This is an
essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been
thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
This is a proposal under construction. It is in Essay space in order to collaborate on it with multiple editors more easily. If you just happen to pass along and decided you also want to help, please leave a message at User talk:Marcocapelle.
Update: On 21 October 2023, WP:SMALLCAT was deprecated. All proposals which assume a continued existence or application of SMALLCAT are thus out of date. As of 26 November 2023, WP:MFN still hasn't been approved. So, currently there is no direct replacement of SMALLCAT. Discussions are ongoing on whether WP:MFN should act as a sort of replacement of SMALLCAT, but it seems clear MFN should be further developed first before being approved as a new categorisation guideline.
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/SmallCat dispute/Proposed decision#SmallCat (Finding of Fact no. #1), 26 August 2023:
are part of a large overall accepted sub-categorization scheme.
The practice to nominate categories "per WP:SMALLCAT" without (explicitly) discussing the potential for growth and focusing on the currently available articles exists for many years (see below with examples from 2020). This created an unintentional case law where categories with less than five articles were understood to be small.
The WP:OCAT guideline in general, and WP:SMALLCAT in particular, focus on completely and permanently undesirable categories and have therefore very strict thresholds.
The practice mentioned above is not based on WP:SMALLCAT but until very recently we always imagined that it was sufficiently in the spirit of WP:SMALLCAT because the articles were too small to aid navigation. Now we have come to realize that the beforementioned practice is very different from WP:SMALLCAT in two very important aspects:
In other words, on the fly, a new and very different criterion was developed at CfD without realizing it was new and different.
Now there is an objection to developing new criteria per se. The unfortunate thing here is that seemingly nobody was aware of it.
"Realistic potential for growth" in WP:SMALLCAT is very subjective. The guideline itself currently gives three examples:
1. Husbands of Elizabeth Taylor
3. Schools in Elmira, New York
The edit history of WP:SMALLCAT also shows frequent disagreements over good examples of categories which have no "realistic potential for growth", which were added, but later removed.
The phrase a large overall accepted sub-categorization scheme
is part of the
WP:SMALLCAT guideline, and has been since it was first developed in December 2006. But it is unclear what it means, why and how this specific wording was developed, and what are good examples. More importantly, there is widespread disagreement whether it is really works to prevent the deletion or merger of certain important/helpful categories, or that it can be employed as a pretext to oppose the deletion or merger of any category whatsoever, no matter how unimportant/unhelpful that category is. As a result, there is no consensus on how to interpret it, and whether it should stay in the
WP:SMALLCAT guideline as it is, should be amended to be clear and work as intended, or be removed the
WP:SMALLCAT guideline for serving no apparent useful purpose. Update:
On 21 October 2023,
WP:SMALLCAT was deprecated as a whole.
There is no consensus on whether there should be an explicit cut-off or numerical threshold in order to identify a category as a "Smallcat", or that it should remain an indeterminate amount, handled on a case-by-case basis at WP:CFD. There are pros and cons.
Some relevant observations:
a large overall accepted sub-categorization schemelooks like, and how many items there should be in a category to be exempt, or that this number should remain vague or unspecified.
Categories help readers and editors of Wikipedia navigate easily between pages. For that navigation function to be useful, a category needs to clear on what its purpose and scope is, why the items in it should be in it, and what the relationship is between that category and its parent category/ies and any potential child category/ies.
Readers and editors should just be able to find what they're looking for quickly. WP:CFD exists in order to continuously help them accomplish that goal. That's because we've decided for technical and practical reasons that anyone should be able to create a category, but not everyone should be able to single-handedly delete, merge, or rename a category. That would cause way too much chaos.
To avoid too large categories (after more than 200 items, they won't show up in a single page, because there is no room), subcategories can be created for a more WP:CATSPECIFIC subset of items. Sometimes these subcategories even should be created. At other times, they probably shouldn't, at least not yet. That's where (up)merging for now comes in.
