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I'm trying to figure out the relationship both between RfCs held for different categories and of an RfC for other existing categories not discussed in the RfC. The main RfC is Category talk:Anti-Semitism#RFC on purging individuals and groups which was closed on 29 July 2014 by User:Sandstein with a decision that there was a lack of consensus and thus an earlier RfC's instructions that for Category:Antisemitism and its various subcategories, "It must not include articles about individuals, groups or media that are allegedly antisemitic".
On the basis of the word media Category:Antisemitic forgeries, Category:Antisemitic publications and Category:Antisemitic canards were removed today from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by User:Kendrick7. None of these categories are subcategories of Category:Antisemitism so I don't see how the RfC applies, although others may differ. Of course, if we remove everything from these categories they would normally be deleted. Actual subcategories that would presumably be emptied and deleted if this continues are for instance Category:Scholars of antisemitism - "it must not include articles about individuals".
Frankly none of this makes sense to me. We can call Hitler an anti-Semite but we can't put him in the category Antisemitism? But I was on the other side of the RfC so I would feel that way of course.
Another related issue is about the subcategory Category:Antisemitism in the United States. At Category talk:Antisemitism in the United States#People should not be in this category an RfC closed slightly earlier than the one above was closed by User:Mdann52 with the consensus that "There is consensus not to remove or specifically exclude all BLP's from this category.". Is that closure made null by the RfC a few weeks later?
"With media the focus is on things like the Guardian newspaper" #headDesk User:Timrollpickering Do you yet see why admins acting on their own shouldn't be allowed to create new policies?? -- Kendrick7 talk 06:07, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
Do we have a category for pages with lists of redlinks, like List of ICD-9 codes 630–679: complications of pregnancy, childbirth, and the puerperium? If not, I think we should create one - hidden, if necessary. Ditto for links in non-article space. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:00, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
Two problems have come up that are causing problems with category redirects:
What's the best way forward to deal with these sorts of messes when they arise? Timrollpickering ( talk) 09:58, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
Currently, WP:PROJCATS divides categories into two main types: "Administrative categories" and "Content categories". The former is also subdivided into "stub categories", "maintenance categories", and several others without explicit names given.
The name "Administrative categories" is problematic. It makes it sound like it is something that only concerns Wikipedia:Administrators. This misconception is reinforced by the Template:Tracking category commonly being followed by Template:Polluted category as at Category:Pages containing cite templates with deprecated parameters.
Perhaps it is a better idea to divide categories into "Maintenance categories" and "Content categories". Then "Maintenance categories" can be subdivided into "stub categories", Wikiproject categories, and so on. Those seem like maintenance categories to me so the semantics is fine under this re-naming. Jason Quinn ( talk) 17:59, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
I've dug into the page history to figure out how we ended up with the present (rather myopic) naming scheme. I learned that originally there was just a distinction of a "maintenance" category from the rest (see this for instance). Things started to change with a massive reworking of Wikipedia:Categorization with this edit (11:13, 26 February 2009 by User:Kotniski) which according to the edit summary was done because nobody replied (after just two days) to their "REWRITE" proposal. Among many changes, this rewrite divided categories into "project" and "content" categories. Later, this edit (03:05, 14 April 2011 by User:Mclay1) renamed the "project" categories to "administrative" categories (without any discussion as far as I can tell). Things fluctuated here and there but for the most part these are the two seminal changes that led to the current scheme.
I've been mulling over this topic for a while but I think the original idea (and my idea posted above) where they are named "maintenance" is still the best. I've tried to get more people to comment here but apparently not many people care. When I feel I've thought this out well enough, I will go ahead and start making some changes. Jason Quinn ( talk) 05:00, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
Is there a consensus as to how things should be handled when, for instance, Ian McKellen has received numerous awards for which there are categories, but the awards he's received are discussed at Ian McKellen, roles and awards? I can think of a few ways this might be handled but am not sure what the prevailing viewpoint is (or if there is one):
Among other things, I'm concerned about issues with WP:CIRCULAR, and I don't personally think readers should have to look at article B to confirm that categories applied to article A are appropriate.
Thanks for your input! DonIago ( talk) 15:46, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
I just created Category:Authors and writers external links templates and populated it. With for example {{ Gutenberg author}}. However Gutenberg author and many others are not showing up, staying in the parent cat of Category:People and person external link templates. It seems to have maxed out at 7 entries. I notice the other sub-cat to Category:People and person external link templates, Category:Canada politics and government external link templates, is also maxed out at 7 entries (though maybe its natural number, just suspiciously the same). Is 7 a bug, or feature? -- Green C 15:39, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Look at Category:Health ministries. You'll find two groups of entries under the letter I - one in the usual place, and another one between D and E just containing Ireland. I've checked that both 'I's are in fact the same Unicode character, so what's happening? Colonies Chris ( talk) 09:32, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
is it possible? here's an example: replacing the link to category with a category transclusion in Copernicus Publications#See also. Thanks. Fgnievinski ( talk) 04:40, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
I just saw someone changing a category from Medieval Scottish saints to Medieval Roman Catholic Scottish saints at Saint Ninian and noticed he is now in 7 'Saint' categories. Does this make sense? Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 09:09, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
I don't understand why categories like Category:Romanian toponyms are not allowed. Since Category:Slavic toponyms and Category:Latin place names, why it can't be another one for Romanian, another for German and so on?
Where can I gather together Romanian language toponyms like Păltiniș Păltinișu, Peșteana, Peştera (disambiguation) and other disambiguation pages like that? At least can I make a list with them?
I have read Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2012 November 26 and Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2012_November_13#Category:Norwegian_toponyms but I don't see any valid reason to remove such categories.
If a name like Banka is used in both Slovakia and India, it can be put in both Category:Slovak toponyms and Category:Hindi toponyms. If a name belongs to many languages (like Alba), then it can be added to categories in a invisible manner, so it won't bother the reader with too many categories. — Ark25 ( talk) 04:43, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
Input from editors familiar with categorization is requested at Talk:Paddle steamer#Category:Ship types. Mitch Ames ( talk) 05:32, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
The above-mentioned disagreement has been resolved, by reference to WP:EPONYMOUS. However it does highlight the fact that the WP:EPONYMOUS exception to the general rule of WP:SUBCAT is not mentioned in SUBCAT or the first paragraph of WP:CAT#Categorizing pages (as non-diffusing categories are). I suggest that it should be. Thus I propose the following changes to Wikipedia:Categorization:
Categorizing pages
... In addition, each categorized page should be placed in all of the most specific categories to which it logically belongs. This means that if a page belongs to a subcategory of C (or a subcategory of a subcategory of C, and so on) then it is not normally placed directly into C. For exceptions to this rule, see Eponymous categories and Non-diffusing subcategories below.
...
Subcategorization
...
A page or category should rarely be placed in both a category and a subcategory or parent category (supercategory) of that category (unless the child category is non-diffusing – see below – or eponymous). ...
Support, comments or objections? Mitch Ames ( talk) 12:09, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
I suggest a new category, some of the following
etc Please help me at HH Ferry route, cannot find a suitable category. Boeing720 ( talk) 22:44, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
The following statement has been in the guideline for a long time:
This statement is completely on the contrary to how the vast majority of our categorisation system works. For example, look at the subcategories and article content in Category:Perth, Western Australia. Category:Perth, Western Australia-related lists, Category:Swan Coastal Plain, Category:Crime in Perth, Western Australia: none of these are Australian capital cities, or Cities in Western Australia or Coastal cities in Australia (the parents of the given category). Effectively, this guideline suggests that even set categories on a topic (like "People from foo") should not be in the topic category ("foo") as they will almost never share the features of the parent category.
This statement should be removed from the guideline because it is completely unrepresentative of our categorisation system. We overlap the various categories when they have a parent-child semantic relationship – by design you can get to the "People in CityX, CountryY" category by going through the "Cities in CountryY" category. That's what we've all come to expect and the implementation of the above (highly restrictive) guideline's categorisation method would profoundly change the structure of today's Wikipedia. SFB 02:21, 18 January 2015 (UTC)
Category:Lakes in Foobelongs in
Category:Fooand
Category:Lakes(b) No -
Category:Foobelongs in
Category:Fooistan(the country) (and there are also "Wikipedia categories named after ..." categories) and article
Foobelongs in
Category:Cities in Fooistan,
Category:Capital citiesetc (as well as its eponymous category). The point is that there are some categories that are appropriate as parents of Foo, but not appropriate as parents of Category:Foo. Another example: the RAF article belongs in Category:1918 establishments in the United Kingdom, but the RAF category does not belong in a 1918 category (as that would have the effect of putting every RAF squadron in the 1918 category).
Subcategorization
A tree structure showing the possible hierarchical organization of an encyclopedia. Items may belong to more than one category, but normally not to a category and its parent (there are, however, exceptions to this rule, such as non-diffusing categories). An item may belong to several subcategories of a parent category (as pictured). If logical membership of one category implies logical membership of a second, then the first category should be made a subcategory (directly or indirectly) of the second. For example, Cities in France is a subcategory of Populated places in France, which in turn is a subcategory of Geography of France.
Many subcategories have two or more parent categories. For example, Category:British writers should be in both Category:Writers by nationality and Category:British people by occupation. When making one category a subcategory of another, ensure that the
members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions) to belong to the parent also.main article of the subcategory will be a valid member of the parent category. Category chains formed by parent-child relationships should never form closed loops; that is, no category should be contained as a subcategory of one of its own subcategories. If two categories are closely related but are not in a subset relation, then links between them can be included in the text of the category pages.A page or category should rarely be placed in both a category and a subcategory or parent category (supercategory) of that category (unless the child category is non-diffusing – see below – or eponymous). For example, the article "Paris" need only be placed in "Category:Cities in France", not in both "Category:Cities in France" and "Category:Populated places in France". Since the first category (cities) is in the second category (populated places), readers are already given the information that Paris is a populated place in France by it being a city in France.
Note also that as stub templates are for maintenance purposes, not user browsing (see #Wikipedia administrative categories above), they do not count as categorization for the purposes of Wikipedia's categorization policies. An article which has a "stubs" category on it must still be filed in the most appropriate content categories, even if one of them is a direct parent of the stubs category in question.
This
edit request to
Wikipedia:Categorization has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
There is a typo: on one occurrence you have "sub-category" instead of "stub-category".
2.125.15.86 ( talk) 09:20, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
I've noticed that some categories completely lack any visible parent categories, seemingly making them uncategorized, except they contain hidden maintenance categories as parents. This completely breaks navigation by category tree, since these categories are unreachable from the root category by descent (you'd have to ascend from some shared subcategory, if any shared subcategories exist)
Category:Wikipedia categories named after Canadian musicians exhibits this anomalous behaviour, where the categorized categories lack any visible parents and only have this maintenance category. Since them categories contained are not maintenance categories themselves, but content categories, this seems wrong.
-- 65.94.40.137 ( talk) 05:54, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
The categories that would normally belong on the article page, are on the category page only.
One exception and that being
Category:Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. I reversed it putting the categories on the article page but then got reverted
[4] claiming a talk page consensus[Talk:Sea Shepherd Conservation Society/Archive 12.]. The discussion is lengthy but fact is I have never seen an instance of this, categories only on the category page and not the article page before. Is [[Sea Shepherd Conservation Society}} wrong?
