Category talk:Space Shuttle Discovery

May 2018

{{Fill this category}}

• Space Shuttle Discovery arrives at International Space Station
• Space Shuttle Discovery launches on final mission
• Space Shuttle Discovery launches
• Final launch of Space Shuttle Discovery delayed until at least Thursday
• Space shuttle Discovery safely arrives at launch pad
• Final launch of Space Shuttle Discovery delayed another day
• Launch of space shuttle Discovery delayed indefinitely
• Space Shuttle Discovery launches for mission STS-120
• Space Shuttle Discovery lands safely in California
• NASA sets launch date for Space Shuttle Discovery
• Space Shuttle Discovery STS-114 landing postponed for weather
• Space Shuttle Discovery successfully lifts off on mission STS-128
• Space shuttle Discovery back in Florida
• Space Shuttle Discovery lands for final time
• Space shuttle Discovery photographed from ISS
• Space Shuttle Discovery lands in Florida
• Space Shuttle Discovery to return to Earth
• Discovery lands at Kennedy Space Center
• Space shuttle Discovery cleared for Monday launch
• Space Shuttle Discovery launches for mission STS-121
• Launch of Space Shuttle Discovery further delayed
• Space Shuttle Discovery resumes rollout to launch pad
• Discovery docks with International Space Station
• NASA to launch Discovery despite crack in insulation foam
• Space Shuttle Discovery successfully launches after a month of delays
• Space Shuttle Discovery launch scheduled for Tuesday
• Space Shuttle Discovery launches on mission STS-124
• Space Shuttle Discovery landing cancelled for today/Brief
• Space Shuttle Discovery STS-114 landing postponed for weather/Brief
• Crew of Discovery inspect Shuttle for launch damage
• Discovery going for second launch since 2003 Columbia loss
• Shuttle Discovery given 'go' for landing at Edwards AFB
• Rules may be bent to launch Discovery
• NASA prepares to roll orbiter Discovery to launch pad
• Space Shuttle Discovery launch on indefinite hold
• Shuttle Discovery moved to VAB ahead of May launch
• Discovery Space Shuttle Launch scheduled for July 13
• Discovery launches after scrubbed attempt

Hopefully, all of these will be obvious candidates for this category. Cheers. Green Giant (talk) 23:39, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

Hmm. I see we also have articles on Space Shuttle Atlantis and Space Shuttle Endevour, if not more. May I suggest we just have one category for the entire Space Shuttle Program, especially since it has already ended. Cheers, --SVTCobra 03:30, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Categories provide nagivation through the archives; the fact that the program has ended doesn't make it less relevant to track articles about individual shuttles. --Pi zero (talk) 03:54, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

OK, but is it relevant to track individual shuttles? --SVTCobra 03:56, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

If we've got articles about them, why not? And in addition to purely beind-the-scenes organization of our archives, the more things we have links for, the more wikilinks from our articles are local, and the more incoming interwikis there are. --Pi zero (talk) 05:16, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

But shouldn't there then also be a category for the program. The shuttles had overlapping operational histories, if one wants to follow our archives chronologically, such a category would be necessary. --SVTCobra 08:42, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

I think there are just too many articles about the individual shuttle orbiters to justify a single category. It just seemed inconsistent to have a category for Atlantis but not the others, although I haven’t checked how many articles are about Columbia and Challenger. I suspect there are not enough articles on the latter two to justify separate categories but they would fit into an overarching Category:Space Shuttle. Alternatively I was thinking it might be useful to have a Category:Human spaceflight, combining the individual Space Shuttle categories, Category:Soyuz programme, and Category:Orion spacecraft. I’m less sure about including Category:Apollo program, because the articles seem to be more about the astronauts or referencing the Moon landings than about the spaceflights themselves. Cheers. Green Giant (talk) 08:49, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

More categories is a good thing, provided they're news-ish rather than encyclopedic in character, and they're easy to maintain — which atm means mainly that they naturally tend to be referenced by a keyword, so that {{w}} is engaged in populating them. I would favor having categories for various individual vehicles and, perhaps, also for the shuttle program as a whole.

I had long-range plans (I recall, from some years ago when I last tinkered with this particular corner of the category hierarchy) to use this part of the category hierarchy as a testbed for a notion I've been working on, wherein a complete set of categories cover some aspect of things regardless of whether some elements of the set are too small to justify on their own account. The idea is, somehow, that when you click on a wikilink for an element of the set, you're taken not to an individual page for just that one tiny (perhaps even empty) category, but to some sort of page for the set as a whole, with perhaps a list of all the individual elements, specifying how many articles there are in each element, and allowing either expansion or visiting the individual element however small it might be. Exactly how this might work, I never fully worked out; but there are cases where it's much easier to work with a set if you can be confident that all the elements of the set will have categories. We already have at least three of these: we have categories for all the countries in the world, even though some of them are individually sparse (we used to claim we had at least one article about every country in the world, but I think we later discovered there was one exception to this), and we have categories for all the states of the US, and iirc all the states of Australia. I've long wanted to do all the states of India, but without a clean way to handle complete sets with underpopulated elements, several Indian states succumbed several years ago to our rule-of-thumb about at-least-three-articles. Anyway, as a testbed for the concept, I was toying with the idea of having separate categories for each shuttle mission. --Pi zero (talk) 12:37, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Done --Pi zero (talk) 22:45, 28 May 2018 (UTC)