Tuesday, September 30, 2014

#Wikipedia - #Category: #Cholmondeley Awards

A poet is proverbially poor. If there are any, it is not really an occupation but more of an aspiration to live off the high art of poetry. To celebrate great authors, great poets, organisations like the Society of Authors, recognise them with awards. Money may be involved, but the prestige, the awareness of the public is what makes the real difference for a poet.

The Cholondeley Award is to "honour distinguished poets" and, yes there is some money to be had; £8000 to be exact. There is still a category for the distinguished ladies and gentlemen who were awarded in the past. It is up for deletion because £8000 is considered chicken feed and also because awards are supposed to be in a list, not a category per WP:OC#AWARD.

It was a revelation for me that there is something like "over categorisation" in the first place. It means that categories are deleted. Wikipedia is a law unto itself and given "consensus", categories will be deleted. It is sad that all the work that went into the categorisation is deleted with those categories. It is even worse when the implied information is not first saved to Wikidata.

Categories distinguish themselves from lists because they can be found on every article that is categorised. Changes to article names are automatically reflected while Wikipedia lists are ... static. In Wikidata, lists can be defined up to a point and funnily enough this is not done for lists but it is done for categories.
The information from the category has been saved with AutoList2. Given that Wikidata often knows about more recipients of awards than any and all Wikipedias individually, the current emphasis on lists is silly. Wikidata will do a better job.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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