• Delete (changing my !vote) per WP:OC#SUBJECTIVE. I should have read the whole of the head article at the outset, but having read it in full (particularly the list of denominbations) it's clear that there are several competing definitions of "mainline" which lead to very different views of the category's scope. This sort of material is better captured in a list, which can explain how different perspectives lead to radically different lists. Attempting to use this sort of fluid definition as the basis of a category just leads to edit wars, as good faith editors make their case for choosing one of the competing sets of inclusion criteria. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 08:45, 12 August 2013 (UTC) reply

• I would be happy to support JPL's suggested merger as an alternative to deletion. For all the reasons he sets out (Amero-centricity, normative terminology, subjective inclusion), the current category is unworkable. The NCC category has a slightly different scope, but it avoids all the problems. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 06:16, 13 August 2013 (UTC) reply
• I too can support JPL's suggestion. Laurel Lodged ( talk) 20:26, 13 August 2013 (UTC) reply
• I find it difficult to support JPL's suggestion, as it appears to be Americo-centric. An alternative might be members of World Council of Churches, but that is not as inclusive as it sounds as certain evangelical groups and the Catholics had kept out of it, because they approved of its liberal tendencies. If we are to keep a "mainline" category, some one needs to provide a robust definition for what is mainline, to show trhat this is not a POV category. Peterkingiron ( talk) 16:39, 14 August 2013 (UTC) reply

Thank you for your quick response. :) -- Black Falcon ^{( talk)} 21:12, 11 August 2013 (UTC) reply

Comment That would be not a really good name. For example the Masters (snooker) never a was a ranking event, but it was held at the Wembley Conference Centre from 1979 until its demolition in 2006. Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 15:39, 11 August 2013 (UTC) reply

Comment: It would also not be responsive to the actual purpose of the category, which it self-documents as broader than "world ranking snooker competition venues". — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 12:04, 23 August 2013 (UTC) reply

Reply: This doesn't provide a defensible rationale for any of these serial changes. The "underlying problem" statement is false; DexDor misunderstands "defining characteristic" as something that must be singular; a list is not magically immune to inappropriate entries being added to it; and DexDor misunderstands notability as something temporal, which it emphatically is not (once the Crucible has become notable for its longstanding connection to snooker, just like Wembley for [association] football and Wimbledon for tennis, that notability and categorization doesn't evaporate even if the place burns down or turns into an apartment complex). More detail below in my main post, but the closer probably won't want or need to wade through it all. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 12:04, 23 August 2013 (UTC) reply

• NOTE TO CLOSER: I have also tagged that category. – Fayenatic L ondon 20:01, 13 August 2013 (UTC) reply
  • Further note to closer: That's an exemplary case of WP:IDONTLIKEIT, and provides no actionable rationale for upmerging the snooker category to the cue sports one, which effectively cannot be done, due to the categorization rationale of the sports categories. All the snooker subcategories are independently subcats of parent sport categories (snooker is treated by the mainstream media and other non-historical reliable sources as an independent sport, not simply as some misc. variant of billiards, which it is only developmentally, just as Australian rules football grew out of association football, to which the Australian game's subcats cannot sanely be upmerged). The snooker topics are also subcats of the parent cue sports categories, because the historical relationship is a real one. This is fine and normal, just as a band and its album, song, etc., subcats can be categorized in two different musical genres' subcats as parents, even if category links between the genres indicate a developmental relationship between them. WP categories are not unilaterally hierarchical. Note also the billiard halls category was incorrectly included in this CfD by simply adding an improperly formatted CfD tag to it after the fact (I corrected some of that myself), meanwhile the two categories are not entirely comparable - they do not present the same challenges, contain totally similar articles, and cannot be handled the same way, meanwhile Fayenatic provided no valid reason for upmerging that one, either. More detail below, but it's mostly for Fayenatic, not the closer. See previous CfDs; this second one and its relisting as this third is effectively, if unintentionally WP:PARENT rehash, raising no new issues at all, just expecting that different eyes will be looking and will somehow reverse the original landslide KEEP consensus, willy-nilly. Wikipedia:Consensus doesn't have to change, no matter how insistent someone is. There is not only no consensus to delete or upmerge either of these categories or redefine their scope, the ideas raised in this CfD that there's even a problem here at all, are generally mutually contradictory, other than a general need to clarify the categories' descriptions and weed out some inappropriate entries. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 12:04, 23 August 2013 (UTC) reply