...William 13:13, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
What is the best way to categorize alumni so that there is a clickable link in the main article for the school? I have been using the first method, but in the past others have removed it, saying the school is not an alumni. Of course it isn't, it is there to be the header for the category list and provide a clickable way to get to the list from the school page. -- Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) ( talk) 21:33, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
If I understand your question, you're wondering how to properly link the alumni category within the article on the school, correct? #2 is the only acceptable option of the three you've listed, and you should also use {{ cat main}} on the category's description page to link back to the school article. If there is also a standalone alumni list as well as an alumni category (and please don't use confuse us by using "list" to refer to the contents of a category), then that list should be categorized by the alumni category with a blank sortkey, and then include a link to the list in the school article. postdlf ( talk) 21:41, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
There used to be three columns on category pages, but now i only see one at Category:Bandy clubs by year of establishment, which makes it strange. Am I the only one to see this? Is it a problem with my browser? 78.78.1.90 ( talk) 09:48, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
WP:SUBCAT currently says "ensure that the members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions) to belong to the parent also" and (very reasonably) an editor has asked for clarification. An example of where this applies is Category:British military personnel of World War II - it is (via several intermediate categories) under Category:British people, but there are a few people ( example) who were in the British military but were not a British person. This seems a reasonable exception to me. Has anybody got any good other examples and/or ideas about how to explain this simply in the guideline ? Note: The discussion immediately above this and the (now archived) recent long discussion are also concerned with SUBCAT. DexDor ( talk) 07:22, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
Hi, when adding categories to articles, should we be adding categories that aren't literal? For instance, here a category was added for "People from Bristol" in an article that is about a website run by a person from Bristol. The website obviously is not a person. I've seen this sort of thing before, for instance where there might be a robot character in a cartoon series, and a "Robots in fiction" category might be added. The series is not a robot. Can someone help spoonfeed this to me? Thanks, Cyphoidbomb ( talk) 22:00, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
About Wikipedia:Categorization#Eponymous_categories. I still can do not understand the explanation as it is given. Maybe more examples could help (including red don'ts), from a simple set. I can point to these confusing elements for sure:
@DePiep, the section is talking about its difficulties; there is a natural tendency to think of a category A as a concrete thing 'a', but it's not.
-- Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 14:26, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
In the category Category:American alternate history novels, there are subcategories which are Series of novels set in the same Alternate Universe. Should these be diffusing or non-diffusing. I'm trying to figure out whether (for example) 1634: The Baltic War which is in the subcat Category:1632 series books should be in the parent as well. Naraht ( talk) 10:18, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
This is one of those can of worms. I see Category:Force feeding has recently been created and been given the same cats as Force feeding, namely Cruelty to Animals, Nutrition and Torture. Now I can sort of see why the article gets the Torture cat as that's a main focus of it - but articles such as Pliers and Electricity don't get the cat. But the category is currently all about its use in food production - the foie gras article and so on. Such uses may not be nice but they are legal in many countries, unlike torture. My feeling is that the torture cat should be removed from Category:Force feeding but it's the kind of area where I'd hesitate to step without some discussion first. Le Deluge ( talk) 11:41, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography#Categorising by place of burial for a follow-up discussion after my recent close on Burials by city. – Fayenatic L ondon 09:56, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
There is a discussion going on at Category talk:Treaties extended to Christmas Island about the inclusion of categories in multiple levels of parents, contrary to the WP:SUBCAT's "A page or category should rarely be placed in both a category and a subcategory or parent category ... ". Editors interested in categorization are invited to comment there. Mitch Ames ( talk) 13:20, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
In Category:Western Europe, some countries as listed directly in the category, some are listed as subcategories, and some are listed as both. Which is the correct categorization? Kaldari ( talk) 00:17, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
I would encourage editors to vote at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 January 17#Category:Buildings and structures in Western Australia by road & all subcategories on whether it is a good idea to categorise buildings by street. – Fayenatic L ondon 15:04, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
Recently I had added, Category:20th century in music to those pages where it belonged. Although I have been questioned by one of the editor who referred me to WP:SUBCAT and told that if 1998 in music has Category:1998 in music, then there's no need to add Category:20th century in music.
He must be correct. Although we have articles such as 1998 in Ireland, they are having categories about not only the particular year but also the decade and the century. OccultZone ( Talk • Contributions • Log) 15:10, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
@ P64, Sillyfolkboy, and Debresser: I would like a more specific answer. 1998 in music should be
-- Magioladitis ( talk) 09:29, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Thoughts? Where we have: a) Category:Opera; and below it b) (sub)Categories:Opera by composer, is that a diffusing category? Tx. -- Epeefleche ( talk) 17:03, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Greetings, Today I added Category cleanup templates subsection which contains comments about templates for improving an article with not enough, too many, incorrect templates. The Category unknown title was added above the existing Uncategorized sentence. Most of these templates I have used occasionally while doing article assessments. While there may be more templates available, these should be the ones most helpful to new editors. Regards, JoeHebda ( talk) 00:24, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
where is a guideline which describes how to handle Category:Container categories and how to depopulate categories?
Case:
in the case there is no such guideline, please help me to resolve the disagreement with @ Monochrome Monitor: -M.Altenmann >t 15:44, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
Sorry, I was probably was unclear about the question. Let me clarify. Is it a correct solution to delete the article from the category to which tree it clearly belongs? For comarison, suppose some "overcategarized" category is to be deleted. We don'r simple remove this category tag from articles. We put this category somewhere else in the category tree.
IMO this issue must be clearly written in the policy, because there are plenty of people armed with twinkle mop work hard of "cleaning" wikipedia without applying common sense. In old times there were zealots who reverted important additions with edit "incorrect English"/"poor grammar". And the explanation that this is an invalid reason was added to policies, despite it being pretty obvious to people with a grain of common sense.-M.Altenmann >t 15:24, 3 June 2015 (UTC)
This is in regard to the categories Category:Unincorporated communities in New Jersey and Category:Unincorporated communities in New Jersey by county. If we have one parent category, for instance, the Category:Unincorporated communities in New Jersey category with 940+ entries, this would help serve as a guide for those searching for individual locations within the state (like a glossary). As for the Category:Unincorporated communities in New Jersey by county, not all readers may know what county a specific location is in. I find that both work for helpful navigation, even if some believe it is not necessary. To be consistent with states in the U.S., see the subcategories in Category:Unincorporated communities in the United States by state, where practically all, except a couple Northeast states, have a parent category and multiple subcategories. NJ should not be any exception. Plus it will be time consuming to delete the already included categories added to the pages. Thewildone85 ( talk) 20:21, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
You said the state-level categories are a "disorganized mess", yet they are auto-sorted alphabetically. That's not disorganization at all. And the easy solution to the separation of the CDPs from the unincorporated communities is to make the CDPs a subcategory, as a CDP is a type of unincorporated community. Category:Populated places in New Jersey should contain every populated place in the state, but only as a container category. postdlf ( talk) 15:46, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Given that WP:SUBCAT clearly excludes the dual categorization by both county and state, why should it be done here? Any suggestions of a policy basis for its use here? Alansohn ( talk) 20:01, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Should this be happening? Category:2000s American animated films is not a child of Category:American films, but it would be better to do that than add a redundant category to all of the other films. 208.81.212.222 ( talk) 17:30, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
Two weeks ago, above, User:Redrose64 linked a section of Ser Amantio user talk by its section heading "Please stop". Next day the link was broken by User:Walter Görlitz who changed that heading to "Please continue" [6].
Maybe-relevant talk sections, 2015 only:
-- P64 ( talk) 15:45, 27 June 2015 (UTC)
If Mercury (planet) were the *only* Mercury article which had a Category based on it, should the category for the Planet have the disambiguation in the name? Naraht ( talk) 14:46, 29 June 2015 (UTC)
The terms of what makes a category "diffusing" or "non-diffusing" are still opaque to me—I get the gist, especially re: nationalities, gender, etc., but not with the edge cases. Is Category:Video games based on films a diffusing category? I would think that it would be fine to be included in just Category:Video games based on films directed by George Miller rather than that and its parent, no? (Side note: why would an article need to be in both Category:Wii games and Category:Wii-only games?) – czar 20:00, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
Right now Category:Pseudoarchaeology is a child of Category:Pseudoscience. This is wrong as archaeology is not considered a science in the English speaking world, being taught either as part of the humanities or the social sciences. What's the process for getting this done? Doug Weller ( talk) 13:45, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
[[Category:Pseudoscience
and remove from that up to the next ]]
inclusive. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 13:53, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
<!--DO NOT delete this category-->
--
Redrose64 (
talk) 22:33, 1 August 2015 (UTC)In response to non-article pages may get added to the category: When using templates to add pages to categories, it may be helpful to test using code to check the namespace of the page transcluding the template, perhaps something like
{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|{{ns:0}}|<!-- in article/main namespace -->[[Category:Category name]]|<!-- in another namespace -->}}
, before committing a template to auto-categorize.
Or, for a userbox:
{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|{{ns:2}}|<!-- in User namespace -->[[Category:Category name]]|<!-- in another namespace -->}}
Ref. mw:Help:Magic words#Namespaces, mw:Help:Magic words#Namespaces 2. Slivicon ( talk) 15:18, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
{{
main other}}
and {{
user other}}
to do exactly that. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 15:26, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
In respect of the discussion on Burgher sportspeople I find the current guideline lacking on what I believe is a generally followed practice in categorisation:
This is, to say, that the topic isn't one which is an entirely new creation through Wikipedia. The only pertinent part of the guideline I could reference for that was the section on defining characteristics. However, this deals with whether a category should be applied to a subject, not whether a category on that subject merits creation in the first place. User:Obi2canibe cites the guideline diffusion of large categories as a relevant reason for creating subcategories on topics which have no real world application, and there is some precedent of doing this.
I've seen plenty of discussion of whether categories should be subject to a notability check on an article (i.e. "is this relevant to the person's notability" – the purpose of "defining characteristics") but I haven't seen any discussions applying WP:Notability to the creation of categories themselves. Have I missed something here? SFB 21:34, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Category:Container categories is defined as "subcats only". How to proceed with situations when there is a single page, which from my understanding is eponymous, such as the following:
Slivicon ( talk) 16:04, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
Hello, should the Category:Disused railway stations in Croydon be a sub cat of Category:Former buildings and structures in Croydon (as defunct schools currently is)? At present it does not appear as a sub cat. Thanks. Eagleash ( talk) 14:42, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
Hey guys, I just went to go and look for a category for male film directors, but saw that we didn't have any. I noticed that we did have a category for women film directors ( Category:American women film directors), but that male directors go in just the general category. Given the amount of flack we got over not having a category for male novelists, I think that it'd be a good idea to do this with directors as well before someone catches on and we get more hell from the media. I haven't the foggiest how to get this started other than posting here, though. Tokyogirl79 (。◕‿◕。) 08:21, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
Is there an efficient method for determining articles included within a project that are in 1 to 3 categories? I've realized lately that undercategorized articles may be a minor issue in that it could be the reason why some articles get less attention (reading and editing) than they should. I could probably use AWB to go through the article list and do a regex skip for articles with 4 or more categories, but if there's an easier approach, I'd rather use that. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 16:05, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
Is there any systematicity in when categories should be non-diffusing more than "Subcategories defined by gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality should almost always be non-diffusing subcategories."? -- JorisvS ( talk) 09:41, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
template:Images has been proposed for deletion, see Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2015_October_12#Template:Images -- this is a category description template -- 70.51.44.60 ( talk) 03:44, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
WP:SORTKEY's allowance for template categorization seems to contradict what's written at WP:CAT#T. I'm assuming WP:CAT#T would have priority but perhaps we should remove "(tau, displays as "Τ") is for templates" from WP:SORTKEY to avoid confusion. -- œ ™ 06:35, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
The WP:DIFFUSE section does not give a reason for or purpose of diffusion of large categories. In essence it doesn't really have any substance other than "categories are divided up by topic". Anyone care to rectify that? SFB 22:09, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
IMHO, "diffusion" should only be used by orthogonal categories. Wikipedia is on a "categorize everything" binge, I fear. Collect ( talk) 16:14, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
This is mostly for the editor TonyTheTiger, but mostly concerns categories, so this text seemed to belong mostly to this category page.
greetings Tony,
This concerns whether the Chris Young article should be double categorized in the parent category Princeton University Alumni in addition to being properly categorized in child subcategories e.g. Princeton Tigers Athletes.
Your view was No -- see here. (I put a note there, pointing Tony to this talk page.)
Yes, 'the general rule [is] that pages are not placed in both a category and its subcategory ... .'
