Talk:Current Opinion (Elsevier)

Page contents not supported in other languages.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Categorizing redirects

I went to Current Opinion, and was surprised to see that it was one member of "Category:Current Opinion journals", which turned out to be almost exclusively populated by mere redirects. I deleted the categories from all those redirects, as it seemed the obvious thing to do: I assumed that whoever had turned them into redirects had inexperiencedly and uninformedly omitted to delete the categories from them. I see no point in having any vacuous articles (e.g. redirects) categorized. However, I now realize that categorizing them had been entirely deliberate, though I still can't imagine what benefit might accrue from this. -- Hoary 04:46, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The benefit comes when the articles reach their finished state. See Wikipedia:Categorizing redirects. The idea here is that people browsing the category system will find a redirect in, say, Category:Neuroscience journals. If the redirects remain uncategorized, no one is really aware of them, and they can easily be lost. It's the same idea as behind Category:Redirects with possibilities. There are many, many redirects that have never been categorised and have simply been 'lost'. I agree the categorisation in the same category as the list may seem superfluous, but I am going to restore the other categories. Carcharoth 04:59, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Also, "mere redirects" is a bit disparaging on the value of redirects. In a printed index, it is possible to look something up and be told "for X, see Y". That is the exact equivalent of a redirect on Wikipedia. In the printed index, these blind entries are given, so why not put them in the index-like categories on Wikipedia (not all categories are indexes, but many of them are). Carcharoth 05:04, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
One reason not to do this is that at the end of the trail there's nothing (so far): for each, just the title, the ISSN, the start year, and (often obvious from the title) the area(s) covered. Still, you do have a point elsewhere. -- Hoary 05:09, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Have a browse through Category:Scientific journals. Many are still stubs. If you want to pull the information out from the Trends (journals) and Current Opinion lists and turn the redirects back into articles, with infoboxes and a short sentence on each, feel free. I personally think lists should be used before stubs, but if you can add more information, then please do. Carcharoth 05:16, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No, please, no stubs, no infoboxes, and definitely no stubs with infoboxes! -- Hoary 05:24, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
OK! :-) Carcharoth 05:44, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I second that request for redirects to this page instead of separate tiny stubs for each journal. If we eventually get more than a few paragraphs about a specific journal in this series, then we can talk about a split at that time. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:18, 28 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]