he has so ruled, all must bow to his will, for to do otherwise will result in being called disruptive and accused of making personal attacks.wm

FaH do you actually write and research any articles of any substance, or do you simply do drive by's on those produced by others to get your stats up? [[User:| Wmcewenjr]]