Category label for real estate and housing questions? March 8, 2011 4:47 PM   Subscribe

Pony Request: Can we have a category for real estate and housing questions?

Pretty straightforward, really. There seem to be lots of questions on housing and real estate, and they seem to be mostly categorized under work and money or grab bag, neither of which really fits.


This request brought to you by my latest question, which doesn't feel at home in its grab bag category. *Sob*
posted by charmcityblues to Feature Requests at 4:47 PM (16 comments total)

Get off my lawn?
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 4:47 PM on March 8, 2011


"Home and garden", maybe?
posted by maqsarian at 4:52 PM on March 8, 2011


"Home and garden" is an existing category, but maybe that's too Martha Stewartesque for actual housing questions.
posted by amyms at 4:52 PM on March 8, 2011


Yeah, we need some phrase for the flip-side of Martha's universe. "Mold and crumble," "The Antiques Dead End," or "Faulty Towers".
posted by Namlit at 5:13 PM on March 8, 2011 [2 favorites]


Quite.

Where I live "Housing and Real Estate" correlates quite neatly with "Economics and Investment" and with "Class Warfare".
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:42 PM on March 8, 2011 [1 favorite]


I think this is a good idea
posted by MattMangels at 6:45 PM on March 8, 2011 [1 favorite]


I hate and fear change, but otherwise I would support this.
posted by killdevil at 6:56 PM on March 8, 2011


I have been consulted.
posted by fixedgear at 7:48 PM on March 8, 2011 [1 favorite]


If we're doing that can we also have Adult Services?

/Not Mathowie'sList-IST
posted by special-k at 8:03 PM on March 8, 2011


House Pony
posted by galadriel at 8:06 PM on March 8, 2011 [1 favorite]


We've intentionally kept the categories static for along time; it's not impossible that there'll be some sort of Great Categories Reckoning in the future, but it's pretty unlikely we're going to add a category here or there as one-offs.

Ultimately, categories are intended to give a broad first-approximation guide to the content, and different folks use them differently in any case. There are tag-driven approaches for folks who want to sort their askme reading by more granular semantic criteria—take a look in particular at the My Ask page, from the tab on the front page of the green, for a built-in way that folks can filter for stuff they're particularly interested in.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:27 PM on March 8, 2011


We've intentionally kept the categories static for along time;

Can you explain why?
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 11:16 PM on March 8, 2011


Can you explain why?

Well, for one, it's not always going to be about just adding a new category. Sometimes it would make more sense to split an existing broad category into two or more narrower ones.

And even if you're just adding a category, you still have to consider whether to move a few tens of thousands of questions to the new category. It's a lot of very boring, very time-consuming work, so it's not a step to be taken without a compelling reason.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 1:57 AM on March 9, 2011


le morte de bea arthur: "And even if you're just adding a category, you still have to consider whether to move a few tens of thousands of questions to the new category. It's a lot of very boring, very time-consuming work, so it's not a step to be taken without a compelling reason."

Modhat: "Hey folks, we're splitting the category 'grab bag' into two separate categories: 'grab' and 'bag'. All questions previously in 'grab bag' will just stay there or go into 'grab' (whichever is easier), and all future questions will go into either "grab" or "bag", depending on the poster's preference."

See, now that wasn't very time-consuming, was it?

Yeah, ok fine, it was very boring, but that's just because I have no writing skill/sense of humor.
posted by Grither at 5:35 AM on March 9, 2011


Can you explain why?

Because we haven't run into an overwhelmingly needed-seeming specific category change or addition, and because starting down that road pretty much means continuing down that road, and dividing/expanding the categories piecemeal is a recipe for a messier list of categories without having necessarily improved the overall functioning of that aspect of askme. Really there's a bevvy of questions that are floating around the issue:

How many categories should there be? What happens when we go through the effort to retrofit askme with x new categories and then folks want y further new categories six months later? How long a list should a user have to scroll through to decide which category fits their question? How much more often will we run into wrong-category hand-wringing (not a lot of that now but some) or repair requests, as categories get more specific and hence "wrong"ness becomes more concrete? How do we decide which categories deserve addition and which don't? How do we deal with recategorizing archived questions, or do we at all, when a category has been effectively partitioned into new categories?

Like I said, maybe at some point there'll be a strong feeling that really taking a new look at the categories system for askme is necessary, and if that were to happen those questions would need to get tackled. But it's not territory we really want to just sort of amble into for the sake of this or that one-off category addition.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:19 AM on March 9, 2011


Ok, looks like it will be grab-bag, then. I understand the difficulties inherent in making changes, and how it could easily snowball out of control.

I do hope that a real estate and housing category label will be added whenever the category system is reconsidered.
posted by charmcityblues at 2:17 PM on March 9, 2011


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