Category talk:Radio

RFM discussion: June–July 2010

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

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Category:Radio

You would think this topical categories has such terms like frequency modulation, very high frequency or band, especially seeing as this category is a member of Category:Physics. However it mostly consists of terms like game show, which are probably not used in the field of physics. Therefore, this should be split up into something covering actual radio/TV stations, and this category should only have physics terms. -- Prince Kassad 16:18, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Support splitting, although I can't think of what the new category should be called... --Yair rand (talk) 19:17, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Same opinion. Mglovesfun (talk) 21:34, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

• Clearly the polysemic term "radio" is unsuitable as a one-part category name because the selection of its meaning is too context dependent. We could recategorize the entries having to do with the physics of radio waves as "physics" (very high frequency, band), broadcast technology as "communication engineering" (frequency modulation). Perhaps the remainder should be a category such as "media" displaying as "radio", relying on the context to convey which sense of "radio" is applicable. Many terms related to the content of broadcast radio programs are the same as those for TV program content, so perhaps they could be combined as "broadcasting", though "radio and TV" or, more wastefully, "radio and television" would be more intuitive. Finally, some terms my be used in more than one of these contexts (eg, FM, AM). The context "radio" may be very intuitive in its meaning in an entry, but cannot yield an appropriate categorization. DCDuring TALK 11:02, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Yes, the name "radio" is less than ideal, mainly because it has widely different meanings in foreign languages as well as English. We already have Category:Television as a subcat of Category:Entertainment, it may be better to move some of the terms to Category:Broadcasting (which incidentally happens to already exist) since they apply to radio stations too. The other, purely physical terms should get their own category. -- Prince Kassad 11:45, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

I have invited Conrad to weigh in as he has been doing most of the work on mapping context tags to categories. There is a trade-off between the intuitiveness and good meaning-in-context of terms like "radio" and the fact that they apparently should map to distinct categories depending on the sub-context in which used. DCDuring TALK 11:55, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Since when did I do anything with categories? :p. Instinctively I agree, using an ambiguous name for a category is yucky. Practically, I imagine that we don't have enough common single-meaning terms, to adequately cover our category space - and I think using common words is definitely a constraint to consider. In some ways it would be cool (though very confusing) to have multiple categories with the same name, that differ by the category they are in broadcasting > radio, and physics > radio as separate. I think I prefer "radio" as meaning related to the physical thing, something that is on the radio is not necessarily anything to do with the radio itself, so would advocate splitting the remainder off into something like "radio programming" or "radio broadcasting". I don't think we can have a general solution to the problem, other than be vigilant in spotting categories being abused - maybe we'll get some ruels of thumb over time. Conrad.Irwin 09:09, 18 July 2010 (UTC)