Reply: Nothing prevents anyone from adding an inappropriate entry to a list any more than to a category. You have not made a case for doing anything more drastic than simply clarifying the wording of the category description. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 12:04, 23 August 2013 (UTC) reply

Reply: That's not what the category is for, and this is well documented at the category. That was, therefore, an invalid straw man argument and pure WP:IDONTLIKEIT, which also incorrectly attempts to blame this child category for the alleged sins of the sports venues parent. More detail below. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 12:04, 23 August 2013 (UTC) reply

1) Category:Cue sports venues is a container category, like most of the cue sport categories. Fayenatic's complaint that there's only one article in the parent Category:Cue sports venues simply is not a valid criticism. We're not supposed to have any articles directly in the "cue sports"-named container categories, except the most general of all possible cue sports articles! (Or articles that fit the container but which are too few to form a reasonable subcat on their own.) That's how container categories work. Other than a few such topmost-level articles, these container categories intentionally and quite naturally divide into snooker, pool and (often, not always) carom billiards topics, just as "football" broadly subdivides logically into association football, rugby (two kinds), Australian rules, American (and Canadian and other forms of gridiron), etc. No one would suggest forcibly merging such topics if they understood them at all. Fayenatic's "does not seem useful to me" is blatant WP:IDONTKNOWIT/ WP:IDONTLIKEIT. If this editor understood the nature and governance of the disparate cue sports, it would be clear why these are separate, why WP:SNOOKER itself is a separate project from WP:CUE. " I don't get it" is not a valid deletion rationale.

2) Contrary to Carlossuarez46, none of these categories has anything at all to with "performances" of any kind (the actual playing of the sport by any particular player or team, for example) but for sports venues by sport. Exhibit A: It's a subcategory of Category:Sports venues by sport; QED. The venues categories for snooker and billiards (mostly pool, but there aren't enough carom venues with articles to warrant that split yet and probably never) are for venues that exist as snooker/billiards venues. Period. An article subject may qualify simply because the building is notable and happened to be a pool hall among other roles it played in various periods, or it may be a long-running home of a world championship, or maybe it exists solely for the sport. There is no special, unique-to-cue-sports reason to treat this category and its criteria any differently than any other. CfD doesn't determine whether an article properly belongs in a category; editors at that article's talk page do.

3) The categories are secondarily for venues that are overwhelmingly associated with the sport, and the Crucible Theatre is an – perhaps the – legitimate example of that: Within the snooker world, "the Crucible" has become synonymous with the World Snooker Championship itself (e.g. "his third Crucible title in a row", etc.), and the event is by far the most significant event that takes place annually at the venue. Even if one were to disqualify that particular venue, on the basis that the category should only include venues that exist for the sole purpose of snooker, that still doesn't magically obviate the need for the category, because snooker venues and pool venues are generally not the same places, aside from some billiard halls that have both kinds of tables, and these are increasingly scarce.

