Confused about categories

Meta Discussion
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Tooling, Domains, Usage. I am not sure which category should be used when I have a questions reguarding some specific Package. Is it one of these, or would it be a good idea to add a new Packages category?

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I think this question should be in the Meta-Discussion subforum :smiley:

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Haha wow yes. Due to being a little confused about categories, it seems I have gotten used to default to Usage. Sorry about that. The category is changed :slight_smile: This was an example of a symptom of the problem xD

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Ha ha, no problem. By the way, I agree with you, it’d be good to have specific packages subforum.

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Any ideas how this would be implemented? With 5,000 packages, we can’t have a section for each, so how would we go about breaking it up?

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I think that when the question corresponds to packages for some specific functionality that already has a category (eg a question about plotting can go to Domains/Visualization) then it should go there (but Usage is fine too), otherwise default to Usage.

I don’t really see the point of introducing a lot of fine categories, people will just get lost.

Rather, we should encourage informative post titles (eg “filtering dataframes by group statistics” in place of “I have spent 8 hours trying to figure this out and I am ready to chop my computer into little pieces with an axe”).

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Not breaking it up at all. Just adding a category called Packages, where one can ask questions reguarding any specific package. It would feel like a better fit that just chucking it into usage. I am, to clarify, not at all in favor of splitting anything up for each individual package.

But I just had another idéa: perhaps usage/packages would be the right solution?

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This is precisely how I think of it, too. I see General Usage as the default superset of everything. If there’s a more specific category then use that.

Categories are really only useful for two things:

  • A place where folks who care can dedicatedly follow or even opt-in to emails for a curated subset that’s relevant to them in real-time.
  • A place where folks can go to find old posts on subset they care about (e.g., by category search or browsing).

I don’t see a catch-all “packages” category being all that helpful for either of those use-cases. The category descriptions are all wikis, we can continue editing them to make things more obvious here.

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