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CDG one week later: categorical musings

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Collaborative Directory of Geminispace since I announced it a week ago!

CDG

It got far more attention, and demanded far more of mine, than I had expected. It already has 223 links. I have been actively curating it, trying to impose a fairly uniform style on the link descriptions, and making agonising decisions on how to cut the directory into categories, and on where to place the various links in that hierarchy.

Dividing Geminispace, and hence in particular human endeavour, into disjoint categories is of course a fool's game. But it seems I decided to play it anyway. Any categorisation will be arbitrary and unsatisfying, and there will always be cases which resist unique classification. Borges imagined a classification of animals into those "(a) Belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, ... (g) stray dogs, ... (l) et cetera, ... (n) that from a long way off look like flies", and I'm not sure that the classification of Geminispace I've arrived at so far is much better justified. But let me try to justify it.

Perhaps the natural approach would have been to have the top-level categorisation be by subject, perhaps even using the Dewey Decimal system as some suggested. Instead, we first categorise by "type of thing". I think this makes sense. Links are not books, they don't necessarily have a well-defined subject. I'm not sure where Antenna or Station would go under a subject-based classification, and we do want them to be easy to find. Meanwhile, since the natural form of a Gemini resource is a collection of static text, I think it makes sense to separate out the interactive systems and the non-textual media. After separating out a few categories like that, we're left with links for which a subject categorisation does make sense (the topics/ hierarchy). For now at least, this is developing organically to handle the links which have been contributed, so it's adapted to the kind of thing which people tend to write about on Gemini; e.g. we have topics/space/ rather than topics/science/space/.

I think this general approach makes sense, but the details could be debated endlessly, and I've been playing with the categories every day as more links have been added.

Some things I'm not sure about:

Currently "Gemini-first" content is separated from mirrors of websites and so forth. My thinking was partly that if you come to the archive hoping to discover what interesting content you can find on Gemini, you'll be disappointed to find it full of copies of things you could have found on the web. But I'm thinking of relenting on that and moving mirrors into the topics/ hierarchy where this makes sense, in particular for the contents of mirrors/archives/.
A few links to individual glog entries have been added. I'd like to just blanket-ban that practice, on the basis that the Directory would quickly be overwhelmed if it became standard practice. Also because we already have the aggregators to handle gemlogs, and I see the Directory's purpose as orthogonal to theirs. But for now I've been avoiding deleting submissions, since it's happened a few times that my first reaction was that something didn't belong in the Directory, but trying to fit it in led to adding some sensible category. And there are a few cases where it would be a shame to have to delete the link, e.g. the only information on Lagrange for Android in Geminispace seems to be in skyjake's glog posts. Still, I'm leaning towards a purge.
Does a glog devoted to a specified topic belong in the corresponding topics/ category?

I'd be happy to hear people's thoughts on all the above. Meanwhile, please do keep contributing! I'm hoping it will grow to be a comprehensive directory of the interesting things on gemini, while staying focused enough to be manageable. Even if I make a mess of the categorisation, the Directory is released under CC-BY-SA, so it will always be possible to fork it.

Guidance on how and what to contribute

UPDATE 22/09/2022: I made some decisions about the above questions, with the help of some community feedback. I scattered the mirrors category across the rest of the directory, but made sure that "mirror" or similar is in the description for each link, so those who would rather ignore them can easily ignore them. I file glogs on topics under the corresponding topic, and instead of links to general personal glogs we now just have links to personal capsules as a whole in personal/. I decided against banning links to individual glog posts for now; they're just discouraged, and I'll trust the contributors to only do it when it really does make sense. They seem worthy of that trust so far.