Certain categories are permanently undesirable. Most criteria for deletion, merging, renaming or splitting mentioned at WP:OC are for categories that should never exist. However, the "Merge for now" criterion is for categories that don't really aid navigation right now. This is mostly because there are very few items in it, and readers and editors looking for those items are not helped by the fact that those items are put away in a very small, obscure subcategory. That doesn't mean such a category can't be appropriate in the future; it may well be. But for that, there should be a larger number of items in it to have added navigational value. "Very few items" is generally understood to be fewer than 5, but this threshold is not strict. Context should be taken into account. More on that below.
Sometimes, categories appear to have been created for the sake of categorisation itself, instead of aiding navigation between articles. Usually, this means a well-intentioned but perhaps overly ambitious or optimistic editor is creating a whole category tree that they expect to be fully populated at some point in the future, but for now they just want to put 1 or 2 articles in a sub-sub-subcategory.
One example where this might or might not be the case is the following (as of August 2023):
Apart from the question whether "singing" is even an "instrument", is it beneficial and practical to have a WP:NARROWCAT tree which combines "nationality, genre and instrument", and then proceeds with 2 redundant layers, then an under-populated layer with only 3 pages and then a poorly-populated, final subsubsubsubcategory with only 8 pages? Which reader benefits from this detour circus? Which reader is thinking, "I'd like to know more about French folk-pop singers, so of course I'm going to type "Category:Musicians by nationality, genre and instrument" into the search bar"? Probably not many. Perhaps someday in the future there might, maybe, possibly, potentially, be at least 5 biographies of Category:French pagan folk metal electric guitarists or something. Who knows? Nobody ( WP:CRYSTALBALL). So until then, Category:French musicians by genre and instrument and Category:French folk musicians by instrument don't really help readers and editors navigate between existing articles. The 2nd and 3rd containercat in this example can therefore be upmerged to the (grand)parent containercat. They don't aid navigation right now, so they can be upmerged for now.
Several essays (mostly focused on articles) provide more reasons why certain categories shouldn't be created yet, and are sometimes better "(up)merged for now". (Many of them use the metaphor of building a house, which works quite well for categories, too):
By merging a nominated category into another closely related category (usually merging a category into a parent category, called "upmerging"), the meaningful connection between the items is preserved. It is not deleted or "destroyed", but put into another category space which usually has a somewhat broader scope and meaning that still applies to all items in the nominated category. Merging acknowledges that connection. A reader or editor will probably still be able to find very easily what they are looking for by navigating between the items in the broader category. A category which has been "(up)merged for now" could be re-created in the future if there are enough items (preferably at least 5) within the broader category to merit a subcategory for a more specific subset of items.
"Very few items" is generally understood to be fewer than 5, but this threshold is not strict. Context should be taken into account, and this number should not be gamed ( WP:GAMING). E.g. editors may not empty a category out of process just to reduce the number of items in a category below 5 in order to enable its upmerging per this criterion "Merge for now". Such behaviour may be considered Wikipedia:Disruptive editing and is sanctionable as such.
In many cases when there would be only a few articles in a category, the articles are already interlinked. In that case categorization does not add any value.
Even when they are not interlinked yet they can be easily interlinked, if only, in a "see also" section. Again, this applies when there are only a few other articles.
The only requirement for category pages is that parent categories are made explicit on the category page, all other page content can be added later or not all. So the barrier to create or re-create categories is very low. This is confirmed by the fact that in the last few days no less than about 500 new categories per day have been created (see [3]), large by editors who hardly ever visit CfD. As we are going to propose a possibly temporary merge, the double work that is involved with it is negligible. Besides in most cases re-creation will never happen, or it will take many years before it becomes relevant again.
The "large established tree" clause exists so that categorizing editors can add articles to categories without checking beforehand whether that category exists or should exist. Because it is part of an established tree they may rely on the fact that it exists or should exist.
Also for readers it may be confusing to find almost every other sibling category in a tree except for the subcategory that they are looking for.
For example Category:Rivers by country is a well-populated complete tree by country. Should there be a few countries with very few articles about rivers then it may make sense to still keep these, so that for new articles editors can rely on the fact that they can add the new article to a rivers in any country category. For that reason e.g. Category:Rivers of Djibouti may be kept. according to whom?
