Editing Philosophical Research:Spaghetti containment procedures (section)

== Place Items in meaningful numeric locations ==

when choosing a number for a new Item or Lexeme, attempt to put Items somewhere which will seem in retrospect like the most logical place to have put them. for instance, Items can be placed in a numeric location which directly references some characteristic of the Item, such as release year or the numbers of other similar works, or an Item can simply be placed referentially near blocks of other Items which resemble it. in some cases, it will make sense to place Items with similar concepts parallel to each other, such as <cite>The Taming of The Shrew</cite> (Q1590) and character tropes used within it or referencing it (Q3590-3591). as Item numbers increase from the thousands to the hundred-millions, these kinds of considerations will become less necessary and relevant, as no giant Item number will be inherently memorable. however, small Item numbers being somewhat recognizable versus others is important for cases such as referencing simpler concepts in more complex ones in fields such as the "consists of components" Property and Wavebuilder combinations sections. on a healthy wiki, contributors are going to discuss the titles of pages as well as paste them into other pages, and on any multilingual wiki or one which may be in the future, contributors are going to be discussing language-independent identifiers. furthermore, on a wiki that operates primarily from text pages and only secondarily from data Items, Item labels cannot be taken as seriously as they would on a pure Wikibase instance. because of this, Item numbers must be given at least some minimal amount of thought as if they were names. just as people recite "Pokémon 493" or "SCP-682" as the names of those things, to some degree every Item number on this wiki will count.

all of this stands slightly in contradiction to the notion that Item numbers are not language, but it is done out of necessity to try to tame the contradiction between hard notability requirements of certain things that cannot be included and nearly everything anyone can think of being added. at the end of the day, what is always present in a decision of what and what not to include? some things in spaces and other things not in those spaces. thus, any decision on whether something is notable enough "to be included right now" can be tempered by the arbitrary metric of how well it fits into a meaningful Item number versus something else. having a good Item number is not a hard requirement for anything; any "less-presentable" Item can always be added later. at the same time, using numbers to guide the inclusion of Items makes it easier to plan things such as the "U.S.S.R. process", in which Items are created in a scratchpad area and that particular chunk of Items is promoted to the main numbering when the work is finished or published. if Item numbers are handed out at the moment the Items make sense, put into official signifiers at the moment an unfilled name makes sense to be their name, then the process becomes less about deliberately excluding anything forever and more about giving things names and first giving names to especially-interesting things — or at least some tiny arbitrary subset of them that will fit within the limitations.