Steven temporarily closed this discussion yesterday after my comment above, but I wanted to post a few words of explanation here so that those of you who have voted for the proposal know what's going on.
I made a mistake when I added these two sentences to the Category FAQ in August: "Categories should not be used primarily as a recognition tool when there is little other genealogical benefit to placing the profile in a group. For this purpose, see Profile Stickers."
This wording implies that categories must have a genealogical benefit. We never established this rule. It's inconsistent with what we say about categories in other places, so it has caused a lot of confusion. I apologize for it.
A big thank-you to Steven and Natalie and the other Categorization Project members who have struggled to deal with the confusion and who are now trying to clear it up.
For now I have edited the line to say: "Categories should not be used primarily as a recognition tool when there is little other benefit to placing the profile in a group. For this purpose, see Profile Stickers."
In other words, I changed "genealogical benefit" to just "benefit."
It might not seem like a radical step for us to require that all categories have benefits for our genealogical collaboration. After all, we often say that WikiTree is for genealogy collaboration. Most of our features, functions, and policies are designed to facilitate it.
However, our collaboration has a higher purpose. The tree we are growing is meant to benefit others, now and in the future. We want it to be of value to our non-genealogist family members, to our future descendants, to non-wiki genealogists, historians and researchers, etc.
So, are categories one of those features that are just for facilitating our collaboration, or do they have a role in the higher purpose of WikiTree?
I believe that they do have a broader role. They're not just a tool that we use. They are part of the content that we grow, or at least part of what makes that content easier to find and use. Obviously, they facilitate browsing. Less obviously, they help Google and other search engines "understand" a page. This helps our profiles appear in more searches.
We might also develop more internal tools that utilize them. Categories could someday help a descendant find all his ancestors who played baseball, or who worked on train. Or help some epidemiological researcher find people who lived in a certain area and died of a certain disease. Sports, occupations, and causes of death may not be directly relevant to any current genealogy collaboration, but they can add value for others.
Still, I do appreciate that broad usage of categories has caused problems in our community. It could be that even though they have technical functions and benefits that go beyond our community, our community cannot support these usages. We can't do everything. In the end, we may need to decide that they should only be used for genealogy collaboration.
I just want to make sure that we have considered other ways to lighten their burden. The team and I will work with Steven, Natalie and other Categorization Project members to formulate some technical changes that could help, and we will propose some alternative policy changes.
