This essay is in development. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints. Consider these views with discretion, especially since this page is still under construction.

Step 1: Finding discussions to close

The simplest way to find discussions to close is to go to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion#Discussions awaiting closure and pick a day. Typically there will be a few ones that are tricky to close in the older ones; if you're new to closed idscussions at CfD, try to start off with a brand new set, i.e. Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2024 April 21. Longer discussions that have been relisted twice will most likely be harder to close as well.

You can also look at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Old unclosed discussions and Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/All old discussions

Step 2: Determing consensus

This is the hardest part of closing discussions. You don't necessarily need to know all of these but it may be helpful to be familiar with them. CfD nominations will often link to the relevant policies and guidelines. The main policies and guidelines that are cited in discussions are:

• WP:SMALLCAT. Typically the minimum size for categories is around 3-5 articles; it varies between categories. Stub categories are an exception, they have a minimum of 60 articles. Note that this does not apply a) when there is potential for growth (e.g. there are 10 more articles that could be added to the category) or b) when it is part of a large overall accepted sub-categorization scheme (e.g. category:Flags of Haiti only has two articles as of writing but it's part of Category:Flags by country making it okay).
• WP:NONDEFINING. A category has to be defining, that is, it has to be important enough to be worth categorising. E.g. Category:Blue fish would not be defining because a fish being blue isn't that important. A related guideline is WP:TRIVIALCAT.
• WP:NARROWCAT. The intersection between characteristics needs to be defining (see above) e.g. Category:American people of Hungarian descent by occupation is an intersection of occupation and ethnicity.
• WP:OVERCATEGORISATION. This is a broad guideline that is broken into a lot of smaller guidelines like SMALLCAT and NARROWCAT.

Here are some discussions and my thoughts on them:

This one's nice and striaght forward, an easy rename.

Most discussions of this type will be straight forward to close. Make sure that the nominator's rationale makes sense and isn't missing anything, and that nothing has changed e.g. if a category is nominated for deletion per SMALLCAT and you check and see it has 10 members. In that case, relisting would probably be best to play it safe, leaving a relisting comment mentioning that there are 10 members.

If there's just the nominator !voting, the discussion should probably be relisted. THe exceptions to this are

1. If the rationale is a speedy criterion. Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy is the normal place for speedy nominations, but if someone makes a nomination in CfD by accident, it can be closed as speedy as long as the typical discussion period has passed.
2. Soft delete. If the rationale is reasonable, straight-forward, and no one objects, you can close a discussion as soft X. This means that if anyone objects to the result afterwards, the category should be restored (and a new nomination should be started). See WP:SOFTDELETE.

The nominator's rationale is reasonable and follows the spirit of WP:C2C (a speedy criterion). However, the opposition rationale is also strong. In this case I would relist. If no further comments were forthcoming, I would close as no consensus.

First off, it is clear that the category cannot be deleted - its members should be merged as Pppery says. However there isn't exactly clear consensus for that - only the nominator argued strongly for that. It cannot be relisted, because it has already been relisted twice. Closing as no consensus would be a reasonable closure, but the nominator's rationale seems reasonable. The only issue is that there is uncertainty over the taxonomic status of Maxillopoda. In this situation, I would either close as no consensus, or !vote myself.

Here, first looking at the category structure helps. Category:Baltic-language names contains only Category:Baltic-language surnames, and those two categories are the ones being nominated for deletion/merging here. Category:Baltic-language surnames contains only two categories, Category:Lithuanian-language surnames and Category:Latvian-language surnames. It is then worth reading the objection to the reasons for deletion/merging. In this situation I would ask Ceyockey to clarify what they propose containerising, because the categories already contain only categories, and perhaps also ask them where they suggest reclassifying the content, and maybe ping the other contributors to see if they have a response to Ceyockey. Ultimately, I would probably close this as delete/rename as per nom, depending on what responses I got. Alternatively I might !vote myself, though not being very knowledgeable in this area, I myself probably wouldn't.

Step 3: Implementing the closure

This is a slightly tricky bit, because the contents of a category often have to be modified in order to do anything with it.

If you are a non-admin: You can list closures at Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Working so that admins can add them to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working, which gets a bot to process them. For this purpose I wrote a script, User:Qwerfjkl/scripts/CFDlister, which you may or may not find helpful. It helps to read WP:CFDW and now the format expected for that page.

If you are an admin, you can add closures directly to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working. If you're unsure about how to go about doing it, feel free to ask at Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Working or Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion.

If the closure needs to be implemented manually, instead go to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working/Manual.

The script Cat-a-lot is excellent for large scale recategorisation. You can install it at User:קיפודנחש/cat-a-lot.