However, 'non-diffusing subcategories ... provide an exception to the general rule ... ' (same source), such that a page should be placed, or can be placed, in both the category and its subcategory.
Such exception seems to apply to the article at issue (Chris Young), based on the following reasoning:
A Diffusing Subcategory seems to mean a subcategory created to reduce the size of the parent category. 'Diffusing large categories[:] a large category will often be broken down ("diffused") into smaller specific subcategories.' source (with italics added)
A Non-Diffusing Subcategory seems to mean a subcategory created for some reason other than size-reduction, e.g. to highlight some 'some special characteristic of interest'. source
Princeton Tigers Athletes appears to:
- have been created not to reduce the size of Princeton University Alumni, but rather to highlight some special characteristic, i.e. Princeton University athletes
- therefore be a Non-Diffusing Subcategory.
Therefore the article at issue, Chris Young, seems like it should be included in both the parent category Princeton University Alumni and in the Non-Diffusing Subcategory Princeton Tigers Athletes.
Another reason for such double inclusion is that the public might not immediately know that Princeton Tigers is part of Princeton University, because e.g. the wording is 'Princeton Tigers', not 'Princeton University Tigers', and conceivably 'Princeton Tigers' could be a team of e.g. Princeton township, not Princeton University.
Maybe this proposed chain of logic is flawed. What do you think? Thanks.
Bo99 ( talk) 15:45, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
update: TonyTheTiger replied
here.
Bo99 (
talk) 21:14, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
(this notice x-posted to the Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories page as well)
A user has placed a request for renaming all of the video game console generations pages (eg, History of video game consoles (third generation) → Third generation of video game consoles).
These pages are used to categorize eras in video gaming history not only on Wikipedia but due to what some believe is a documentable case of citogenesis, has probably helped form a standard naming convention outside of Wikipedia as well. So these pages have some level of influence and visibility beyond this site.
The reason I'm here is that the current structure of the category names is likely flawed and not up to Wikipedia standard, but historically this often becomes a contentious change debating semantics (the last time this came up it sure did) and I believe that if it's going to be changed it should be changed to a Wikipedia standard form. I just want this current vote to have high enough visibility to get a clear consensus so that we're not back here in a couple of years when the next new crop of editors decides they have a better way to phrase the category titles.
So I'm bringing this debate to a greater audience so we can hear your thoughts and help us video game editors in the process. Thanks for your attention and I hope to see your thoughts on this vote. BcRIPster ( talk) 01:08, 14 November 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I've written an article on Easy Listening Satanic music which I would very much like to remain on Wikipedia. Is it possible that it might be included in the general music category or perhaps easy listening?
Rev. Reynolds — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rev. Reynolds ( talk • contribs) 20:04, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
If you have been on WP long enough, you have probably seen at least one endless debate about whether Person X should be categorized by a given nationality, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. Such debates can get quite heated.
It seems that there is a natural desire to establish that a notable person is "one of us" (or to establish the negative version of this - that the notable person is not "one of them")... I get that... however, far too often no one involved in the debate asks the more fundamental question: "Is X's nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation (etc) worth categorizing in the first place? Is being an <insert your nationality, ethnicity or religious affiliation here> really a defining characteristic of person X?"
Note I am not saying that a person's nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation (etc) is never defining... for some bio subjects it can be. However, I don't think this is true in every case. I think we need more clarification as to when a person's nationality, ethnicity or religious affiliation should be considered defining (and thus categorized) and, more importantly, when it isn't defining (and thus not categorized). Please share your thoughts.
Blueboar (
talk) 14:18, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
WP:SUBCAT has long included this: When making one category a subcategory of another, ensure that the members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions{{clarify-inline|date=April 2014|reason=what are these exceptions and where would one find a list and/or explanation of each}}) to belong to the parent also.
The section which I have shown in italics was removed on 24 June 2015 by user:Bilorv.
IMHO it should be reinstated. I doubt that a comprehensive set of detailed principles could be produced for this, but common sense should suffice. Cases of dispute could be discussed on the talk page of the sub-cat, or somewhere centralised if there were broader issues. – Fayenatic L ondon 09:34, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
I saw a bunch of boys choirs in Category:Men in the United States. I think that category is a bit too general to have boys choirs in it. I think there are two possible solutions: create a specific American subcategory of Category:Boys' and men's choirs and put the article in there and that category in Category:Men in the United States, or simply delete that category. Opinions, other ideas? Debresser ( talk) 07:37, 13 January 2016 (UTC)
Further to an ongoing discussion at Category talk:Southern Levant, I would like to propose adding a clarifying sentence to WP:SUBCAT, along the lines of:
Please could editors confirm if they agree with this? It's purpose is to ensure the guidance is in plain English and even more difficult to misunderstand.
Oncenawhile ( talk) 12:55, 13 January 2016 (UTC)
I'm currently involved in a debate about whether or not politicans who received criminal convictions before their political careers began ought to be included in Category:Politicians convicted of crimes. I've no strong opinion on the matter but amn't happy with the disparity I've seen. A list of US politicians with criminal convictions stipulates they committed their crimes while in office, while the only countries I've seen that include politicans whose convictions precede their political careers are Ireland and South Africa. Both of these countries have had recent conflicts, which introduces a more fraught note to discussions. Gob Lofa ( talk) 15:49, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Misuse of categories is rampant, alas, on Wikipedia. IMHO, such categories should be restricted to only those politicians whose crimes were specifically related to their careers in politics - that an MP was convicted of drunk driving as a youth is useless as far as categorizing the adult as a "criminal". Collect ( talk) 19:53, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
[[od}}It may be me but I can't see an agreement here which reflects on the edit war here. Can we try and get a one time resolution? Adding Irish politicians as a category is contentious. I can see the argument (and have some political sympathy with it). One solution is to get rid of British and Irish from the links. ---- Snowded TALK 18:31, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
This
edit request to
Wikipedia:Categorization has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
111.118.248.6 ( talk) 14:46, 16 February 2016 (UTC) AJAY SIR PLS PLS MILO NA
An editor has proposed and partially implemented a novel system of ordering entries in categories for river drainage basins. For an explanation of the system, see the headnote at Category:Thames drainage basin.
Although WP:SORTKEY does not claim to be an exhaustive list of possible sorting methods, the proposed system seems out of line with the guidelines there, because it relies on numbers (and letters) which are not part of article titles. It seems to me that the system makes it much more difficult to use the categories as navigational aids. For a discussion see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Rivers#Sorting_in_drainage_basin_categories.
Any views?-- Mhockey ( talk) 21:32, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
Is there any guidance to what order the categories should be on a particular page? For example, first the Eponymous categories and then alphabetical? Also, does this same guidance (alphabetical) apply for the categories that a category is subcatted in? Naraht ( talk) 20:14, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
From the latest "Tech News":
Future changes
Reposting here so that editors interested in category sorting are more likely to see it. -- John of Reading ( talk) 03:25, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
{{
Deaths in century}}
, and the code for that template includes the line [[Category:Deaths by year|#{{#ifexpr:{{{1|5}}}<9|0|}}{{#expr:{{{1|5}}}+1}}]]
{{#ifexpr:
on, the important thing is that |#
immediately after the cat name which forces transcluding pages to sort under "#". Forced sortkeys like this should not change behaviour, it's those that use default sort keys - such as if you used [[Category:Deaths by year]]
We have a vast body of precedent that sub-cats may have shifts in topic, e.g. as discussed at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Categories#A_big_problem_with_our_category_structures. E.g. Category:Food- and drink-related organizations cannot be ingested, yet the latter is an accepted sub-category of Category:Food and drink.
I recently asked James Michael DuPont ( talk) why he set up Category:Open content companies as "not a subcat of Category:Open content". He replied that "a company is a subcat of company, not of content"… "Just because it is related to does not make it a sub category" and referred me to the mathematical article Subcategory. When I countered with the food example, he asked whether this is policy.
At present, the guidance WP:SUBCAT does not seem to cover the shifts in meaning to closely related topics. I propose that it be rewritten to match longstanding practice in English Wikipedia.
CN1, would you be able to help, please? – Fayenatic L ondon 22:35, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
That kind of bizarrely rigid misunderstanding of categories comes up like spring weeds every year. The category system is created and maintained by editors, primarily to facilitate navigation, and to connect related articles and topics. It is not and never has been a strict classificatory hierarchy. We do no one any favors by imposing arbitrary roadblocks and deadends in this system just to satisfy some ultimately unrelated concept such as what is "mathematically" proper (I've also heard we "must" do it a certain way "because set theory"). Doing it that way, we'd end up with thousands of disconnected little category ladders you could only go up and down rather than a network that connects everything. postdlf ( talk) 23:57, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
A big part of the category system already consists of topic categories.
Fayenatic is right when he says that despite their importance and presence, they are mentioned very little in the category policy page and we need to formulate guidelines for how to use them or at least a description of them.
@
Fayenatic london: The following is what I imagine for a paragraph in
Wikipedia:Categorization#Category_tree_organization.
Topic categories
Topic categories are categories in which the relationship between its subcategories and themselves is't an is-a relationship, but a belongs-to relationship.
The presence of an is-a relationship can be objectively determined but it is not so easy to assess if a belongs-to relationship is justified.
Every belongs-to relationship has to be assessed individually.
This is why it's always a good first step to identify the nature of the subcategories in question, which means to ask if they are themselves a topic or a set category.
Questionable belongs-to relationship
CN1 ( talk) 18:14, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
In the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey, the 5th most popular proposal was numerical sorting in categories (for example, sort 99 before 100). The WMF Community Tech team is ready to implement this, but a pre-requisite for the change is that we must switch English Wikipedia's category collation from "uppercase" (a simple collation algorithm that sorts strings based on character values, but considers uppercase and lowercase letters the same) to "uca-default" (which is based on the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA), the official standard for how to sort Unicode characters). The most noticeable difference is that UCA groups characters with diacritics with the their non-diacritic versions. So, for example, English Wikipedia currently sorts Aztec, Ärsenik, Zoo, Aardvark as "Aardvark, Aztec, Zoo, Ärsenik", but UCA collation would sort them as "Aardvark, Ärsenik, Aztec, Zoo" (with Aardvark, Ärsenik, and Aztec grouped under a single "A" heading, instead of under 2 separate headings). There are numerous other advantages to using UCA collation, but they are a bit technical to discuss, so I'll refer you to the documentation instead: [10] [11] [12]. If you would like to experiment with UCA collation, go to https://ssl.icu-project.org/icu-bin/collation.html. Set the collation to "und (type=standard)" (the default) and turn on numeric sorting in the settings. If anyone has any concerns or questions about switching to UCA, please reply here or in the Phabricator ticket. Thanks! Ryan Kaldari (WMF) ( talk) 00:24, 25 May 2016 (UTC)
|listas=
is not set in those, therefore the uppercase algorithm currently applies on those. If I remember correctly, UCI handles every variant of dash/hyphen, single quote marks and few others as separate charachters, so DEFAULTSORT will still need to be set for those cases. Depending on what "switch" is set in the UCI algorithm, de Gaule, De Gaule, de-Gaule and De-Gaule will be sorted in different orders. Other wikis have already changed to UCI. French is one of them.
Bgwhite (
talk) 06:22, 25 May 2016 (UTC)According to WP:Categorization#Subcategorization:
When making one category a subcategory of another, ensure that the members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions) to belong to the parent also.
