Question about educational genre types

[martingzzz]

There seem to be 3 genre types that are somehow educational types.

Code: Select all

> select * from genretypes where text like '%Edu%';;
+----+--------------------+
| id | text               |
+----+--------------------+
| 69 | Educational (Misc) |
| 18 | Game: Educational  |
| 36 | General: Education |
+----+--------------------+

18 Is clearly discinct from the other two because it specifies "Game". However, I don't understand the difference between the other two, and a quick glance at a random few entries of these two genres doesn't help me.

What is the difference between genre types 69 and 36?

[AndyC]

I doubt there is one. Most of the genre stuff is a throwback to the old WoS flat file arrangement and I'm not sure consistency was ever its strong point.

It's not a great way of representing that kind of data in the real world either. Generally I'd take the approach of allowing multiple "tags" to be applied to any title, e.g. educational+ game. That allows for much easier cross referencing of overlapping genres without having to define a myriad of vague categories.

[martingzzz]

I agree about the "multiple tags" idea. It's not clear how practical moving to that would be though, rather than trying to fix up the data as much as possible within the existing schema.

If a deeper analysis than I have done confirmed that there really it no meaningful difference between genres 36 & 69, I wonder how much impact there would be in simply updating all genre 69 entries to 36, and removing 69 altogether?

[Einar Saukas]

If a deeper analysis than I have done confirmed that there really it no meaningful difference between genres 36 & 69, I wonder how much impact there would be in simply updating all genre 69 entries to 36, and removing 69 altogether?

Agreed! This will be changed in the next ZXDB update.