4) Categories like this make sense even when not hugely populated, because they are part of a logical series and a logical, programmatic category structure for sports articles: Category:Sports venues by sport and all of its subcategories. I find it "interesting" that as soon as I mostly retire from editing, people pop out of the woodwork to launch XfD after XfD against WP:CUE-related pages of all sorts, from templates to redirects to, now, categories. Where are the CfDs against Category:American football venues, Category:Badminton venues, Category:Table tennis venues, and their subcategories? There is no logic for singling out cue sports and its subcategory snooker (which is a subcat principally because snooker is reliably sourced as a "world of sport" unto itself at an international level, completely unrelated to the governance, fandom, professional touring circuits, and other facts, figures and processes of the billiards family of games, other than a historical relationship (snooker derive from earlier pocket billiards games like life pool and black pool, in the 19th century). There's thus even a good reason to not merge them. If the snooker and/or cue sports venues categories are wrongly deleted on the basis of grossly misusing an inapplicable "place by performance" analysis, then the same logic has to be applied to every subcategory of Category:Sports venues by sport, if not Category:Sports venues itself. and various other subcats of the parents Category:Entertainment venues and perhaps Category:Buildings and structures by type. For example, Category:Comedy venues, Category:Dance venues, and Category:Music venues are obviously "place by performance". I'm being sarcastic; obviously "place by performance" does NOT include this sort of category at all, but refers to, say, classifying a particular music hall in a Category:Venues where Elvis Presley played or Category:Venues that have hosted post-punk concerts or other nonsense categories. The fact that someone can recite a phrase like "place by performance" from the overcategorization guidelines doesn't mean they're actually using it properly.

5) In theory, I have no objection to tightening the criteria for inclusion, so that venues are not added willy-nilly based on having hosted a few snooker events. But the idea that such tightening is needed is only an argument for cleanup, not for deletion or merging, and more importantly no convincing argument has been made for it to happen. A few items being categorized wrongly in there is something to address on those articles talk pages, if anyone even resists decategorizing them. If they do, it's a matter for whether or not the article's content and sources support the inclusion of the category or not. It's not a CfD issue. Better wording of the criteria, to more clearly discourage adding multipuprose venues simply because snooker (or pool, in the other category) was played there once, is probably in order, but that doesn't require CfD. Moreover, Peterkingiron's criterion for such a proposed tightening of criteria, and concomitant rename to something like Category:Venues for world-ranking snooker events (more likely Category:Snooker world ranking tournament venues) is not a valid approach, since it would rule out the kind of venue that is the #1 reason the category were created, e.g. the South West Snooker Academy, and wouldn't do anything useful for any of the content of Category:Billiard halls, which have nothing to do with snooker at all. The fact that the category already legitimately includes other snooker venues besides those used for snooker world ranking tournaments means that one for world ranking events would necessarily have to be a lower-level subcategory. Arguably there are enough to sub-sub-categorize it like that already!

6) DexDor's analysis is also faulty - we have a very long-standing precedent that the correctness of categorization, like the existence of notability, is not temporary. The Crucible would not be listed or unlisted as a notable (really, the most notable ever, by some definitions) snooker venue because, say, next year the World Snooker Championship was held somewhere else. The entire "it's (slightly) less clear that snooker will always be a defining characteristic of that theatre" line of reasoning is just invalid. The Crucible has for so long, and so tightly, been bound to the ultimate event in professional snooker, watched by millions every year on television, that there is absolutely no question that snooker is in fact part of what defines the Crucible Theatre for WP purposes, and that the Crucible Theatre is part of what defines the World Snooker Championship for WP purposes. That association may some day be marked by an official end, but that will have no sorcerous power to erase the encyclopedic significance of the association as historical and non-trivial fact.

7) DexDor continues in further error (sorry, I'm not picking on you, just addressing the arguments you're pushing): "The underlying problem here is that (unlike cycling, watersports etc) snooker can take place in a multi-purpose venue". Actually, virtually any sport can take place in a multi-purpose venue, and most of them do. Even after enormous, world-watched events like the Olympics, facilities get repurposed. Most sports facilities are, naturally, designed to be repurposed from day-one, because their construction would be far too cost-prohibitive to limit them to a single season of a single sport. DexDor's made-up criterion here would make it impossible to categorize most sports venues as such at all. It would also make it impossible to categorize something under both a subcat of Category:Music venues and Category:Dance venues, since any such venue used for one could also be used for the other and for who knows what else. Fortunately, WP:COMMONSENSE generally prevails, and we all know that how our categorization system actually works is that any article can be added to as many categories as clearly apply to it. This is not somehow mystically different for sports venues, no matter how many sports they host during their respective seasons, and no matter how many other non-sports events they may also host. Luxor Las Vegas is not delisted from the hotels or casinos categories because we somehow can't handle the fact that it is a multi-use, multi-purpose facility. DexDor's "underlying problem" is entirely a project of that user's own imagination, and doesn't trouble anyone else in Wikipedia, or our categorization system would have collapsed years ago.