However, geography categories don't seem to follow that rule. For example, Category:Rivers of Austria contains Category:Danube, which contains (indirectly but correctly) Aljmaš, Croatia; however, Aljmaš, Croatia doesn't belong in Category:Rivers of Austria. An other example: Category:Geography of Massachusetts contains (indirectly) Category:Boston, Massachusetts, which includes Category:People from Boston, Massachusetts - even though a person isn't part of the geography. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 15:11, 8 June 2016 (UTC)
What is the minimal number of items in a category? -- Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) ( talk) 17:34, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
Since well-over half of all articles contained in Category:GA-Class Animation articles seem to be about The Simpsons, and probably at least a quarter of the remaining articles are about either Family Guy or South Park, I feel that it would be beneficial to create subcategories focused on each of these shows. Would this be appropriate? I'm not familiar with the general guidelines on how to structure "GA-Class" categories. Ideally, I'd like to see all of the articles related to these three shows removed from the parent category and placed solely within their respective subcategories - that way, it would be easier to see which animation articles about other topics have attained GA status. I've skimmed through a handful of Help / Guideline pages about categories, but haven't seen anything written on the topic. Can someone point me to the relevant page, if it happens to exist, or if it doesn't, could someone let me know whether there are steps that I should take before moving stuff around (aside from simply consulting with the relevant WikiProjects)? Should I bring it to WP:Categories for Discussion or is that strictly for "renaming, merging, and deletion"? Also, since it seems that all GA articles within WP:Animation are automatically added to Category:GA-Class Animation articles, would it even be possible to remove the articles on Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park from the category, without also removing them from the WikiProject? -- Jpcase ( talk) 19:55, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
{{
WikiProject Animation|class=GA}}
perhaps with some other parameters. Similarly,
Category:Stub-Class Animation articles contains talk pages which bear {{
WikiProject Animation|class=stub}}
; and
Category:GA-Class The Simpsons articles contains talk pages which bear {{
WikiProject The Simpsons|class=GA}}
. These categories exist to indicate the intersection between a WikiProject and an article's class. It's all part of the way that WikiProject banner templates work. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 23:15, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
{{
WikiProject Animation}}
puts pages in subcategories of
Category:Animation articles by quality; and if |family-guy=yes
is set, the pages are also put in subcategories of
Category:Family Guy articles by quality, but are not taken out of the subcategories of
Category:Animation articles by quality.{{
WikiProject The Simpsons}}
is the banner for a separate WikiProject, and it puts pages in subcategories of
Category:The Simpsons articles by quality but not in subcategories of
Category:Animation articles by quality, so any page that is in a subcategory of
Category:The Simpsons articles by quality and of
Category:Animation articles by quality must have both WikiProject banners.{{
WikiProject Animation}}
is redundant if {{
WikiProject The Simpsons}}
is present, but that's a decision for
WT:WikiProject Animation and they may well say that The Simpsons does fall within their purview. It's a well established convention that each WikiProject reserves the right to set its own boundaries, even where they overlap significantly with those of another. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 08:46, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
WP:CATDEF currently states that "The order in which categories are placed on a page is not governed by any single rule (for example, it does not need to be alphabetical, although partially alphabetical ordering can sometimes be helpful). Normally the most essential, significant categories appear first."
I would like to see it changed to something like "Although no single rule governs the order in which categories are placed on a page, alphanumeric order is useful for placing the categories into a coherent order. An exception is when a leading category is equal to or is closely associated with the name or subject of an article."
I am suggesting this from my exposure to cognitive psychology & user interface design (besides the classes for my Library & Information Studies MS degree, I have worked in IT for 25+ years & am also a former university reference librarian). I find that Chunking (psychology) is very useful to organizing information. The lack of any order among categories is chaotic & makes it difficult for a reader to follow. As one of the simplest forms of chunking, alphanumeric order is a basic & effective solution to this problem.
Peaceray ( talk) 16:52, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
Is this category acceptable? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Atsme ( talk • contribs) 3:05, 11 September 2016 (UTC)
I have created, and requested template changes to populate, two new tracking categories. Like Category:All articles with topics of unclear notability, these categories combine all the entries from corresponding month-by-month tracking categories in one category. One use for this is to allow the use of Special:RandomInCategory across all tracked months at once, though there are certainly other uses. The new categories are:
— swpb T 13:00, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
As previously discussed on this talk page, we’re going to change the algorithm for how sorting works in categories, as a step on the way to be able to get numerical sorting. We plan to do this today August 29, around 18:00 UTC. We expect the maintenance script will take about 24 hours to run, during which sorting will be a bit unreliable. / Johan (WMF) ( talk) 13:14, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
{{
RTisza}}
. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 16:57, 20 September 2016 (UTC)
What about replacing the sort-key numerals with, say, Greek letters: α for direct tributaries, β for secondary ones, and so on? (Vaguely similar to their use in chemical nomenclature to indicate the point of attachment of substituents relative to a functional group.) I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard for a bot or AWB to make such replacements in the affected categories.— Odysseus 147 9 00:49, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
Please don't be patronising Someone has erred by making a change without thinking through the implications. This change hasn't just affected rivers. For a start, the changes have also screwed up hundreds of locomotive class articles worldwide in various locomotive categories, for instance: Category:Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft locomotives, Category:Imperial Royal Austrian State Railways steam locomotives, Category:Caledonian Railway locomotives and Category:Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway locomotives. The change has clearly had a major negative impact that wasn't envisaged and should be reverted while we find a way to accommodate everyone's all requirements. Bermicourt ( talk) 14:06, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
P.S. Oh and it also seems to have messed up categories of military units e.g. Category:Infantry regiments of the United States Army and Category:Infantry regiments of France... -- Bermicourt ( talk) 14:27, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
P.P.S. ... and political article categories e.g. Category:New Jersey legislative districts and Category:Arrondissements of Paris. Bermicourt ( talk) 14:35, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
|049
was previously placed under the 0 heading;
Caledonian Railway 179 Class under 1, because of its sortkey |179
. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 09:42, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Please don't call them headers-- They are 'subheadings', OK.
Changing the sorting back to how it was before-- I do not propose to change back into sort-by -digit. I support keeping the sorting by numerical value.
Keeping the current sort order but splitting a category page into ranges of 100 (or whatever) ...-- Splitting the numbers into numerical headings (like 100, 200) sure would need a code change, but that does not make the proposal invalid. imo, it would be an improvement (and I do think this solves the current discontent people mention). - DePiep ( talk) 00:40, 14 November 2016 (UTC), edited - DePiep ( talk) 10:02, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
I propose that WP:CAT should include the following subsection, under 2. Creating category pages:
2.1 Content
Category pages are not article pages, so in general should not include text describing the subject of the category, except where required to help define the contents of the category as described in Creating category pages. Instead, hatnotes such as {{ Cat main}} should direct the reader to the relevant article.
A few current examples that I think need cleaning up:
And a previous example, which has now been cleaned up:
What do other editors think? Mitch Ames ( talk) 08:12, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
Misunderstandings of categories and category mainspace are so intertwined in the history of wikipedia in the last 10 years, I think this is a fairly limited approach to a more complex issue:
Some readers are likely to be quite perplexed at the subject and contents differentiation, and I believe to complicate as to which is which would create situations where arguments and potential conflicts would arise, where the creation of the distinction is in the end of no particular help in the long run.
For a project or subject area to have an editor keen on clarifying the context or background of the category I believe does not harm the main space of a category. I believe the allowance for editorial comments on the subject or contents at a main space area on a category can in many cases clarify something that is otherwise difficult to place.
Many editors place links to wikiprojects, to portals, and to other subjects, so that if someone does venture to the category mainspace, it is not as a 'blank' clean main space - but a space with clues as to the category (many biota categories have nothing, so that an unacquainted reader is incapable of discerning whether the category is about animal vegetable or mineral).
I believe, before this gets out of hand in time or space, that there should be an effort to allow clarifying text of either subject or content, to remain in category mains space in the name of helping anyone who might arrive at the space to know how to get out or go somewhere for clarification, the proposal to cleanup the space I believe is retrograde, unhelpful and equivalent to a building inspector asking to remove Exit signs in buildings. JarrahTree 08:34, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
Some readers are likely to be quite perplexed at the subject and contents differentiation"
the desired contents of the category should be described on the category page, ... The category description should make direct statements about the criteria by which pages should be selected for inclusion
many biota categories have nothing, so that an unacquainted reader is incapable of discerning whether the category is about animal vegetable or mineral"
One specific reason for the proposed "categories are not articles" addition to the guideline is the matter of references. Generally statements about a subject (eg "The Gordon River is ... in South West Tasmania") must be verifiable, and typically this is done by including references " at or near the bottom of the article" – ie on the same page as the statement being made. However " category pages should not contain ... citations"; this implies that category pages should not make statements about the subject. Mitch Ames ( talk) 12:08, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
Instead [of text describing the subject of the category], hatnotes such as {{ Cat main}} should direct the reader to the relevant article.
Hi, I don't normally ask for help but I really need some for a category-related issue. I've been having a bit of a slow-but-now-speeding-up edit war with a user who is intent on categorizing certain articles about coats of arms with a "key sort" that looks like this: for the article " Coat of arms of FOO", he would like it to be categorized like this
[[Category:FOO| ]]
See, for example, his recent edit on Coat of arms of Whitehorse, Yukon.
In other words, he wants to categorize coats of arms articles as "key articles". The guideline #8 of WP:SORTKEY states: "Use a space as the sort key for a key article for the category."
Shortly after I pointed this guideline out to the user, suggesting that this sorting was inappropriate, he changed the definition of "key article" in the Wikipedia:Glossary (!) to state that a heraldic coat of arms in an example of a key article (which is clearly is not, in my opinion). There was no proposal of this edit to the definition made beforehand or contemporaneous with the edit, so I have been repeatedly removing it while trying to have it discussed on the Glossary talk page, but only this user is participating in that discussion, and he has repeatedly reverted my removals of it.
I thought about an RFC, but my patience on the issue is all but spent and this is the most I can muster.
Could some users who are familiar with categories please take a look at the discussion here and weigh in?
Thanks, Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:23, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
Can someone tell me how to make Category:Articles containing timelines appear on the talk page so I can click on it. I made it a hidden category, was that wrong? -- Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) ( talk) 00:29, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
In § Sort keys, list item #10 begins
Having said that "Μ" (capital mu) was changed because it was confusing, the section goes on to reinstate the confusion, in ♠s:
Yes, they do "resemble Latin letters B, I, P etc.". So much so, in fact, that those Latin capital letters are indistinguishable on the page from their Greek lookalikes, which makes the text I have highlighted completely misleading.
In addition to clearing it up, I've made several other changes. Item #10 now reads:
-- Thnidu ( talk) 01:48, 28 December 2016 (UTC)
I have come across some cases (about 90) where a DEFAULTSORT has a space preceding a comma from the article title. This is done so that the following sort correctly:
Bush Hill , Enfield
)Bush Hill Park , Enfield
)- based on the fact that in ASCII space sorts before comma (which sorts before alpha characters). These entries were made around 2010/2011 and seem to make sense (I may even have been involved in a discussion back then).
Should we adopt this more widely?
All the best:
Rich
Farmbrough, 00:19, 9 January 2017 (UTC).
Smith-Dorrien-Smith, Thomas Algernon
)Smith-Dorrien, Horace
)Smith, Augustus (politician)
)Existential nonsense |
---|
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
|
Prior to being blocked for an unrelated issue user:earflaps left a legacy of a range of categorization issues that will dog us for a while - maybe a companion with user:wwikix of whom idiosyncracy is a polite and genteel term for the two editors legacies in the realm of categories...
The last batch that earflaps was into in his editing history was Canadian festivals... The following family still exists at List of festivals in Canada:-
And please do not let me make claims over the legacy of a blocked editor - if it can be argued that the family of categories is a genuine and valid combination - please feel free to clarify and explain!
The arguments that earflaps had at CFD and similar venues about the 'festivalization' of wikipedia were from how I read them slippery and elusive - and the specifying of what constituted 'events', 'festivals' and so on are quite unsatisfactory for the long term benefit of the encyclopedia.
Whether anyone is going to pick up the issue and work on the anomalies that wwikix and earflaps created, I have no idea.
However I do think it has to go on the record that category savvy editors need to be aware here is a legacy that needs examining, and somehow, someone needs to bite the bullet... JarrahTree 01:36, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
I have been having a discussion with User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao about the applicability of WP:SUBCAT to people-by-century categories. The discussion is at User talk:Ser Amantio di Nicolao#Lots_of_superfluous_cat-a-lots.
