User talk:Asqueella/Categorizing Firefox pages

About my restructing idea: as you can see, a lot is different. Some key points:

• I suggest renaming "Basics" to something like "Basic features and setup" or maybe "Basic usage" (?); "Basics" by itself seems a little too vague. In contrast to that, I suggest renaming "Configuration" to "Advanced Configuration", just to make the meaning of that category clearer to general users, who might not immediately understand the difference between normal "setup" and "configuration".
• I threw several categories into one bigger category, Customization, partly to simlify the category structure. That's similar to what I thought would work for the Thunderbird category structure. Advanced Configuration could also go under this category; that might eliminate some of the potential for confusion between "customization" and "configuration" among general users.
• I didn't do anything to the Issues section. (No time to look at it.)

Anyway, this is all just an idea. It's perfectly fine with me if you think it doesn't work so well and you want to revert the whole thing to how it was before. --Wintogreen 05:10, 3 Apr 2005 (PDT)

This looks nice to me, although I would like to again raise the point that we discussed over at Talk:Rules/Categories:

I still see "Issues" and "Firefox basics" mainly as views of certain bits of the database rather than semantic categories in which the data is stored (the "main Firefox tree"). As a result, I think we need to really emphasize to editors that they should try hard to put articles intended for those two places in part of the main Fx tree as well. It's just that it would be better to have every article relating to eg. tabbed browsing in the "Tabbed browsing" category (wherever that ends up being in the main tree), even if some articles also feature in the "Issues" or "basics" categories. It just seems "tidier" that way. --Mozcerize 09:36, 1 Mar 2005 (PST)

Agreed! --asqueella

The proposed subcategories of Basic should probably not be subcategories of Basic at all, but rather they should be categories which exist outside of Basic. (Privacy and Security sounds to me like an important category in its own right.) Then the more "basic" articles in these categories should be assigned to the Basic category in addition to their own category. This solves the following problem that I really do see arising: what if someone writes an article on Cookies which does goes beyond what can be done using the "out of the box" GUI (eg requires about:config changes)?. It would need to be placed in Advanced Configuration somewhere. But it also needs to "sit alongside" the more basic articles on Cookies in case someone arrived at the KB wanting to easily find as much info as possible on cookies. So all cookie articles need to go in the Privacy and Security category and also be shared between Basic and Advanced Config categories (if appropriate).

I see the Basics category as not having subcategories, but rather subheadings on the category page representing the important concept and manually-constructed links to the articles in Basic under each subheading---a bit like the current FAQ/tips pages. (This isn't the same as going back to the bad old days of FAQ/tips, because (1) in addition to this manual sorting, the categories page automatically shows all articles so there's no possibility of "losing" articles, and (2) when someone visits an article in the Basic category, asqueella's nice templates will ensure that, from that page, the user can see all the other categories which that article sits in, and can thus jump to them easily.)

--Mozcerize 09:06, 3 Apr 2005 (PDT)

Maybe this is similar to what you're saying here, but what I've been thinking is let's get rid of both the Basics and Issues categories. All the articles will be put into other categories instead (e.g., Firefox : Issues : Alt Enter Doesn't Work goes into the "Keyboard and mouse" category). Instead of having Basics and Issues categories, there will only be a separate article for each, consisting of a manually constructed list of links to relevant articles. The Basics article for TB would look something like Thunderbird : FAQs : Getting Started (except that the links would point to kb-internal pages). The Issues page would look essentially like what we have now with Firefox : Issues. People would be able to add or remove links within these Basics/Issues articles at will, without having to mess with or worry about the categories at all. To me, it seems like this would make categorization easier to implement and maintain. --Wintogreen 22:24, 5 Apr 2005 (PDT)

I think that categories are superior, at least for use with "issues" (well, maybe "basics" was a bad idea). At least, using them gives a link on a page back to the category for free.

