The Vicissitudes of Categorization

Among the many simple and useful features of Wikipedia are its categories. At the bottom of an article, you’ll find a listing of categories relating to the article in question. Here’s what the VQR category list looks like:

Clear and direct, these listings form the taxonomies that galvanize Wikipedia’s disparate content into related, structured groups. Combined with the numerous links embedded in each article, Wikipedia becomes a rooted system of interconnected pieces, a crudely scaffolded, ever expanding knowledge bank. Categories allow a user to easily bore down into a particular subset of a large area of concern. Studying anarchists? You can begin with the anarchism page, move on to anarchism theorists, Russian anarchists, fictional anarchists, and end on postanarchists (although, in reality, the end to Wikipedia browsing is only one’s patience—such chains of linkage and association are potentially endless).

The potential downside of these categories, like any effort at classification, is that articles will end up in groups where they don’t belong, or that by being granted a particular categorization, an implicit political or moral judgment is being made, perhaps one that the subject would wish to refute. Some of the categories are irritatingly broad in design: does W.H. Auden’s page need to include a link to the 1907 births category, with more than 2,000 entries? Or the 1,000 Guggenheim Fellows? On the other hand, does lumping him in with gay writers, LGBT people from England, and LGBT writers from the United Kingdom—all categories at the bottom of his Wikipedia page—convey a kind of callousness towards sexual orientation, as if it were merely a box to be checked on a form, rather than a complicated, sensitive, personal determination? Of course, this sort of discussion depends on whom we’re considering. Cary Grant, whose Wikipedia page contains a section discussing rumors of his sexual orientation, and who once sued Chevy Chase for slander after Chase joked on TV that Grant was gay, is not categorized as a gay or LGBT actor— nor is he categorized as a heterosexual one.

It is difficult to navigate this line between utility and obsessive completeness, between distinguishing individuals from the deafening mass of Wikipedia content and finding the linkages that make for useful, engaging, appropriate connections. Despite its morose nature, I’ve long found fascinating the Wikipedia category on writers who committed suicide (285, according to the site). Considered on its own, it may be called an odd object of interest, but then again, the subject of writers and mental illness is a weighty and thoroughly researched one. And I suppose that distinction reflects the libertarian impulses underlying Wikipedia’s philosophy: information should be available, accurate, thorough, and free; and one person’s interest may be abhorrent or boring to another, but it should be available all the same. There may be someone out there who has pored over the pages contained within Hairdressers and barbers who have committed suicide (2 listings), while another plumbs through the 3,499 names of people born in 1928, never quite knowing what she will find, nor what she’s looking for.