Talk:Contents

This page discusses Teflpedia's Contents tree. Please insert your comments where they are relevant, or click 'Add topic' tab above. Sign your comments with ~, please.

Language
Grammar, orthography, phonology, contrastive-analysis, history of language, linguistics.

Teaching English
The teaching of English--procedures, activities, materials, lessons plans.

Today contains 40 subcategories--too many. Maybe divided "English teaching" up into several less broad top level categories, or lead to intermediate-level sub-categories that predictably divvy up its contents. Or (I have done this) group the categories of primary interest at top of the list via category sort keys. --Roger 17:02, 14 November 2012 (CST)

Methodology
Methodology, approaches, strategies (starts to branch into Practice but that is fine; sub-categories can reside under more than one top level category when appropriate), pedagogy theory.

English teaching community
About our profession and the people in it--job issues, finding jobs, ELT conferences and organizations, language schools, ELT authors, bloggers in our field.

Help
How to use Teflpedia. Already too many pages. Maybe organize them into sub-categories, such as:
 * Editing
 * Images
 * Links
 * Categories
 * Tables
 * Templates

Or refactor (simplify and merge) the existing Help pages to a smaller set. It is probably best to link to advanced Help pages at MediaWiki.org instead of writing them ourselves here because advanced Help pages are time consuming to write well, and others have already done it there (they do get a little long winded there but better there than here for than). --Roger 17:02, 14 November 2012 (CST)

Category name suggestions
If you have suggestions of other category names we should have, please add them below:

...

General stuff
General, er, stuff?


 * Could "general stuff" be replaced by "stuff for the teacher" to include activities, games and lessons? That category is fairly important I think... --Jameson2000ad 08:31, 24 November 2012 (CST)
 * Category:Teaching English contains everything for teachers, activities, games, lessons, general practical material. So we don't need a "General stuff" cat I think. --Roger 18:51, 2 December 2012 (CST)

divide. I propose we divide this into the other top level categories and then removed it because it is too ambiguous. --Roger 17:02, 4 November 2012 (CST)


 * Done. --Roger 19:38, 2 December 2012 (CST)

Language stuff
merge. I propose we merge this into Language. --Roger 16:34, 4 November 2012 (CST)


 * Done. --Roger 19:37, 2 December 2012 (CST)

Tools

 * Special:Categories—all our categories alphabetically
 * Special:UncategorizedCategories—uncategorized categories
 * Special:UnusedCategories—empty categories
 * Special:WantedCategories—categories that don't have a description yet (red link cats)
 * Special:MultiCategorySearch—intersects and or excludes categories to show just what you want (docs)
 * Special:CategoryTree—shows a tree view of a category you specify. Also makes our Contents page (docs)

Remember

 * To link to a category in-line: Use a leading colon like this  :category:grammar, otherwise you categorizing the page instead of getting an in-line link to a category.

About trees
We want a structure that is navigable, eg between 5 and 20 branches may connect to the trunk. On each of those branches between 5 and 20 sub-categories (sub-branches) which can each have between 5 and 100 leaves (pages) on them. This makes a navigable tree that branches out to approximately 10x10x50 (5,000) pages. That should do for some while I think. When we go beyond 5,000 pages we can add sub-sub-categories and accommodate 50,000 pages. After that? Maybe a page rating system to bring the best 50,000 pages to the top, each so ranked page could itself link to the rest of the pages like it that rank under it, which could compete for it's ranked spot.

Branches may overlap some--a category can be a sub-category of more than one top-level category when appropriate. But avoid category loops where a category is made a sub-category of one of its own sub-categories because that sends folks in circles.