I also don't see why "messing with categories" is a big problem. If it is, why do we bother using them at all? --asqueella

You're right, I suppose. I'm just concerned about how well random new contributors will be able to deal with categories. That's what I meant by "messing around". I was looking at the pages created by new contributors since the Rules were revised, noticing how almost all of them violate the new naming conventions, and it didn't exactly inspire confidence in me that people would be able to use categories effectively. I'm sure categories can work well if there are people to keep things in check; I just hope it doesn't become too maintenance-heavy in the long run, esp. considering how few regular kb contributors there are now.

FWIW, I don't think the idea of a Basics category or article is inherently bad, but it might not be necessary yet since there aren't very many articles per category now. Each proposed Firefox category (except "Visual customizations") now has only 4-6 articles, which is few enough that it's not hard to find the "basic" info at a quick glance. --Wintogreen 04:30, 6 Apr 2005 (PDT)

You see, once current content is categorized, keeping new articles categorized correctly (ie. in a way that makes sense and doesn't go against the rules) shouldn't be very hard. It can be done by a few experienced contributors. It's not a problem to move a well-written article from "Mozilla Suite : Issues : Slithy Toves" to "Slithy Toves" and categorizing it properly. More important, once majority of articles use the new naming conventions, people will stop using old naming conventions for new articles. --asqueella

Great! I also wouldn't make the sub-sections of "Basic features and setup" also subcategories of "basics" (whatever the name is) -- let's make it direct subcategories of "Firefox" instead.

I also think that once "Keyboard and mouse tips" is moved outside "basics", Keyconfig extension and Emacs Keybindings (Firefox) can be included in it. Same for "customizations"/"advanced configurations": the hierarchy could be flattened there, and "misc" could be moved to "advanced config".

Thanks for taking time to categorize this. --asqueella

By "flattened", do you mean dropping the "Customizations" category and just going with "Visual customizations" (or "Themes and visual customizations"?) and "Extensions" instead? "Customizations" is not a very nice category name by itself anyway. --Wintogreen 22:24, 5 Apr 2005 (PDT)

Yes, I've gone ahead and changed that. --asqueella

I've made another quick, rough revision, based upon your comments above. Just revert it if it doesn't look right. Here's what I did:

• Took all the subcategories out of "Basic features and setup".
• Added articles from "Issues" to other, non-Issues categories. (Not all of them, but as many as easily possible.)
• Added a category called "Page display" (since this is what 4-5 of the Issues were about.)
• NO changes to "Customizations". But I wonder if the two subcategories there could come out of that category and become simply "Themes and visual customizations" (too long?) and "Extensions".

--Wintogreen 01:39, 4 Apr 2005 (PDT)

---

I have done quite a few changes today, but none of them modified the categorization. I was mostly renaming articles according to our article naming conventions, updating them and cleaning them up to comply with In-House Style guidelines.

Most suggested categories are copied to Talk:Rules/Categories. Some comments:

• Let's get rid of "basics", at least for now.
• "Web annoyances" could be a single page under "Page display". I really dislike three-line articles.
• Tabbed browsing doesn't seem to have enough articles yet, so I haven't copied it either.
• I don't like "Advanced configuration". It's not really more advanced than most our other articles. (We don't have "basics", so let's get rid of "advanced" too :p ). Suggest renaming to just configuration or something like that.

See also comments at Talk:Rules/Categories.

--asqueella 16:46, 7 Apr 2005 (PDT)

Great, I think none of us liked "Advanced configuration" much. "Configuration" seems a lot better. --Mozcerize 06:39, 9 Apr 2005 (PDT)

It looks like we may need a System category which contains articles about system-related issues including: installation; internet access; application startup (when the issues are system-related); default browser. Take a look at Firefox FAQs. (Actually, I don't think Safe Mode (Firefox) belongs in there.) Presumably this category would be a direct subcategory of each of the application categories, similarly to Plugins.

I think there may be some value in making both System and Profile into top-level categories (at the same level as the application categories) since these categories really do span each and every Mozilla application and thus it seems unnecessary to "share" them between every application category. What do you think? --Mozcerize 06:08, 10 Apr 2005 (PDT)