We have been unable to reach agreement, so please can other editors review the discussion and offer their input on that user talk page?
Thanks! -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 10:16, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
User:Look2See1 is a reasonably prolific editor in category space. I'm looking for input from other editors about the questions posed at the end of this post.
I admit that this is a little bit unusual, but I have recently raised the issue on the editor's user talk page, and after another editor also said they were interested in the answers, we have waited, and waited, but it looks to me like we're being ignored by the user.
Basically, I have found the user's edits in category space to be unusual, generally unhelpful, and in some cases problematic. I have used this as an example for points #1 and #2 below, which was chosen more or less at random. There are hundreds of similar edits to choose from.
I have three questions about this editing pattern:
My comments:
So, there appears to be consensus that Look2See1's edits are unconventional and problematic and something should be done. I agree.
I must disagree with Pyrope. What is causing this is not incompetence. He wrote this and this. He can think and express and understand others expressing themselves.
Considering his willingness to drive off a cliff rather than do things how the community at large sees fit, this appears to be a case of "I am helping shape pages the way I see fit. I am not a big fan of people telling me what to do."
Look2See1 is here to help build and has made 173,817 edits, many, many of them very constructive. A strong effort ought to be made to solve this without it ending in his leaving. The collateral damage of his next 100 edits is small (reverting/fixing) compared to losing a future potential 200k edits. Let's be patient and look at outcomes.
To me, the problem is about willingness to edit according to convention. And don't get me started on the lack of edit summaries. :) So, what to do? I will take a shot at a very friendly plea at his talk. How about that? :) Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 01:23, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
@ Good Ol’factory: You and I go back many years, almost as many as User:Bearcat and I, and during that time we have never managed to agree on much. So with this introduction I guess we can do away with wp:AGF, and I would like to start by saying that my first impulse on reading your wall-of text above was who/why is he lynching this time?
Let me ask a simple question: If you have a problem with an edit why not do what most others here do, revert it and see what happens? …and just a note to other ADMINs who I know have good intentions: rushing to reason with User:Look2See1, who is obviously into main-space editing and not into talking, on his talk-page, would not have seemed sincere to me if I was on the receiving end and did not know the posters. Especially since you all posted here as well, after User:Look2Se was pinged.
Looks like the threading here is the pits. That’s all I have to say, I out of here. Ottawahitech ( talk) 14:26, 1 January 2017 (UTC)
Update: User talk:Look2See1#Update
Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 02:34, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
At Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval#BHGbot_3, I requested permission to run a bot to create a set of a few thousand category redirects from "Foo organisations" to "Foo organizations" and vice versa.
If anyone has any views on whether this is a good or a bad idea, please add your comments at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval#BHGbot_3. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:41, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
An editor added some material (shown here bolded) to the "Articles" section ( WP:CATDEF):
And was reverted with the comment more of less to the effect "let's discuss this first" (which is proper IMO, changes to rules should be discussed first).
So let's discuss it. Is this a welcome addition, or not? Herostratus ( talk) 17:13, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
My post below was written before I noticed that the above section was about this very topic...: This page has had some copy on it for a long time that reads "Articles on fictional subjects should not be categorized in a manner that confuses them with real subjects." A couple of months back, I expanded it with a suggestion on how that would apply. Using this as an example, do other users feel like categories such as Category:Fictional characters with bipolar disorder belong as subcategories of the type Category:People with bipolar disorder? Would {{ Catseealso}} be a better solution? In my mind, I may be seeing this as a difference between set and topic categories--what do others think? @ Dimadick: for his perspective. ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 08:37, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
I would say not. The editor who added this, Koavf, is extending a guideline about disambiguating reality-based and fiction-based articles to their category tree. The result is a broken category tree, where interested users can not locate a related article because it does not appear at all in the parent category. This defeats the purpose and has no visible benefits. Dimadick ( talk) 08:43, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
"See also" in categories serve to display a related concept or category, but not a daughter category. An example is Category:Parliament of England leads to the succeeding political body: Category:Parliament of Great Britain.
This does not work well in categories where the common point is the diagnosis or misdiagnosis of a relatively common psychological disorder. These are not related concepts, it it the same concept in reality and its portrayal. Dimadick ( talk) 08:53, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
If I change a page the user or user talk space and the owner changes it back indicating that they know the policy, but simply prefer to keep it, what's next? Naraht ( talk) 16:50, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
There is an RfC about the guidelines as pertain to user categories at Wikipedia talk:User categories#Request for Comment on the guidelines regarding "joke" categories. I figure people who watch this talk page might be interested. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 21:01, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
What do cats have to do with categories? The first line of this project page says: Multiple shortcuts redirect here, you may be looking for: Wikipedia:WikiProject Cats.." I think that's a discrimination for dogs. Or birds. — Ark25 ( talk) 20:00, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
Editors interested in categorization are invited to comment at Talk:Strasserism#Category:Nazism, where there is a disagreement about inclusion of articles in both parent and child categories. Mitch Ames ( talk) 02:54, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
Similarly at Talk:White pride#Category:White supremacy. Mitch Ames ( talk) 03:25, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
The same editor who thinks that WP:SUBCAT ought not apply to White Pride apparently also thinks that WP:SUBCAT is " nonsense" when applied to Great White Fleet in Albany, Western Australia in 1908.
Editors are invited to contribute to the discussion at Talk:Great White Fleet in Albany, Western Australia in 1908#Category:Albany, Western Australia. (I use the term "discussion" loosely here, because the editors who don't like SUBCAT haven't yet indicated why). Mitch Ames ( talk) 09:21, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
I've noticed that there are quite a few comedians who are categorized under both Category:American Jewish comedians and Category:Jewish comedians. Is there any reason why the usual parent/child categories rule doesn't apply here? NewYorkActuary ( talk) 00:46, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
Thoughts on this category? AusLondonder ( talk) 15:24, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Should the "politicians-by-century" categories ( Category:20th-century American politicians, Category:20th-century Indian politicians, etc.) be treated as container categories under WP:SUBCAT? -- Ser Amantio di Nicolao Che dicono a Signa? Lo dicono a Signa. 01:05, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
Relevant discussion here. It lays out, generally speaking, my reasons for having acted as I did. I'm generally not a fan of overcategorization, and frequently work to battle it when I run into it, but this is a slightly different case, to me (as indeed all the people-by-century categories are, when I think about them.) Happy to elaborate further if asked - I will say that in my opinion a large part of the problem is that the politician-by-country-and-century category trees are not all quite created equal, so to speak, and if that were to be changed it would go some way towards fixing the issues I see.
(Please be gentle - this is my first RfC, and while I think I've done everything per instructions and by the book I may have missed something, in which case my apologies. :-) ) -- Ser Amantio di Nicolao Che dicono a Signa? Lo dicono a Signa. 01:05, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
This proposal may arise out of that long discussion on Ser Amantio di Nicolao's talk page, but it does not address the problem which was discussed there. It proposes a solution which nobody sought, and which is likely to be universally opposed.
The problem is quite simple. Ser Amantio di Nicolao (who I will abbreviate to SAdiN) has been flouting WP:SUBCAT on an utterly massive scale, by using Cat-a-Lot and AWB to copy the contents of categories such as Category:Assam MLAs 2006–11 to its parent Category:21st-century Indian politicians.
WP:SUBCAT is very clear. Apart from certain exceptions (i.e. non-diffusing subcategories, see below), an article should be categorised as low down in the category hierarchy as possible, without duplication in parent categories above it.
Yet despite being aware of this guideline, SAdiN made tens of thousands of edits which clearly breach it. SAdin had treated Category:Assam MLAs 2006–11, Category:15th Lok Sabha members etc as non-diffusing sub-categories, which they weren't. None of them was tagged as non-diffusing, and given the tools used, SAdiN must have been aware of that. Even more troublingly, SAdiN did not himself tag any of these categories as non-diffusing, which would have alerted others to what he was doing. Instead, he acted sneakily, on a huge scale.
Despite the fact that this was clearly in breach of WP:SUBCAT, and that SAdiN's edits received no support from those who responded to my call for outside commentators, SAdiN has steadfastly refused to revert their edits.
As that refusal dragged on, I told SAdiN that unless they could demonstrate a consensus for their massive changes, I would go to ANI to seek to have these changes reversed.
Bizarrely, what SAdiN has done here is not to see approval for their treatment of these categories as if they were non-diffusing.
What I and others have sought is for SAdin to ensure that normal WP:SUBCAT rules apply: articles in a subcat of Cat:xxth-century fooers are not also in Cat:xxth-century fooers itself. That Cat:xxth-century fooers containing only those articles which are not already in a sub-category.
Instead what SAdiN has proposed is to containerise Cat:xxth-century fooers, so that it contains only sub-categories. That would involve a massive purge. It would not just diffuse the articles which are already in subcats ... it would purge all the articles which are not in sub-cats.
What is going on here?
SAdiN is the most prolific editor in the history of the English-language Wikipedia. He has been an administrator for a decade. Most of his edits are to categories. So why this straw man RFC?
Did SAdiN intentionally set up a straw man RFC?
If not, I hope that they will sort this out. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 23:09, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
When is a "people from FOO" category justified? Only if a person was born in FOO, or also if they lived there? Debresser ( talk) 16:23, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
Opinions are sought at WT:CATP#Ongoing dispute re duplication in child and parent categories, regarding the use of WP:SUBCAT. Mitch Ames ( talk) 12:43, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
I know I'm drawing attention to a problem without proposing a solution, but the guidance in WP:EPONYMOUS isn't sufficient to know which categories to apply to an eponymous category. The section gives an example, but doesn't make it clear how to generalize from that example. What categories are "relevant to the category's content"? If better explicit guidance can't be given, then some more examples would help a little. — swpb T 15:55, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
Morning, the above category seems to have exceptionally unclear inclusion rationale and has accrued some both obviously unrelated, or tenuously associated, events. Most just seem to be times when something controversial has happened involving race, sex or religion, and just then been bucketed in. Others are claimed by someone involved to be about Political Correctness, but the actual controversy is about something unrelated (such as violence, suppression of freedoms etc relating to wider political issues). I don't want to nominate it for deletion without understanding what we think should actually be in here first and whether it can be redeemed in any fashion. Any comments or ideas how this can be improved? Thanks Koncorde ( talk) 10:32, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
Koavf has been removing alumni categories of people who also (for a different reason) belong to a different category that happens to be a child category of the alumni category. Two examples:
I think this issue goes well beyond alumni categories, and that our categorization guideline provides poor guidance for this case. It allows articles to be in both a parent and a child category when the child is non-diffusing (often gender-based or ethnic subcategories of non-segregated parent categories) or when an article is the main article for a subcategory, but it doesn't describe any other exceptions. I think it is common sense that, when an article has a reason for being in a parent category that is independent of its reason for being in a child category, it should be in both, but this does not seem to be codified in our guidelines. Perhaps it should be? — David Eppstein ( talk) 05:41, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
Another similar case: Patrick C. Fischer for whom Koavf has created the one-article category Category:University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts alumni to avoid simultaneously listing him in the parent category (for his undergraduate degree) and the business school category (for his MBA). It is plausible enough that Fischer's undergraduate degree actually is in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, but our article's text and its sources only say that he earned a bachelor's degree from Michigan. We can guess that he probably majored in mathematics (in LSA) but the sources don't say so, and he could as easily have majored in engineering (a different school) or business (same category as for his graduate degree, but we can't list an article twice in a single category). A quick web search also shows that Michigan undergraduate diplomas do not mention the name of the college, only the university, the degree, and the name of the degree program, so the case for this category being defining seems quite dubious to me. — David Eppstein ( talk) 06:51, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
The North-American Interfraternity Conference is an organization composed of American Social Fraternities. In recent years a few of them members have withdrawn from the conference. There are also Fraternities which are no longer members of the North-American Interfraternity Conference any more because they have merged with other fraternities in the NIC (or in a few cases merged with another group which then merged with a group still in the NIC!