8) Betty Logan is entirely correct here: "The purpose of categories is simply to organize articles according to their content. That is all they do. If the article does devote coverage to the facility's function as a snooker venue then it seems reasonable to categorize it in that manner. " If an article about a topic makes it clear that the topic is notable as an X, a Y and a Z, then it gets categorized as all three of these. This is a basic, everyday, dirt-simple fact of how categorization works here. It also means that if the topic is not reliably sourced as notable in connection to one of these things, then it would not be categorized as such. This is just how it already works. There is nothing special and different about cue sports and cue-sports-related cateories, so even the suggestion that the inclusion criteria for these two subcats must be tightened is basically a load of anti-cue-sports nonsense. If you see something being categorized as a snooker venue that shouldn't be, because its article and the sources cited in it do not demonstrate that it is in fact notable as a snooker venue, you are already empowered to remove that topic from the category, and to demand, per WP:V policy, reliable sources that justify the categorization if someone wants to revert you. If the article does in fact clearly establish a subject venue's snooker notability (having an entire section about it is one of multiple ways to do this), you have no leg to stand on to begin with and need to quit harassing snooker editors.

9) Importantly, we cannot reasonably be simultaneously proposing that the original category be limited and renamed to only be about snooker world ranking tournament venues, on the basis of their importance to pro snooker, and yet also propose banning those venues' inclusion because they're not solely-snooker venues, as others would have us do. Neither of those are defensible arguments against this category, as I have shown. Together they demonstrate compelling evidence against the existence of any sort of consensus that there's something wrong with this category, what that something might be, and what to do about it, since they're mutually exclusive approaches! One person chanting "kill the frog, because it is ugly", and another saying "dress the frog up like a cat" does not make for any kind of consensus to do anything but leave the frog alone.

There are other lurking illogical arguments in this triple-repeat CfD that I could address, but this should be enough already to put this to rest, and keep it abed. One of the few things I will come back out of wikiretirement for is to try to stop these attempts to undo the good-faith work of WP:CUE and WP:SNOOKER, which seem to be increasing in number and frequency just because some of their early most active editors are away doing other things and the topic areas seem like easy pickings for people with weird axes to grind. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 08:48, 14 August 2013 (UTC) reply

Reply: If something is actually broken here with this snooker subcat in particular [I address the billiards/pool one below, in reply to Fayenatic london] and needs to be fixed, e.g. we think some things are wrongly categorized, then the obvious, non-destructive solution requiring no big debate just WP:BOLDness, is to simply remove the improper articles from the category and word the category's description a bit more clearly. The end, move on.

Upmerging to Category:Cue sports venues will break the snooker category structure. Snooker is only incidentally a subcategory of cue sports, historically speaking. It is independently and correctly also categorized as a major world sport in its own right, because it is one. Merging a snooker topic into cue sports generally because of their developmental relationship is directly comparable to merging bird topics into dinosaur ones. Snooker basically should never have anything to do with it upmerged into the quasi-parent cue sports category, any more than something to do with rugby league or Australian rules football should be upmerged into the association football category just because of their historical derivation.

I agree with you that "any convention space" is in theory suitable for a snooker tournament, and that such venues should not be categorized here simply for having hosted one or a few of them. You seem to be willfully missing the fact that this is not what either of these subcategories have ever been for, despite me explaining this in great detail. Again, they're primarily for snooker halls and pool/billiards halls, respectively, and very secondarily for the rare case of a multi-purpose venue (theatre, hotel-casino, convention centre, etc.) being so consistently a site for such events that it's become one of the defining characteristics of the venue, as sourced at that venue's article. The only snooker one that qualifies for that is surely the Crucible, which is literally synonymous (in context) with the World Snooker Championship, as already detailed. The other entries in the category should be snooker halls (present or former, as demonstrated by sourced information to this effect in the articles).

