Thread:AndyC37/@comment-122900-20200806180200/@comment-25924244-20200807034420

"On thing that I, personally, is not very fond of is putting a page in the main category as well as many of the subcategories under the category."

Yes I agree with you. I prefer a "tree" of categories with subcategories. And every page should have one place on the tree and only one. So for your example, the tree might look something like:

etc etc
 * Locations in the works of Agatha Christie
 * Locations in Miss Marple stories
 * Fictional locations
 * Locations in St Mary Mead (locations better than buildings because some could be farms, a bridge, a stream)
 * Old Hall
 * Non-fictional locations
 * Locations in Hercule Poirot stories
 * Fictional locations
 * Non-fictional locations

The problem comes with organising a proper tree. As you can see, I am not doing a good job. I'm not sure whether Marple/Poirot or Fictional/Non-fictional sub-category should come on top. Or may be who the lead character is, and whether fictional/non-fictional should be sub-categories from two separate trees.

Ideally, the higher up categories should only have subcategories and not article entries otherwise the higher up you go, the bigger the page is.

Organising a proper tree is not easy and we have to experiment with it. On my other wikias where I am admin, I have never achieved a category tree which was totally satisfactory.

For the moment we can remove obvious duplications. So I agree on the Miss Marple case you mentioned. There are obvious duplications.

But not all duplications are obvious. Take murderers:

etc
 * Murderers
 * Murderers who use guns
 * Murderers who use knives
 * Murderers who use poison

Should the bio page for a murderer just be "murderers who used..." only, or also have a higher up "murderers" category? I am not so sure.

On the other hand, some are obvious duplications: etc
 * Hercule Poirot characters
 * Blue Train characters
 * Murder on the Links characters

Every member of a sub-category is going to be a member of the upper category. There is no point flooding the top category with all the character names.

Sorry if this note is so long and rambling, it is a topic I have thought a lot on and never had a satisfactory answer.