Update: On 21 October 2023, WP:SMALLCAT was deprecated. All proposals which assume a continued existence or application of SMALLCAT are thus out of date. As of 26 November 2023, WP:MFN still hasn't been approved. So, currently there is no direct replacement of SMALLCAT. Discussions are ongoing on whether WP:MFN should act as a sort of replacement of SMALLCAT, but it seems clear MFN should be further developed first before being approved as a new categorisation guideline.
These texts are based on how the criterion has often been variously formulated in established WP:CFD practice:
The important part is that we prefer upmerging these categories for now; they are not completely and permanently undesirable categories. We might consider this as a kind of WP:TNT convention, but applied to categories instead of articles. If someone starts over and re-creates the category at some point in the future, and can populate it with, say, 20 items, everyone who !voted Upmerge for now without prejudice etc. will not object to its re-creation. But there is no guarantee that anyone will re-create this subcategory ever again, nor that there will be a sufficient number of items to do so. WP:Write the article first is pertinent here. And so, Upmerging per this criterion of SMALLCAT is a temporary and possibly-but-not-necessarily indefinite measure. Upmerge for now without prejudice etc. !voters just prefer to have these items in the parent category/categories for the time being, mostly for navigational reasons, and regard saying so as good practice.
Outdated proposal; SMALLCAT has been deprecated.
|
---|
|
Outdated proposal; SMALLCAT has been deprecated.
|
---|
|
The alternative texts are written for WP:MFN, but we may apply them to SMALLCAT too.
A tentantive proposal is to introduce a numerical threshold of at least 5 items for each category at all times. This will establish an objective criterion for (up)merging for now by default in scenarios where only 0 to 4 items are present in a category, and there appears to be no way of populating it to 5+ items without inappropriately "stuffing" it beyond its purpose and scope (merely to secure a Keep closure by people who just like the category in the absence of valid arguments, or make a mistake). This has been an informal rule of thumb for many years at CFD in practice, even though it was never formalised, and never part of WP:SMALLCAT (see SmallCat Dispute FoF #1). One of the main reasons no numerical threshold was maintained was the risk of WP:GAMING by "stuffing" or "ECOOPing". But both can be somewhat mitigated if all CFD regulars install the User:Nardog/CatChangesViewer script. (This script didn't exist back in December 2006, but it does now.) That way it can be detected more easily if anyone has been stuffing or ECOOPing a category in order to game the nomination. It may not be possible to prevent all gaming, but it will be easier to detect it. Both "stuffing" (by people who just like a category, or make a mistake) or "ECOOPing" (by people who just don't like a category, or make a mistake) have been issues the community has had to deal with anyway, often in SMALLCAT-related cases, and the script is a relatively adequate tool to address both.
Outdated proposal; SMALLCAT has been deprecated.
|
---|
(This expanded text is written for MFN, but may be applied to SMALLCAT too.) A large overall accepted sub-categorization scheme fits at least one of the following conditions:
Presumably the text below can be shorter by quite a bit, after the above addition. There are two solutions to resolving the ambiguity of the phrase
Until here shorter. |
Outdated proposal; SMALLCAT has been deprecated.
|
---|
In practice, from 2006 to present, WP:SMALLCAT has invoked a lot of examples of categories which supposedly had "no realistic potential for growth" (and therefore deleted), which were actually based on inappropriate WP:CRYSTAL assumptions. These assumptions had more to do with the limited imagination of certain editors that there could never be more than [number] of [items], until we found out there actually could.
Hypothetically there could be a proposal C to expand the base text by the same (vague) potential for growth clause as currently in SMALLCAT, but that would go entirely against the spirit of MFN. There are two solutions to resolving the ambiguity of the phrase
|
Much of the above talks about fixing SMALLCAT; SMALLCAT is no longer a guideline.
Categories with fewer than five members are usually upmerged into a parent category, in the understanding that it can be recreated in the future if needed
a large overall accepted sub-categorization schemebit, but shorten to
an. We can give some examples, but make it clear that CfD is the place to determine whether something islarge overallaccepted sub-categorization scheme
an accepted sub-categorization scheme. Maybe create a talk page template that says something along the lines of
this is part of [sub-categorization scheme]?
no potential for growth. I do not think there are categories that are useful for navigation that are neither sufficiently large nor part of a broader categorization scheme. Merge them for now, and recreate them if and when they actually grow.