To agree again, I don't entirely like the "venues" categorization scheme so much myself. It does lead to trivial-intersection miscategorizations more often than we'd like. But making life difficult for the already under-staffed WP:CUE and WP:SNOOKER projects (almost entirely different editors, BTW) isn't going to fix that, only introduce categorization inconsistencies confusing to both readers and editors. All of the venues categories need to be reexamined as a system/structure for programmatic overhaul, not picked at inconsistently on a topic-by-topic basis. And not on the WP:IDONTLIKEIT nonsense reasons given by some, above.

Reply: Upmerging everything from Category:Billiard halls into Category:Cue sports venues would kill the latter's role as a container cat., and would lump all those billiard/pool hall articles in with Riviera (hotel and casino), which is not a pool/billiards hall. It will blur rather than aid distinction and clarity, and simply reinspire creation of the subcat. to resolve the unnecessary confusion. It is a good thing that Category:Cue sports venues has a container category tag that discourages anyone from adding things except to its subcats, which fork only into snooker (generally) and billiards/pool halls (specifically). This reduces the urge to trivially overcat by adding things like convention centers that have hosted one pool tournament – they fit neither in the parent container cat., nor the subcat.

"Billiard[s]" has multiple meanings (it's even more complicated than "football"), and in the case of Category:Billiard halls it is a principally North American catchall for "cue sports other than snooker". As noted above, snooker is, for everything but historical purposes, an independent sport, treated as such on WP as it is in the media (i.e. "we follow the sources"), so the trend is always for it to have its own articles and categories. Thus snooker hall is likely to be an independent article at some point, as will be snooker ball, snooker cue, snooker table, etc. - there are increasingly well-developed sections at the more generic articles that these already redirect to, and a case could be made for splitting some of them already.) This leaves us asking "what to do with the rest?". Where it makes sense, e.g. categorization of professional players, who rarely jump major disciplines, we put them in separate Category:Carom billiards players and Category:Pool players structures. In other cases, such as billiard/pool halls, there is no clear-cut difference, especially when it comes to historical venues, which is the bulk of the articles in Category:Billiard halls – one would usually need to do a lot of original research to find out whether the place was strictly a billiards hall in the carom sense or strictly a pool hall, or both, and we can't do that. This is also a problem with the notion of deciding that this place can be listed in the category for being notable as a pool hall at some point in its history, but this other one can't. That's blatant OR and PoV-pushing. If the article is on a notable venue, and reliable sources say it was a pool hall/billiard hall, that's good enough to put it in this category, just like Leonard Nimoy can also be categorized as a poet, solider, etc., even if principally notable as an actor, and even if he would almost certainly not have been notable for that other work if he'd not already been notable as an actor. I.e., we cannot make up special, weirdly restrictive rules that only apply to this category and topic. Anyway, in yet other cases, e.g. tables, balls, early history, etc., there's just no reader-helpful reason to fork the articles into separate pool and carom billiards topics.

Generally we prefer natural, real-world usage like "billiard hall" to a made-up phrase like "cue sports hall", if/when it doesn't lead to excessive ambiguity and confusion ( Category:Cue sports, by contrast, is named that, not Category:Billiards, for a reason). If cognitive dissonance remains, and its gist is that Category:Billiard halls also includes pool halls but some people object to including "pool" in a broad definition of "billiards", it would be much preferable to rename that subcat. to Category:Pool and billiard halls than to upmerge it. Upmerging the snooker one would be problematic in even more ways, and would be akin to upmerging some small rugby, Australian rules and American football subcats into the "sideways" parent categories for association football.

Comment But does Wikipedia has enough article to warrant a category? I could find only the following two: Alderaan, Krypton (comics). Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 18:43, 11 August 2013 (UTC) reply

Comment we do have a number of articles on real or suspected destroyed planets. Theia_(planet), and some extra-terrestrial solar system articles, other articles about suspected destroyed planet creating the asteroid belt, Vulcan belt. -- 76.65.128.222 ( talk) 04:20, 16 August 2013 (UTC) reply