Organization

Since they are doing this big pattern search and conquer thing on Ravelry, I figured it would be a good time to make sure that I've entered all of my books and magazines. A while back (I think about 2 years ago from the dates on magazines) I entered most of my books and magazines. So I spent some time today entering the rest of my books and magazines, and adding booklets.

My knitting library includes 42 books, 87 magazines, and 11 booklets. Most of the books and magazines were obtained in the 2003-2006 range when I was gobbling up anything and everything knitting. My in take of books and magazines has slowed to basically just my Interweave subscription. Looking at all of my books, I don't even remember which was the most recent purchase. It was likely something last fall.

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At first when they announced this Ravelry reclassification project, my reaction was "I don't want anyone classifying MY patterns. They are my designs and I get to label them!!" Fortunately it seems as though designers have ultimate say over their classifications and so my gut worry wasn't warranted.

After classifying my own patterns, I went through some that were in books/magazines/booklets I owned and did some classifying. For most it appeared that others had already done most of the work in defining the attributes, but the category needed to be filled in, (or maybe confirmed?).

In any case, I just found it interesting how many attributes people were assigning to patterns. When I assigned attributes to my own patterns, I tried to carefully select the key features that someone searching for something like my Dr. Girlfriend scarf would use. I didn't muck it up with additional attributes that are unnecessary (at least I tried not to). Some patterns I came across add 20+ attributes! From what's been hinted at about the new search system it is supposed to be smarter and more efficient (post-reclassification of course), and so I guess in theory someone might select 10 attributes and hit on the perfect pattern to match those attributes because someone else took the time to click every attribute no matter how small or insignificant to the overall pattern ("wow, there's one eyelet! Check off eyelets!")

I'm already skeptical of the whole wisdom of the masses mentality that rules things like Wikipedia, so I'm curious to see how this all turns out in the end. One person's lace might be another's mesh. One person's unisex might be another's male. (One of the one's that was really confusing me was "teen sizing" how the heck is "teen sizing" different from "adult sizing." I can see "teen styled" as something a 15 year old might wear and not a 35 year old, but "teen sizing"??)