This is an
essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been
thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
This is a proposal under construction. It is in Essay space in order to collaborate on it with multiple editors more easily. If you just happen to pass along and decided you also want to help, please leave a message at User talk:Marcocapelle.
Update: On 21 October 2023, WP:SMALLCAT was deprecated. All proposals which assume a continued existence or application of SMALLCAT are thus out of date. As of 26 November 2023, WP:MFN still hasn't been approved. So, currently there is no direct replacement of SMALLCAT. Discussions are ongoing on whether WP:MFN should act as a sort of replacement of SMALLCAT, but it seems clear MFN should be further developed first before being approved as a new categorisation guideline.
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/SmallCat dispute/Proposed decision#SmallCat (Finding of Fact no. #1), 26 August 2023:
are part of a large overall accepted sub-categorization scheme.
The practice to nominate categories "per WP:SMALLCAT" without (explicitly) discussing the potential for growth and focusing on the currently available articles exists for many years (see below with examples from 2020). This created an unintentional case law where categories with less than five articles were understood to be small.
The WP:OCAT guideline in general, and WP:SMALLCAT in particular, focus on completely and permanently undesirable categories and have therefore very strict thresholds.
The practice mentioned above is not based on WP:SMALLCAT but until very recently we always imagined that it was sufficiently in the spirit of WP:SMALLCAT because the articles were too small to aid navigation. Now we have come to realize that the beforementioned practice is very different from WP:SMALLCAT in two very important aspects:
In other words, on the fly, a new and very different criterion was developed at CfD without realizing it was new and different.
Now there is an objection to developing new criteria per se. The unfortunate thing here is that seemingly nobody was aware of it.
"Realistic potential for growth" in WP:SMALLCAT is very subjective. The guideline itself currently gives three examples:
1. Husbands of Elizabeth Taylor
3. Schools in Elmira, New York
The edit history of WP:SMALLCAT also shows frequent disagreements over good examples of categories which have no "realistic potential for growth", which were added, but later removed.
The phrase a large overall accepted sub-categorization scheme
is part of the
WP:SMALLCAT guideline, and has been since it was first developed in December 2006. But it is unclear what it means, why and how this specific wording was developed, and what are good examples. More importantly, there is widespread disagreement whether it is really works to prevent the deletion or merger of certain important/helpful categories, or that it can be employed as a pretext to oppose the deletion or merger of any category whatsoever, no matter how unimportant/unhelpful that category is. As a result, there is no consensus on how to interpret it, and whether it should stay in the
WP:SMALLCAT guideline as it is, should be amended to be clear and work as intended, or be removed the
WP:SMALLCAT guideline for serving no apparent useful purpose. Update:
On 21 October 2023,
WP:SMALLCAT was deprecated as a whole.
There is no consensus on whether there should be an explicit cut-off or numerical threshold in order to identify a category as a "Smallcat", or that it should remain an indeterminate amount, handled on a case-by-case basis at WP:CFD. There are pros and cons.
Some relevant observations:
a large overall accepted sub-categorization schemelooks like, and how many items there should be in a category to be exempt, or that this number should remain vague or unspecified.
Categories help readers and editors of Wikipedia navigate easily between pages. For that navigation function to be useful, a category needs to clear on what its purpose and scope is, why the items in it should be in it, and what the relationship is between that category and its parent category/ies and any potential child category/ies.
Readers and editors should just be able to find what they're looking for quickly. WP:CFD exists in order to continuously help them accomplish that goal. That's because we've decided for technical and practical reasons that anyone should be able to create a category, but not everyone should be able to single-handedly delete, merge, or rename a category. That would cause way too much chaos.
To avoid too large categories (after more than 200 items, they won't show up in a single page, because there is no room), subcategories can be created for a more WP:CATSPECIFIC subset of items. Sometimes these subcategories even should be created. At other times, they probably shouldn't, at least not yet. That's where (up)merging for now comes in.
