/prog/gie decimal system

Anyone who has looked at the Dewey Decimal Classification would notice something interesting about the computer science section: there's pretty much no organization at all.^† If you were to trying to make a superior categorization of computer science texts, how would you organize it?

　

Works cited　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　
^†http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes#000_.E2.80.93_Computer_science.2C_information_.26_general_works

>>3

And how, do tell, do you plan to categorize these texts? It's one thing to just throw tags at a problem, but if you don't provide a standard set of tags for common categories, you end up with a mess of an organizational scheme.

To illustrate my point, imagine a hypothetical music torrent tracker. You could let people tag their torrents however they wanted. What would happen, then, if one person wanted to tag, say, an album of Gameboy music as "chiptune", while another tagged a similar album as "8bit"? Now, even though they both mean the same thing, searching for the two tags would give me entirely different results. Even worse, uploaders attempting to maximize search results might use both tags, creating redundancy. Now take this simple problem and magnify it hundredfold, and you have a small idea of just how big of a mess this system causes. That's not even taking things like misspellings and arguments into consideration.

With a little bit of foresight, this problem could be avoided simply by specifying standard categories from the start. With enough of these broad-sweeping categories, alongside more specific tags, our tracker could become quite pleasant to use.