Forum:CT Archive/categories are currently innefficient

ok so i have been using wookieepedia for quite a while now and never been motivated to contribute but i have been using it heavily recently as reference for an RP game i am planning to run and i have noticed something. categories are all over the place, they are supposed to be used as sort of an indexing tool, but the current policy governing them makes them pretty useless in that regard. What i mean is the policy to not put a page in a category if it is already in a sub category. An index like that should have a top down approach, with broad categories with a large number of articles that are further refined with subcategories. the current policy is a sort of bottom up approach were everything is separated into specific sub categories and anything that doesn't specifically fit is left in the parent category. this makes the index incredibly hard to use to find anything unless you know the specific subcategory you are looking for.

i propose a policy where any article that fits into a subcategory also is put into its parent category to make the an index that is easy and intuitive to use. yes this will make some categories with a very large number of entries but i don't see how this is necessarily a bad thing. Also stricter guidelines on what constitutes a subcategory are needed, an article in a subcategory should conform to both the definition of the subcategory it is in and the parent category its subcategory is from so, for example starship components should not be a sub category of starships as a an activation cylinder isn't a spacefaring vessels too large to be a starfighter.