Certain categories are permanently undesirable. Most criteria for deletion, merging, renaming or splitting mentioned at WP:OC are for categories that should never exist. However, the "Merge for now" criterion is for categories that don't really aid navigation right now. This is mostly because there are very few items in it, and readers and editors looking for those items are not helped by the fact that those items are put away in a very small, obscure subcategory. That doesn't mean such a category can't be appropriate in the future; it may well be. But for that, there should be a larger number of items in it to have added navigational value. "Very few items" is generally understood to be fewer than 5, but this threshold is not strict. Context should be taken into account. More on that below.
Sometimes, categories appear to have been created for the sake of categorisation itself, instead of aiding navigation between articles. Usually, this means a well-intentioned but perhaps overly ambitious or optimistic editor is creating a whole category tree that they expect to be fully populated at some point in the future, but for now they just want to put 1 or 2 articles in a sub-sub-subcategory.
One example where this might or might not be the case is the following (as of August 2023):
Apart from the question whether "singing" is even an "instrument", is it beneficial and practical to have a WP:NARROWCAT tree which combines "nationality, genre and instrument", and then proceeds with 2 redundant layers, then an under-populated layer with only 3 pages and then a poorly-populated, final subsubsubsubcategory with only 8 pages? Which reader benefits from this detour circus? Which reader is thinking, "I'd like to know more about French folk-pop singers, so of course I'm going to type "Category:Musicians by nationality, genre and instrument" into the search bar"? Probably not many. Perhaps someday in the future there might, maybe, possibly, potentially, be at least 5 biographies of Category:French pagan folk metal electric guitarists or something. Who knows? Nobody ( WP:CRYSTALBALL). So until then, Category:French musicians by genre and instrument and Category:French folk musicians by instrument don't really help readers and editors navigate between existing articles. The 2nd and 3rd containercat in this example can therefore be upmerged to the (grand)parent containercat. They don't aid navigation right now, so they can be upmerged for now.
Several essays (mostly focused on articles) provide more reasons why certain categories shouldn't be created yet, and are sometimes better "(up)merged for now". (Many of them use the metaphor of building a house, which works quite well for categories, too):
By merging a nominated category into another closely related category (usually merging a category into a parent category, called "upmerging"), the meaningful connection between the items is preserved. It is not deleted or "destroyed", but put into another category space which usually has a somewhat broader scope and meaning that still applies to all items in the nominated category. Merging acknowledges that connection. A reader or editor will probably still be able to find very easily what they are looking for by navigating between the items in the broader category. A category which has been "(up)merged for now" could be re-created in the future if there are enough items (preferably at least 5) within the broader category to merit a subcategory for a more specific subset of items.
"Very few items" is generally understood to be fewer than 5, but this threshold is not strict. Context should be taken into account, and this number should not be gamed ( WP:GAMING). E.g. editors may not empty a category out of process just to reduce the number of items in a category below 5 in order to enable its upmerging per this criterion "Merge for now". Such behaviour may be considered Wikipedia:Disruptive editing and is sanctionable as such.
In many cases when there would be only a few articles in a category, the articles are already interlinked. In that case categorization does not add any value.
Even when they are not interlinked yet they can be easily interlinked, if only, in a "see also" section. Again, this applies when there are only a few other articles.
The only requirement for category pages is that parent categories are made explicit on the category page, all other page content can be added later or not all. So the barrier to create or re-create categories is very low. This is confirmed by the fact that in the last few days no less than about 500 new categories per day have been created (see [3]), large by editors who hardly ever visit CfD. As we are going to propose a possibly temporary merge, the double work that is involved with it is negligible. Besides in most cases re-creation will never happen, or it will take many years before it becomes relevant again.
The "large established tree" clause exists so that categorizing editors can add articles to categories without checking beforehand whether that category exists or should exist. Because it is part of an established tree they may rely on the fact that it exists or should exist.
Also for readers it may be confusing to find almost every other sibling category in a tree except for the subcategory that they are looking for.
For example Category:Rivers by country is a well-populated complete tree by country. Should there be a few countries with very few articles about rivers then it may make sense to still keep these, so that for new articles editors can rely on the fact that they can add the new article to a rivers in any country category. For that reason e.g. Category:Rivers of Djibouti may be kept. according to whom?