There is Category:North-American Interfraternity Conference, but i'm wondering what the best way is to categorize groups that fit into either of the "no longer member of" category. Separate subcategory? Two different subcategories? Include them in the main category (with an unusual sort key????)? Ideas? Naraht ( talk) 21:41, 30 June 2017 (UTC)
Categorization deletions are harming the encyclopedia. Organizing is wonderful, but deletions should be discussed. Deletions should go through a comment and consensus process. I also detest the practice of well-meaning, good faith category editors going through my contributions/created articles and category edits when I post a concern or revert their deletion. My personal email inbox will now overflow with WP messages that detail the mass category removals from the articles that I have on my watchlist. It is predictable.
I was appointed a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar with the University of Pittsburgh with the purpose of adding archival library content into Wikipedia and commons. Part of the process is to facilitate the 'finding' of such historical content by readers, historians, school children and authors - not category editors. That is to say, if someone reads the George Washington article, finds an archived image from Pitt that has been uploaded to commons, then appropriate and possible numerous categories should appear as part of the article. Readers find archived content by seeing and clicking on categories. The requests from WP readers to the Pitt archives for more historical information has doubled since I began this work. This is the whole idea behind the Visiting Scholars Program. With zealous un-categorization those links to other historical topics are disappearing. Readers don't care about guidelines related to categorization. They want to find historical connections. Of course parents and children will appear connected to articles. That is how you find related topics. Readers don't know or care what a parent or child category might be. Categorization might tidy up the encyclopedia a bit, but I hear precious little about making WP more reader-friendly. Readers like categories. Categories are finding aids. Category deletions are harming my work and the encyclopedia.
Best Regards, Barbara Page — Preceding unsigned comment added by Barbara (WVS) ( talk • contribs) 11:00, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains#Emptying of Category:Locomotives by wheel arrangement
Should both/either/which of 4-4-0 and Category:4-4-0 locomotives (it's the EPONYMOUS lead article) be members of Category:Whyte notation? Thanks Andy Dingley ( talk) 20:53, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
Hi all. I've been whittling down a WikiProject Tennessee backlog, unassessed articles, for about a year and a half and have gotten it from a high of 800 down to less than 100. I hope to empty it soon. (Note that this is all manual editing, no semiautomated tools.) My problem is that I have in the past seen templates that say something like, "administrarors, please do not delete this category even if it is empty" and I now can't find it when I want to add it to the category page. Obviously the category needs to exist even if it's empty, because people will tag without assessing. Can anybody give me the link to that tag? White Arabian Filly Neigh 21:37, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
{{
Possibly empty category}}
--
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 22:53, 27 July 2017 (UTC)I noticed that the advertised count of pages in some maintenance categories does not reflect the actual page count. Delayed update may have an impact but IMO the message should not be misleading. I started a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Discrepancy between count of pages in a category and actual number of pages, so responses are probably best put there. PBS, you were interested. David Brooks ( talk) 00:28, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
I've seen some category talk pages occasionally get tagged for wikiprojects, but most aren't. Any thoughts on which of the two is best? – Uanfala 18:39, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
I work on cleanup at Wikipedia:Database reports/Uncategorized categories, and I've long struggled with the the guidance of WP:EPONYMOUS: "An eponymous category should have only the categories of its article that are relevant to the category's content." Other than one example, there's no expansion on what that means – what makes a potential parent "relevant"? I think, for the sake of consistency, we should try to flesh out this guidance more – so this is a call for ideas for how to do so, with an eye toward drafting new text for the guideline. Some questions to jumpstart with:
Hopefully there are some ideas floating out there already. Thanks! Please ping me in your reply. — swpb T 14:42, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Several characters (including [space], "*", "+", ans sometimes even "-" or others) are used to place entries before the main alphabetized list on category pages, and sometimes these appear in combination, so that the same category contains entries under multiple pre-alphabet characters. WP:SORTKEY's guidance is lacking regarding which prefix to use and when:
It seems that these two rules are mostly already followed, so I think this is a least-effort, least-disruption solution to the hodgepodge of uses we have currently. — swpb T 14:11, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
I am just starting to learn about categories, and I was taking a look at North American Prairies Province. There are a lot of overlapping categories there and I'm not sure which ones to retain. For instance, Category:Native grasses of the Great Plains region is a child of the following categories that are also tagged to North American Prairies Province:
Are there any good tools to visualize the category trees of a page? Also, how does one decide if a page should have both the parent and child category or just the child? It seems very confusing. - Furicorn ( talk) 04:35, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
Should a defunct cycling team be place into, for example, Category:Cycling teams based in France and Category:Defunct cycling teams based in France? I have previously asked this Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cycling/Archive 15#Category:Defunct cycling teams, but looking back I don't think my question was clear ( Severo?). I have come back to this as Kasir has removed a lot of articles from the parent categories and want further opinions to potentially form a consensus. Bald Boris 13:29, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
In analyzing the 8/20/2017 database categorylinks table, I discovered two reasonable self-linked categories, Category:Hidden_categories and Category:Noindexed_pages, and a dozen or so non-reasonable ones, most of which have already been corrected in the current data, although there are new ones as well. This phenomenon is already tracked via Wikipedia:Database_reports/Self-categorized_categories.
I also discovered many more link cycles of length greater than 1. For example, Category:Tracking_categories and Category:Container_categories are members of each other, thereby forming a cycle (loop) of length 2. This is probably reasonable as well, but there are many more cycles, most of which are non-reasonable -- in fact, a total of 5551 different cycles, when considering categories reachable from regular articles and other categories (namespaces 0 and 14), and not following links beyond Category:Articles. (None of this is taking into account redirected categories or articles.)
The longest cycle is 933 links. There are 849 different cycle lengths. Cycles of length 20 or less, while generally the most common, constitute fewer than 1500 of the 5551 cycles.
I don't have any suggestions at this point for what to do, but I'm sharing this in the hope of helping to improve Wikipedia over (a long) time as a natural language processing (NLP) resource.
RVS ( talk) 21:48, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
I sometimes uses Wikipedia for natural language processing (NLP) research. I was looking at Category:Sports_competitors and discovered that the Ahmed_al-Darbi page (he's a Guantanamo Bay detainee) had Category:Sports_competitors as an ancestor, due to a clearly wrong-directional and otherwise inappropriate link (which I deleted) making Category:Kenyan_male_marathon_runners a parent of Category:Kenya. (Kenya was involved via another questionable link making Category:Wars_involving_Kenya a parent of Category:War_on_Terror.)
Exploring the categorization links further, I also ran across the following series of links (A <- B indicating that page B is in category A), where all the pages listed are in the category namespace except Ahmed_al-Darbi: Natural resource management <- Hydrology <- Hydrography <- Basins <- Depressions (geology) <- Rifts and grabens <- Great Rift Valley <- Gulf of Aden <- Horn of Africa <- Arab world <- Politics of the Arab world <- Political movements in the Arab world <- Islamism in the Arab world <- Islamism in Saudi Arabia <- Saudi Arabian Islamists <- Saudi Arabian al-Qaeda members <- Ahmed_al-Darbi.
Here the whole sequence Great Rift Valley <- Gulf of Aden <- Horn of Africa <- Arab world seems problematic to me. I looked around for the best way to report this and settled on the present page (Wikipedia_talk:Categorization). I also noticed a related older discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Archive_16#Subcategories_and_geography-related_categories, and of course Wikipedia:Categorization#Subcategorization. (By the way, there seemed to be at least a small consensus at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Archive_16#Subcategories_and_geography-related_categories that Category:Rivers_of_Austria should not be a parent of Category:Danube, but no one has changed that to date.)
I see there's a Template:Check_category one can add to point out a problematic category, but there are two major limitations to that. First, it only allows you to specify the problematic parent category, but not which specific parent <- child links one has an issue with. Second, there are no additional template parameters that allow one to specify, say, a short explanation of why one thinks the category or link is problematic.
So I'm writing this for three reasons. One is to solicit opinions on the categorization links Great Rift Valley <- Gulf of Aden <- Horn of Africa <- Arab world. The second is to raise the issue of a mechanism to identify and discuss specific problematic links. The third is to have something I can make reference to when I edit some of those problematic links, probably starting by deleting the Horn of Africa <- Arab world link. Thanks for your attention.
RVS ( talk) 18:50, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
IMO a more detailed guidance should be given about deciding which categories are non-diffusing. The description " simply subsets which have some special characteristic of interest"
is rather vague. Why Albania in "Rivers of Albania " makes it diffusing while "Women" in "Women novelists" is non-diffusing. A river being in Albania looks pretty much "special characteristic of interest" of the river to me, while "Woman" is pretty much decisive classification. Of course, I remember the politically correct shitfall with women writers, which actually reinforces my question: how to decide.
Staszek Lem (
talk) 18:29, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
What is the rationale under the decision that templates are not categorized by content? IMO It would be useful for maintenance. Templates are akin to lists and categories, they are navigation aids. The categorize the latter two, but not the first one. Staszek Lem ( talk) 17:48, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
It would be useful if some other editors could have a look at recent edits to Category:Gunpowder and Category:Explosives (etc). DexDor (talk) 06:55, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
I've recently discovered a number of categories in the format "Fooish children's animated <genre> television series" (examples: American children's animated adventure television series and American children's animated comedy television series). I remember reading in a guideline or discussion that a category should only have so many intersections, but I can't remember exactly where. So: are these categories too specific? Trivialist ( talk) 23:40, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Should MoS shortcut redirects be sorted to certain specific maintenance categories? An Rfc has been opened on this talk page to answer that question. Your sentiments would be appreciated! Paine Ellsworth put'r there 16:37, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Layout#Conflict with Category:Kvng RTH -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 09:47, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
I am attempting to improve the categorisation in this area and my attempts are being resisted by people from the WP:FTN group who will not let me, for example, put articles about acupuncture into that category. As far as I can see they fundamentally disagree with the heirarchical nature of the category system. They want to use categories as labels. I would like some help and advice please. Rathfelder ( talk) 23:28, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
Yes I am. Rathfelder ( talk) 15:39, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
I know that, but when I do it I get repeatedly reverted. I don't want to get involved in an edit war on my own. Rathfelder ( talk) 15:39, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
A discussion has been started by @ Ser Amantio di Nicolao at WT:WikiProject Women_in_Red#Categories about his creation and population of yet more huge people-by-century categories, including some of which have already been deleted at WP:CfD.
These categories potentially contain many thousands of articles, and are being populated with stealthy edit summaries which give no clue as to what is being done. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 17:32, 12 January 2018 (UTC)
I note that there has been some editing recently to the one sentence paragraph saying "Interlanguage links work on category pages just as they do for articles, and can be used to link to corresponding categories on other language Wikipedias
".... While this is true (the links do work on category pages), I don’t think we have ever discussed the more fundamental question... do we WANT interlanguage links on our category pages (and if so, HOW)?
Perhaps I am misunderstanding what this sentence is trying to convey, but it appears to be telling us to place articles at (say) the French or German WPs within the categories here on the English WP... if so, I have to question whether this is something we want to allow. I question whether linking to articles at our sister projects fits with the purpose of our categorization system. I have always thought of our category system as being for internal navigation - helping readers find related articles located here on WP.en.
I do think it helpful to point readers to articles at our sister projects ... but I am not at all sure whether linking to them in categories is the right WAY to do this. Please discuss. Blueboar ( talk) 13:40, 20 January 2018 (UTC) Blueboar ( talk) 13:40, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
My reading of WP:Categorization is that the category structure should not contain loops; i.e. A is a member of B is a member of C is a member of A. All categories should (eventually) be sub-categories of the root category, Category:Contents. However, loops do exist, for example:
Category:Truth -> Category:Concepts in epistemology -> Category:Epistemology -> Category:Knowledge -> Category:Truth
Should these loops be broken? If so, how? power~enwiki ( π, ν) 22:24, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
I'm not at all a fan of these Fooian female/women barbazzes
categories in most cases because they have a "ghettoizing" effect, especially a psycho-social one. Every time we use a category like "Category:British female artists", etc. without a well-sourced reason for having it, it's like describing someone as "my Jewish friend Jimmy" instead of "my friend Jimmy".
