Category talk:Definitions/Topology

THIS CONVERSATION MOVED HERE FROM Talk:Intersection of Closed Set with Compact Set is Compact

I didn't know we take the name of a master page as category for subpages; I haven't seen this before... Are you sure this is what you intended? --barto (talk) 04:25, 12 March 2017 (EDT)
 * Oh I see, it has been done before. Never mind. --barto (talk) 04:28, 12 March 2017 (EDT)


 * There was some discussion of this way back when. Some contributors believed that we ought to include the master categories, some did not. I wavered back and forth, but ultimately I was of the latter camp, on the thinking that if we included every single result in Topology in that category, it would be unwieldy and unmanageable. As a rule of thumb, my view is that it is well to aim for a maximum of, say, 100 results in a category -- more than that and it's probably time to consider refactoring into subcategories.


 * Hence I am also embarking on an exercise to place int specific subcategories results which have multiple proofs, so that a category does now have Name/Proof 1, Name/Proof 2, ... and so on. It keeps the category clean and streamlined.


 * Yes I know there are still some enormously large categories, but this is often because it is difficult to see how to break it down into subcategories. Just think how much more bloated they would be if we did not do at least some splitting down. --prime mover (talk) 04:33, 12 March 2017 (EDT)


 * Oh. I personally don't think many pages in one category is necessarily a bad thing. For example, scrolling the Category:Definitions/Topology gives a handy overview of what is already defined and what is not; e.g. yesterday I was looking for those definitions starting with "Local". After all, I don't find it disturbing to have many categories at the bottom of a page; they're hardly noticeable. (But this discussion, if continued, should probably not be held on this talk page.) --barto (talk) 05:00, 12 March 2017 (EDT)

The problems I currently have are that a) it is cluttered. and b) it spreads over more than one page, so it cannot be seen at a glance what's in there.

There is definitely a case for having a definition for, say "Compact". But there is no case at all for "Compact/Definition 1", "Compact/Definition 2", ... and so on. Extracting the various sub-definitions out into their separate categories is the only way to go. What we can of course do is leave the "user-friendly" redirects in place, e.g. "Analytic Basis" and "Synthetic Basis" and have the full messy page name in the "Topological Bases" category.

It's fine to want to scroll down and see: yes, there's a definition for "Compact Space", but you really don't want to have to see "Oh yes, and there are five definitions for it" -- if that's what you are interested in, then you can drill down easily enough.

See what I have been trying to establish during the course of today. More work to be done, but for now I have other things to do. --prime mover (talk) 08:51, 12 March 2017 (EDT)