Category talk:Solar System

add objects

Before I go hog wild and add all the solar system objects to this category, instead of just the planets (which I did largely as an experiment to see how these category things work), I'm starting to think that this may be a good opportunity to work out a different categorization scheme. Perhaps instead of just one generic "solar system" category, we could have a sort of heirarchy:

• Solar system - generic concepts like asteroid, natural satellite, gegenschein, Yarkovsky effect, etc.
• Solar system object - All the specific individual chunks of matter orbiting the Sun
  • Planet
  • Moon
  • Asteroid

I haven't checked yet whether categories can be nested, which would be really cool; "Solar system object" could mostly just contain sub-categories that way. So, what do people think? Bryan 15:11, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Apparently they can be nested Category:Japanese food that has for example Category:Japan inside. Kpjas 15:17, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Categories seem potentially cool. I think it would be better to put articles into a hierarchy, rather than pile everything into Solar System. And, of course, Solar System should be a sub-category of Astronomy (sub-category of Science, etc.).

The thing that confuses me is: are users going to use this for navigation or not? It isn't very prominent on the Monobook page. If this catches on, we can probably eliminate the navigation footer. I'm not sure. -- hike395 15:20, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

At the moment, I'm thinking that categories aren't really a replacement for the navigation bar footers - though perhaps they will help take some of the pressure off for adding huge numbers of them to articles, which IMO will be nice. I think categories are more likely to serve as a replacement for things like List of astronomical topics - if each of the articles listed here had [[Category:Astronomy]] in it, then the old list page becomes virtually obsolete. Bryan 15:26, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

That seems right. If so, we should make a category hierarchy of solar system objects that reflects the hierarchy we present in our List of solar system objects, right? So, would [[Category:Moons]] be a sub-category here? Should we make one for the Kuiper Belt? --- hike395 05:12, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I was thinking sub-categories like that. I'm not sure what would be the best way to divide up the minor planets; perhaps Category:Asteroids, Category:Centaur planetoids and Category:Kuiper belt objects would be a good way to chop them up (perhaps with all of those as sub-categories of Category:Minor planets)? Category:Asteroids could get further sub-categories, but I don't imagine there are enough articles in the other two to warrant that for them just yet. A further issue; should there be a Category:Planets, and should it contain exoplanets? If it doesn't, then there's only nine - a pretty small category. Bryan 07:56, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

One cool feature about categories is that they don't have to be a strict hierarchy. So, we can make Category:Planets, which can contain the 9 + exoplanets and Category:Planets can belong to Category:Astronomy and the 9 planets can just belong at the top level of Category:Solar system (which makes sense from the Solar System way of looking at things). Under this scheme, Jupiter (planet) would belong to two categories, Solar System and Planet, which are both sub-categories of Astronomy (are categories singular or plural?).

To solve the Centaur problem, we could have Category:Minor planets, which can include Category:Asteroids, Category:Trans-Neptunian objects, and all of the misc minor planets like Centaurs. Are comets Minor Planets? --- hike395 16:17, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I've generally been giving categories plural names when they're closely analogous to the "List of" articles. There's a lot of discussion about this kind of thing over on Wikipedia:Categorization, which I haven't been following very closely but which generally seems to conform to my expectations of how this will all play out (Wikipedia:Categorization#Naming_conventions, in the case above). This page also suggests that categories should be "as heirarchical as possible", but I don't think that impacts your suggestion above; most articles will likely belong to several distinct branches of whatever category tree gets cobbled together. Mars is both Category:Planets and Category:Red things, for example, which I'm sure must share a common root somewhere along the line. Re: comets as minor planets, the intro paragraph of minor planet says they are but I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm the one that wrote that so don't necessarily trust it. :) Should Category:Minor planets be capitalized, BTW? I was under the impression not, but it's not my field. (edit: it just occurred to me that Category:Planetology will probably be handy, too. So many categories, so little time. :) Bryan 23:56, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The Minor Planet Center seems to draw a distinction between minor planets and comets, see first paragraph of [1] and [2]. So, comets should probably belong to Category:Solar system, not Category:Minor planets. Of course, this throws a spanner into Centaur (planetoid) What do you think? --- hike395 04:26, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Minor planets

I agree with hike395. Comets are not minor planets. The objects smaller than the planets would be clumped into minor objects like this, for example:

Category:Solar System

Category:Solar System planets

Category:Minor objects

Category:Asteroids (Main belt/near Earth/Trojan asteroids)

Category:Comets

Category:Centaurs (possibly asteroid sub-group?)

Category:Kuiper Belt Objects (possibly asteroid sub-group?)

Category:Planets (all planets)

As far as I know, all the bodies have been officially classified as asteroids unless a coma is found. Then they're (re)classified as comets. Jyril 12:48, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hi, Jyril. Saw your comments at Talk:Asteroid and Talk:Minor planet, but haven't had time to respond. So, let's separate issues of categorization (here) and naming of articles (over at Talk:Asteroid?).

I think that the primary goal of categories is to be reader-friendly. One aspect of being user-friendly is to not hide information that doesn't need to be hidden. Right now, there are only 23 articles in Category:Solar System (and a lot of those are articles about transits). So, we don't need to hide the most common ones (the 9 planets) in a sub-category -- they just don't take up that much room. If anything, the less common articles (like the transits) belong in their own sub-category.

After writing and browsing Wiki-categories for a while, I don't think we need to make a special "Minor objects" sub-category.. I would be happy with Asteroids, Comets, Centaurs, and TNOs (or KBOs) to live directly under Solar System. I would not hide Centaurs and KBOs under Asteroids, because most people would not think of looking there.

Another possibility is to have Centaurs and KBOs live in both Asteroids and Solar System, although that is sort of redundant. It's a pity that Wikipedia does not permit 2-level-deep category browsing (like Yahoo)

In summary, I think that reader-friendliness should be foremost in the design of the categorization.

-- hike395 15:46, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Moons

What should we do about Category:Moons ? I can imagine a Category:Saturn or a Category:Saturn's moons, only the latter should be a sub-category of Category:Moons. And it seems silly to have both kinds of Saturn categories, since they overlap 98%. -- hike395 04:11, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Category:Saturn's moons would be a subcategory of Category:Saturn as well, so the overlap is more a feature than a bug IMO. That way the root Saturn category wouldn't be cluttered full of moons, and the handful of other Saturn-related topics (Voyagers I and II, Cassini-Huygens, etc.) would be easier to read (assuming there are enough to warrant a Saturn category, that is). Bryan 04:17, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Cool! and Category:Saturn's moons can be a child of both Category:Saturn and Category:Moons. This is actually working! I bet there is enough for a Saturn category. -- hike395 04:26, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Categories that are "list of" versus categories that are "articles about"

Been doing a lot of thinking about categories lately, and I think I may have been mixing two different philosophies inappropriately. For example, I put all of the articles whose primary subjects were moons of Jupiter in Category:Jupiter's moons, but then I also added all the articles whose primary subjects were some specific aspect of one of Jupiter's moons or were about Jupiter's moons in general (eg, List of craters on Ganymede or Galilean moons). If Category:Jupiter's moons is meant to be interpreted as "list of Jupiter's moons", then this was incorrect. If on the other hand it's meant to be interpreted as "List of articles about Jupiter's moons", they should be there. I've currently "demoted" those non-moon articles down to the root Category:Jupiter, which I feel much safer in interpreting as "list of articles about Jupiter," but before I start doing that on a wider scale I figured I'd mention my indecision here and see what others think. Bryan 01:31, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)