Previous RfCs and other discussion about such categories have been sharply critical, yet we still keep having the categories. Why? As far as I can tell it's just for the convenience of some individuals. By this reasoning, WP:OVERCAT should simply be marked {{ Historical}} and ignored, since every intersection of topics turned into a category is convenient for someone. The more obvious ghettoizing effect, of women not being found in general categories but only in "women" or "female" subcategories, is partially resolved by making them non-diffusing categories; however, this still depends on editors actually listing these subjects in the specific and the general category, and them remaining categorized that way, which is often not the case. And this doesn't nothing about the perception problem. [PS: All of this applies to other such "socially charged demographics" categories like "gay", "Catholic", "Hispanic", etc., though we're mostly rid of those that are not well-justified.]
We need to come up with a compromise that draws an easy-to-understand line. The one I suggest is this: Such a category is created/kept only if we're certain that a properly encyclopedic article can and should be written about it (or already has been), at least at the top of the category tree.
Here's a detailed example: I wanted to delete Category:Female pool players as ghettoizing, when it was first created, but I would !vote to keep it now, because it would be both possible and desirable to have a comprehensive Women in billards (or whatever) article that covered this history:
It's fair to say that our coverage of pool is sorely incomplete until this article is written. (Some basics can be found in select bios like Jean Balukas). The same is not true of most occupations; the typical arc is that they were virtually all male-dominated in a simply de facto way, until women entered the non-domestic workforce in massive numbers.
Counter-example: There's nothing like the women-and-cue-sports story when it comes to women playing particular musical instruments. Women drummers (to use an example from a thread at Wikipedia talk:Categorizing redirects) are actually quite common, they're just not very common among touring pros probably simply because drum kits seem to appeal more to males on average (whether that's a factor of marketing or what is off-topic for now). It's exactly the same as the relative lack of women construction contractors; it's not a line of work that seems to attract many women. It is not like the lack of women fighter pilots or female players of American football, which are in fact due mostly to institutionalized discrimination, exactly as with pool: we have clear proof of long-term, organized efforts to bar women's entry. We do not when it comes to drumming or working with power tools.
Our coverage of drumming in popular music isn't incomplete without an article on players who are female, and writing one would be an exercise in original research and PoV editorializing, due to lack of secondary sources for "women as drummers" being a subject of coverage of its own. There's lots and lots of material about women as billiardists and the industry response to them (though much of it is in speciality publications like Billiards Digest and not available online, so doing the article will require library work).
What's current practice? We seem to keep keeping stuff like Category:Actresses and its zillion subcats (despite decreasing support for even using this term at all in female actor bios), on the sole basis that there are some separate awards (Oscars, Golden Globes, etc.) for actresses and male actors, despite there being no particular difference between an actor and an actress in what they do and how they do it. This doesn't really seem good enough to me. It's really quite flimsy.
The reason we have these separate categories has nothing to do with the people receiving them but with the nature of human fiction, which usually involves a love interest which in turn is usually heterosexual; it violates average public expectations that the two main stars in a movie that is at least partially about their relationship are directly competing with each other for a single award. So, they have separate awards to make people happy – and it also lets them give out more awards per film, which makes the awards show go on much longer, which means more sponsor advertising dollars, and so on. It's a business decision.
What's the problem? The actor/actress sort of thing is a very poor rationale to differently label and categorize bios in an encyclopedia. The problem with this weak "sometimes some separate treatment, like for awards" standard is it could be used to "women-fork" any occupational category of any kind as long as someone can find, somewhere, a case of women and men receiving recognition in a sex-divided way. We can do better than this, by tying it to there being a sourceable distinction on many levels, about which a proper article can be written. Important: Actress redirects to Actor, and any attempt to fork it would fail. And "sometimes separate treatment" doesn't cut it anyway. We don't have separate articles on driving cars and teenage driving cars, despite there in fact being separate laws about the latter.
What about other categories? When it comes to bios, the craptastical ghettoizing effect can be mitigated a little by other categories; e.g., Georgia O'Keefe is in the arguably pointless Category:American women painters, but also in Category:20th-century American painters which is not divided by sex. This should be probably be done in all cases in which we have a gendered category split and the members of it span more than a century and there are enough in the categories for a split. But this only works when the main category (here, Category:American painters) is a container category and stuff is all supposed to be in subcats [that category badly needs work in this regard].
It doesn't work for, e.g. Category:Women eSports players; the number of notable pro gamers is too small for such a split, and it's an occupation almost entirely confined to the 21st century (some 1990s, but not enough for a century split). And Category:Women eSports players is perhaps the worst example of all time, since there are not reliably sourceable differences between male and female gamers, other than that some of the former have been total asshats to some of the latter; half the time no one's even going to know what their sex or gender identity is unless they disclose it or they show up for an in-person, live-action competition, and even then people can "pass" if they try hard. It's not sufficient (yet) that we have articles at Women and video games and Sexism in video gaming, almost entirely about video game marketing and amateur player experience, respectively. They're not focused on women as pro gamers, game developers, or other professionals, and it's unlikely that a proper encyclopedia article can be written about that; there simply isn't enough history there, and what there is isn't sufficiently distinct from men doing the same work.
What about wikiprojects' tracking needs? The argument is offered that we need these categories, and lots more of them, to help wikiprojects keep track of the level of article development in particular topic areas. But this is not what user-facing article categories are for. This can done by creating lists at the wikiprojects, by applying hidden categories with talk page wikiproject banners (e.g. {{
WikiProject Women|sports=yes|...}}
), or both.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 07:30, 1 January 2018 (UTC); addendum: 04:50, 4 January 2018 (UTC) substantially revised to address some issues raised below: 06:38, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
they have a ghettoizing effect (of women not being found in general categories but only in "women" or "female" subcategories)— It's quite common for such categories to be non-diffusing, e.g. Category:American women painters, so they are in the general category as well. That's not a justification for keeping the gendered category though.
Such a category is created/kept only if ... a[n] ... article can and should be written about it ...— Corollary: such categories should include a {{ Cat main}}, and if no such article exists a stub should be created.
Women drummers...— I don't think it invalidates your argument, because it's about a specific organisation rather than women drummers in general, but we do have Women Drummers International, which some might claim is a justification for Category:Female drummers.
We seem to keep keeping stuff like Category:Actresses and its zillion subcats— Some of those subcats may be justified by the existence of an article, e.g. Category:Best Actress Academy Award winners and Academy Award for Best Actress.
Category:Women eSports players is perhaps the worst example of all time, since there is really, really, really no difference at all between male and female gamers— "eSports" and "gaming" are not synonymous, but we do have an article Women and video games, which could give some justification for the existence of the category.
Some detailed reply material:
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Agreed on male categories; there may be some defensible ones, but some clearly are not, including
Category:Male models and
Category:Male nurses; male models have existed as long as there have been models, they're just in lower demand; male nurses have not been unusual for generations now. I'll address the "non-diffusing is the solution" idea below, since two others raised it. Agreed on the inconsistencies point; though fixable it's widespread and annoying and causes cleanup to be needed (either duplicate categories, or categories not being applied because the editor thinks the cat. doesn't exist). Should probably stick to "female" and "male" since so many of these do not have adulthood as a criterion. Corollary: agreed, though it shouldn't be implied that creating the stub is required to create the category if the category is genuinely justified. Orgs: I wasn't meaning to imply at all that the existence of a professional association is sufficient; I could create right now an organization called the Men's Political Consulting Association, with full 501(c)(3) status, but that would not justify a "Category:Male political consultants", regardless of any diffusing question, even if we had 20× more articles on people in that line of work. The pool example was about the entire history of the billiards–women relationship, so I would have to clarify that in a real proposal. Yes, we would keep Category:Best Actress Academy Award winners, etc., but there's no reason for them not to be in non-gendered Category:Actors container cats. like Category:Film actors by award, with the pointless Category:Film actresses by award simply going away. Sourcing: This isn't an article, as you say, and the point isn't to mire people in citations for the obvious (even WP:CIRCULAR ones. I would remove rather than source. Given comments below challenging the obvious; it's a political distraction. Women and video games could potentially be justified, in combination with Sexism in video gaming (see below), but only if there's focused, sourced material clearly established noteworthy distinctions between men and women as pro gamers, which is not presently the case. Experiencing some (sometimes a lot of) prejudice isn't enough; that would be true at one point or another for women in every non-domestic occusation, often within living memory of many of us. And changing demographics aren't enough by themselves (and may even mitigate against such categories, as the statistical differences recede). Could write on article Women and tool ownership about increased tool purchases by women, cheesy pink-tool marketing, gender gap in picking up tool skills from an early age and consequent safety/injury issues, etc., etc., but it wouldn't justify categories of women contractors, women set constructors, etc., if the article didn't strongly show gender differences in tool-related occupations. |
I can't accept the "it's hard" argument. It's part of WP's job as an encyclopedia to "determine whether [the subject] activity and occupation has some form of bias against women" and cover it adequately if so. (And yes, that can be politically tense, as is much of what we do in writing proper articles.) Until that's been done, the article is incomplete, and an insufficient basis on which to create a gendered category. Yes, this means way fewer gendered categories, and I would hope that was obvious, being the central idea of the draft proposal.
Cavils about statistics are a distraction:
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I'm not going to get into distracting side arguments about demographics. I've just trimmed the material instead. But go to any Home Depot and note the M:F ratio (and after registering the low number of women, also note how many of them are there with their men and buying non-tool household items while the men are getting tools). Go to 50 rock, pop, jazz, etc., shows over several years and count the number of female drummers; depending on where you live, should be in the 5–15% range at most. I'll just drop such material from any actual proposal rather than invite pointless side disputes about it. |
They also provide a set of examples which article creators can use to improve their own articles.— Why are the "female fooian" articles any better than or different to the "fooian" articles as examples? Is there any reason to believe that articles about females are generally better than articles about males? (If there is, perhaps we need "male fooians" to help find the articles that need improving.) Are there specific characteristics of articles about women that are missing from articles about men? The only one I can think of (from my Western male perspective) is handling name changes due to marriage. ( recent example)
... they list many names from ... non English-speaking countries which would not normally be recognized as women's names.— That could apply equally to male categories. But in either case it's a circular argument, since presumably the only reason you'd need to recognise the names as female (or male) is because you're explicitly looking for people of a specific gender - in which case the advantage of the category is simply that you can find people of a specific gender.
Furthermore, they can be used as a straightforward basis for creating lists of women in a given occupation,— Isn't that simply perpetuating the status quo, rather than justifying it? I.e. the reason for categorising by gender is to make it easier to create lists by gender - but why do need/want lists by gender? (in the absence of a specific article about that gendered list criterion)
{{
WikiProject Women in Red|sports=yes|...}}
. The entire idea "we should keep these categories because it helps my wikiproject work" is completely wrongheaded when it comes to categories that exist for readers. Integrated this into the draft material. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:21, 4 January 2018 (UTC); revised 06:38, 4 January 2018 (UTC)I agree that categories exist to aid navigation for readers "looking for related articles". But two articles on artists that happen to be women (or lesbian, or black, or Hindu) aren't "related" in any meaningful way. It's just another WP:OVERCAT, an intersection that is convenient for someone but doesn't indicate a connection or sensible comparison.
