who sets the categories names?

Howdy,
Quick question: who determines the categories in the directory, and how do they determined them?
For example, who came up with the main 16 categories? (art, games, kids and teens, etc.) Why did they separate sports and recreation into different categories? Is it all arbitary?

Thanks for any help!

Jamy

The top level categories correspond to the old usenet newsgroups top-level categories (with a couple of additions). Today if we started from scratch, we'd probably make Games a subtopic of Recreation. But changing the taxonomy of the root level would be more work than it's worth.

At the lower levels, the taxonomy was first defined by the editors who created categories, then later polished by editor consensus. There are still inconsistencies (and daily new inconsistencies) that should be cleaned up. The editors focused on Handicrafts build their categories with little knowledge of what the editors focused on Computers are doing -- and that is fine. It is more important to have a good Blog subcategory of Handicrafts/Widget_Polishing than it is to make sure that all the Blog categories all over the directory are not called "Web Logs" or "E-Journals" or whatever else the local editor may have thought at the moment.

And as the community recognizes common types of subcategories, we try to reach consensus on naming schemes, which the editalls can retrofit as needed.