Update: On 21 October 2023, WP:SMALLCAT was deprecated. All proposals which assume a continued existence or application of SMALLCAT are thus out of date. As of 26 November 2023, WP:MFN still hasn't been approved. So, currently there is no direct replacement of SMALLCAT. Discussions are ongoing on whether WP:MFN should act as a sort of replacement of SMALLCAT, but it seems clear MFN should be further developed first before being approved as a new categorisation guideline.
These texts are based on how the criterion has often been variously formulated in established WP:CFD practice:
The important part is that we prefer upmerging these categories for now; they are not completely and permanently undesirable categories. We might consider this as a kind of WP:TNT convention, but applied to categories instead of articles. If someone starts over and re-creates the category at some point in the future, and can populate it with, say, 20 items, everyone who !voted Upmerge for now without prejudice etc. will not object to its re-creation. But there is no guarantee that anyone will re-create this subcategory ever again, nor that there will be a sufficient number of items to do so. WP:Write the article first is pertinent here. And so, Upmerging per this criterion of SMALLCAT is a temporary and possibly-but-not-necessarily indefinite measure. Upmerge for now without prejudice etc. !voters just prefer to have these items in the parent category/categories for the time being, mostly for navigational reasons, and regard saying so as good practice.
Outdated proposal; SMALLCAT has been deprecated.
|
---|
|
Outdated proposal; SMALLCAT has been deprecated.
|
---|
|
The alternative texts are written for WP:MFN, but we may apply them to SMALLCAT too.
A tentantive proposal is to introduce a numerical threshold of at least 5 items for each category at all times. This will establish an objective criterion for (up)merging for now by default in scenarios where only 0 to 4 items are present in a category, and there appears to be no way of populating it to 5+ items without inappropriately "stuffing" it beyond its purpose and scope (merely to secure a Keep closure by people who just like the category in the absence of valid arguments, or make a mistake). This has been an informal rule of thumb for many years at CFD in practice, even though it was never formalised, and never part of WP:SMALLCAT (see SmallCat Dispute FoF #1). One of the main reasons no numerical threshold was maintained was the risk of WP:GAMING by "stuffing" or "ECOOPing". But both can be somewhat mitigated if all CFD regulars install the User:Nardog/CatChangesViewer script. (This script didn't exist back in December 2006, but it does now.) That way it can be detected more easily if anyone has been stuffing or ECOOPing a category in order to game the nomination. It may not be possible to prevent all gaming, but it will be easier to detect it. Both "stuffing" (by people who just like a category, or make a mistake) or "ECOOPing" (by people who just don't like a category, or make a mistake) have been issues the community has had to deal with anyway, often in SMALLCAT-related cases, and the script is a relatively adequate tool to address both.
Outdated proposal; SMALLCAT has been deprecated.
|
---|
(This expanded text is written for MFN, but may be applied to SMALLCAT too.) A large overall accepted sub-categorization scheme fits at least one of the following conditions:
Presumably the text below can be shorter by quite a bit, after the above addition. There are two solutions to resolving the ambiguity of the phrase
Until here shorter. |
Outdated proposal; SMALLCAT has been deprecated.
|
---|
In practice, from 2006 to present, WP:SMALLCAT has invoked a lot of examples of categories which supposedly had "no realistic potential for growth" (and therefore deleted), which were actually based on inappropriate WP:CRYSTAL assumptions. These assumptions had more to do with the limited imagination of certain editors that there could never be more than [number] of [items], until we found out there actually could.
Hypothetically there could be a proposal C to expand the base text by the same (vague) potential for growth clause as currently in SMALLCAT, but that would go entirely against the spirit of MFN. There are two solutions to resolving the ambiguity of the phrase
|
Much of the above talks about fixing SMALLCAT; SMALLCAT is no longer a guideline.
Categories with fewer than five members are usually upmerged into a parent category, in the understanding that it can be recreated in the future if needed
a large overall accepted sub-categorization schemebit, but shorten to
an. We can give some examples, but make it clear that CfD is the place to determine whether something islarge overallaccepted sub-categorization scheme
an accepted sub-categorization scheme. Maybe create a talk page template that says something along the lines of
this is part of [sub-categorization scheme]?
no potential for growth. I do not think there are categories that are useful for navigation that are neither sufficiently large nor part of a broader categorization scheme. Merge them for now, and recreate them if and when they actually grow.