Category talk:Buildings of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

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Campus category[edit]

OK, this change confused me: Why is Category:Buildings of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign not a subtopic of Category:Campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign? Are there off-campus buildings in this category that owned by the U of I? --Closeapple (talk)

Because people looking for buildings aren't necessarily going to think to go to the campus category, the definition of what is and isn't "the campus" is problematic, and there are buildings of the University which are not on the "campus". The campus category should be used for overall shots of tracts of land with buildings included, but not focused on any particular building, which should go into the "buildings" category. Beyond My Ken (talk) 12:05, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Has there been a discussion of campus categories not being for specific buildings? It seems counterintuitive to me. The difficulty of a categorizing user being able to determine the line between campus and non-campus, I understand a bit, but I think people would look in two places if they thought there was any doubt about something being on the margin of the campus, whether or not it was a building. How about having Category:Campus buildings of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (which would probably be decently populated)? --Closeapple (talk) 00:54, 31 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
No discussion that I am aware of, I'm simply going by logic and what is most useful to our users.

"Campus" is a very ambiguous term. The campus is, yes, made up of buildings, but it's also made up of all other other stuff that isn't buildings: athletic fields, quadrangles, greens, etc. Universities, of course, generally have a campus, or campuses, but they also have outlier buildings which are only tenuously connected to the campus, as well as buildings which are totally disconnected from them. If I'm interested in finding images of some UIUC (what a terrible abbreviation) buildings, and I arrive at "Category:University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagn", I'm going to want to see a "Buildings" category right there, because I don't know if what I want is a campus building or a non-campus building. That's what I mean by ease of use for our "customers".

For these reasons -- logic and practicality -- the "Campus" cat should deal with non-buildings (such as the McFarland Carillon, which I just moved there), quadrangles and groups of buildings, while the "Buildings" category should deal with all the buildings, individually.

I, personally, have no objection to the "Buildings" category being a sub-cat of both the "Campus" category and the main cat, with the "Campus" cat also a sub-cat of the main cat, but I know that many people can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that our category structure shouldn't be an attempt to order all knowledge into strict hierarchies (a hopeless and impossible task that greater minds than ours have failed at), but should, instead, create a practical means by which our users can search for what they are trying to find. Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:29, 31 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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