discuss: Preview of categories
Subject:
Re: Preview of categories
From:
Stein Gjoen ####@####.####
Date:
18 Feb 2005 22:54:23 -0000
Message-Id: <421672C7.8090405@mail.nyx.net>
Dan Scott wrote:
> Hmm.
>
> As a certified (but non-practicing) professional librarian, I
> understand the methodology but would like to note that it is open to
> abuse. (Full disclosure: I'm employed by IBM and work on IBM DB2
> Universal Database.)
Interesting. I didn't realise there were librarians here already.
Then again not that many in TLDP have said much or anything about
their backgrounds.
> The methodology appears to be "Group things by quantity" -- which is
> fine, except in the case of Databases (5.1.3.1) it has led to MMBase,
> Oracle, and Sybase being the primary subcategories, with Ingres, DB2,
> and others being relegated to "Others".
On reading the report I see some thought has gone into limiting the
number of sub categories and maintaining an overview for readers.
> Now, the 'abuse' is that applications wishing to increase their
> visibility could simply submit multiple, slightly different HOWTOs,
> thereby earning a category of their own and bumping a potential
> competitor back into the "Others" category. For example, this metric
> would have encouraged Ian Hakes and I to keep the "DB2 Version 7
> HOWTO" around as well as the new "DB2 Version 8 HOWTO". Instead, we
> did the right thing and simply replaced the Version 7 HOWTO with the
> Version 8 HOWTO. (For real abuse, I suppose we could also have split
> the HOWTO up into distribution-specific HOWTOs rather than collecting
> them together). Of course, TLDP will hopefully reject separate
> submissions that are obviously not driven by user need, but there are
> arguably already examples of this in the collection today.
My impression is that the submission process already watches out
for excessive overlaps and duplicates. I am not aware of any kind
of competition or ranking, has this happened?
Some documents have already been removed that were of questionable
value or even intent.
> I suspect that the real underlying problem here is breaking a category
> down by product name. That actually introduces an inconsistency into
> the categorization system, which in almost every other branch is
> broken down by the purpose of the technology.
I see your point but have no opinion on it yet.
> The second issue is that classifying content management systems like
> MMBase and PHP-Nuke under the DBMS category is questionable. Content
> management systems are often built on top of databases, but they serve
> a much narrower scope of purpose and should be placed in their own
> category (as a peer of databases, I would suggest).
>
> Otherwise, this seems like a very good step in the right direction.
The old set of categories was a great help and I too hope this
new scheme will improve things further, especially since the
HOWTO collection has grown since then.
Some adjustments to the proposal is expected. I hope we can iron
out the issues so we can agree on sending out the announcement.
Best regards,
Stein Gjoen
