Open AccessContentious categories
Author(s) -
Katherine Thornton
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
proceedings from north american symposium on knowledge organization
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2311-4487
DOI - 10.7152/nasko.v3i1.12805
Subject(s) - encyclopedia , computer science , world wide web , content (measure theory) , information retrieval , library science , mathematics , mathematical analysis
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia created entirely of user‐generated content. Roughly two years after Wikipedia began, the community decided to create a category system to organize the content of the site. The category system has changed over time, as have conceptualizations of what role it should serve in Wikipedia. In this paper, I consider six months of discussion about the design and implementation of the category system in Wikipedia. I analyze the comments editors shared and attempt to understand how these early decisions shaped the category system as it currently exists.