In some cases, like
Category:Female players of American football, there clearly is a meaningful relationship (which I needn't belabour here). That's the kind of gendered, non-diffusing category we should retain. However, as I predicted elsewhere in this thread, some of the entries are still completely diffused, and do not appear in the appropriate non-gendered equivalent category (which might be quite a bit more specific, like
Category:American football quarterbacks or whatever). I fixed a couple of these, but gave up after a while, since it's not one of my topics of interest and my to-do list is already huge. If we're not even doing this right with gendered categories that make good sense, "non-diffusing is the solution" is very obviously not the solution when we're contemplating thousands of way less justifiable categories. They will in fact ghettoize subjects and are already doing so right now.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:21, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
I haven't been involved in categorization much in the past, so I'm a little hazy on the subtleties. I recently published American Bank Note Company Printing Plant. I put it into:
and I'm not sure if those were appropriate. In all of those cases, those categories don't describe the main topic of the article, but things that are mentioned in the article (a park that's nearby, and several tenants of the building). Is that what we're looking for, or should I stick to more core categories? -- RoySmith (talk) 16:44, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
There is a dispute at [[Josh Longstaff] regarding the inclusion of Category:High school basketball coaches in the United States. I contend that his time as a high school coach is a non-essential and non-defining feature of his career. He is notable because of his experience in professional basketball, not his time in high school. Another user argues that his time in high school is mentioned in the article and in hiring announcements, therefore it must be included. Can you clarify help clarify this? Should we include every facet of a biography or just what they're known for?-- TM 01:10, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
I'm confused about appropriate parent categories for topic categories. WP:SUBCAT says "If logical membership of one category implies logical membership of a second (an is-a relationship), then the first category should be made a subcategory (directly or indirectly) of the second." This makes me think that articles in the subcategory would also belong in the parent category, eg. all members of Category:Borders of France also belong in the parent category Category:Geography of France. However, for topic categories, I find this is not the case.
For example, Category:France has a parent category of Category:Countries in Europe, but articles in Category:France include France's 35-Hour Workweek, which should not be in Category:Countries in Europe. Similarly, Category:National Science Foundation has a parent category of Category:Independent agencies of the United States government, but only the main article in this category should be categorized as such.
Should members of subcategories always belong in parent categories? Should topic categories be categorized like their main articles? Is there a guideline, essay, or similar somewhere which clarifies these issues? Daask ( talk) 20:53, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
Here's another example that might help clarify the question.
How can I or a tool avoid drawing this incorrect conclusion? Is it invalid to link via Shakespeare because Shakespeare is a topic category, and if so how is this status recorded in Wikipedia? Or should Shakespeare not be a member of any parent categories, other than those which classify categories rather than articles? Certes ( talk) 12:01, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
"Would it be helpful if topic categories could have no parents other than container categories and maintenance categories...?" No, that would be the opposite of helpful, because it would fragment the category structure and make it harder for readers to find articles. postdlf ( talk) 15:10, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
Hi. There's discussion on how sort keys should be used for Thai people and/or Thai people categories at Wikipedia talk:Categorization of people#Thai names (specific options outlined below at Wikipedia talk:Categorization of people#Moving forward. -- Paul_012 ( talk) 14:48, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
WP:CATVER says, "Categorization of articles must be verifiable." WP:VERIFIABILITY says, "All content must be verifiable. The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material". On 5 March 2018 at 17:37 (UTC), I removed the "living person" categorizations from the article Noley Thornton because the most-recent verified activity by the subject was in 1996, 22 years is a not-insignificant amount of time, and an admittedly-cursory search found no newer evidence.
This is not an articular battle, I've not reverted subsequent re-additions of "living" categories, and I have zero intentions of edit warring. I'm only looking for guidance on our assumptions of individual viability, and timetable(s) therefor. — fourthords | =Λ= | 17:52, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
Individuals of advanced age (over 90)can be moved out without there being evidence of death. For a person who was born in 1983, there's no reason to remove that category. power~enwiki ( π, ν) 17:56, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
You seem to think we have to keep searching for evidence that someone is still alive in order to keep them in that category, even where we have no sources reporting their death. Why on earth would you think that?WP:CATVER says, "Categorization of articles must be verifiable." Ergo, to say that an individual is living such categorization must be verified. That's why I would think that.
The methodology you describe above to support your inference that someone well within normal lifespan was deceased is nonsensical and, ironically, total OR.I'm not inferring anything, nor did I say I was. In fact, barring reliable sources, I'm explicitly not assuming anything: hence the crux of my inquiry here. — fourthords | =Λ= | 16:02, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
You're thinking that you're entitled to change the content of an article just because…I removed the "living person" categorizations from Noley Thornton IAW WP:CATVER. After they were replaced, I came to this page for clarification. That's all I've done. If you see that as acting out some sort of unacceptable expression of entitlement, I can't help that. Since my initial inquiry: (a) I learned from power~enwiki ( talk · contribs) that a BLP policy footnote says, "People are presumed to be living unless there is reason to believe otherwise." (b) I've simply suggested we clarify WP:CATVER with a few words about the "living" categories—an edit I could boldly make myself, but wanted to get input on to avoid ruffling others' feathers. — fourthords | =Λ= | 16:09, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
The application of WP:SUBCAT is the subject of a Request for Comments taking place at Talk:Andrew Wakefield#Request for Comments regarding categorization of this article. Your input at that discussion will be appreciated. NewYorkActuary ( talk) 19:21, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
For some reason, categorisation now appears to be adding articles to the end of the initial letter section (e.g. anything beginning with 'A' is added at the end of the 'A' section on the category page) instead of alphabetically. Anyone got any ideas as to why this should be so? -- Necrothesp ( talk) 09:35, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
A category I started, Category:World Series-winning managers, is having the same alphabetization issues I've seen discussed on this page. I'm sorry to be a pain in the neck, but I need to know if maintenance can be performed on this category. Mr. Brain ( talk)
Hi how are you doing Mohammedhaqq ( talk) 04:01, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 10 | ← | Archive 14 | Archive 15 | Archive 16 | Archive 17 | Archive 18 |
I'm trying to figure out the relationship both between RfCs held for different categories and of an RfC for other existing categories not discussed in the RfC. The main RfC is Category talk:Anti-Semitism#RFC on purging individuals and groups which was closed on 29 July 2014 by User:Sandstein with a decision that there was a lack of consensus and thus an earlier RfC's instructions that for Category:Antisemitism and its various subcategories, "It must not include articles about individuals, groups or media that are allegedly antisemitic".
On the basis of the word media Category:Antisemitic forgeries, Category:Antisemitic publications and Category:Antisemitic canards were removed today from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by User:Kendrick7. None of these categories are subcategories of Category:Antisemitism so I don't see how the RfC applies, although others may differ. Of course, if we remove everything from these categories they would normally be deleted. Actual subcategories that would presumably be emptied and deleted if this continues are for instance Category:Scholars of antisemitism - "it must not include articles about individuals".
Frankly none of this makes sense to me. We can call Hitler an anti-Semite but we can't put him in the category Antisemitism? But I was on the other side of the RfC so I would feel that way of course.
Another related issue is about the subcategory Category:Antisemitism in the United States. At Category talk:Antisemitism in the United States#People should not be in this category an RfC closed slightly earlier than the one above was closed by User:Mdann52 with the consensus that "There is consensus not to remove or specifically exclude all BLP's from this category.". Is that closure made null by the RfC a few weeks later?
"With media the focus is on things like the Guardian newspaper" #headDesk User:Timrollpickering Do you yet see why admins acting on their own shouldn't be allowed to create new policies?? -- Kendrick7 talk 06:07, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
Do we have a category for pages with lists of redlinks, like List of ICD-9 codes 630–679: complications of pregnancy, childbirth, and the puerperium? If not, I think we should create one - hidden, if necessary. Ditto for links in non-article space. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:00, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
Two problems have come up that are causing problems with category redirects:
What's the best way forward to deal with these sorts of messes when they arise? Timrollpickering ( talk) 09:58, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
Currently, WP:PROJCATS divides categories into two main types: "Administrative categories" and "Content categories". The former is also subdivided into "stub categories", "maintenance categories", and several others without explicit names given.
The name "Administrative categories" is problematic. It makes it sound like it is something that only concerns Wikipedia:Administrators. This misconception is reinforced by the Template:Tracking category commonly being followed by Template:Polluted category as at Category:Pages containing cite templates with deprecated parameters.
Perhaps it is a better idea to divide categories into "Maintenance categories" and "Content categories". Then "Maintenance categories" can be subdivided into "stub categories", Wikiproject categories, and so on. Those seem like maintenance categories to me so the semantics is fine under this re-naming. Jason Quinn ( talk) 17:59, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
I've dug into the page history to figure out how we ended up with the present (rather myopic) naming scheme. I learned that originally there was just a distinction of a "maintenance" category from the rest (see this for instance). Things started to change with a massive reworking of Wikipedia:Categorization with this edit (11:13, 26 February 2009 by User:Kotniski) which according to the edit summary was done because nobody replied (after just two days) to their "REWRITE" proposal. Among many changes, this rewrite divided categories into "project" and "content" categories. Later, this edit (03:05, 14 April 2011 by User:Mclay1) renamed the "project" categories to "administrative" categories (without any discussion as far as I can tell). Things fluctuated here and there but for the most part these are the two seminal changes that led to the current scheme.
I've been mulling over this topic for a while but I think the original idea (and my idea posted above) where they are named "maintenance" is still the best. I've tried to get more people to comment here but apparently not many people care. When I feel I've thought this out well enough, I will go ahead and start making some changes. Jason Quinn ( talk) 05:00, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
Is there a consensus as to how things should be handled when, for instance, Ian McKellen has received numerous awards for which there are categories, but the awards he's received are discussed at Ian McKellen, roles and awards? I can think of a few ways this might be handled but am not sure what the prevailing viewpoint is (or if there is one):
Among other things, I'm concerned about issues with WP:CIRCULAR, and I don't personally think readers should have to look at article B to confirm that categories applied to article A are appropriate.
Thanks for your input! DonIago ( talk) 15:46, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
I just created Category:Authors and writers external links templates and populated it. With for example {{ Gutenberg author}}. However Gutenberg author and many others are not showing up, staying in the parent cat of Category:People and person external link templates. It seems to have maxed out at 7 entries. I notice the other sub-cat to Category:People and person external link templates, Category:Canada politics and government external link templates, is also maxed out at 7 entries (though maybe its natural number, just suspiciously the same). Is 7 a bug, or feature? -- Green C 15:39, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Look at Category:Health ministries. You'll find two groups of entries under the letter I - one in the usual place, and another one between D and E just containing Ireland. I've checked that both 'I's are in fact the same Unicode character, so what's happening? Colonies Chris ( talk) 09:32, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
is it possible? here's an example: replacing the link to category with a category transclusion in Copernicus Publications#See also. Thanks. Fgnievinski ( talk) 04:40, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
I just saw someone changing a category from Medieval Scottish saints to Medieval Roman Catholic Scottish saints at Saint Ninian and noticed he is now in 7 'Saint' categories. Does this make sense? Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 09:09, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
I don't understand why categories like Category:Romanian toponyms are not allowed. Since Category:Slavic toponyms and Category:Latin place names, why it can't be another one for Romanian, another for German and so on?
Where can I gather together Romanian language toponyms like Păltiniș Păltinișu, Peșteana, Peştera (disambiguation) and other disambiguation pages like that? At least can I make a list with them?
I have read Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2012 November 26 and Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2012_November_13#Category:Norwegian_toponyms but I don't see any valid reason to remove such categories.
If a name like Banka is used in both Slovakia and India, it can be put in both Category:Slovak toponyms and Category:Hindi toponyms. If a name belongs to many languages (like Alba), then it can be added to categories in a invisible manner, so it won't bother the reader with too many categories. — Ark25 ( talk) 04:43, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
Input from editors familiar with categorization is requested at Talk:Paddle steamer#Category:Ship types. Mitch Ames ( talk) 05:32, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
The above-mentioned disagreement has been resolved, by reference to WP:EPONYMOUS. However it does highlight the fact that the WP:EPONYMOUS exception to the general rule of WP:SUBCAT is not mentioned in SUBCAT or the first paragraph of WP:CAT#Categorizing pages (as non-diffusing categories are). I suggest that it should be. Thus I propose the following changes to Wikipedia:Categorization:
Categorizing pages
... In addition, each categorized page should be placed in all of the most specific categories to which it logically belongs. This means that if a page belongs to a subcategory of C (or a subcategory of a subcategory of C, and so on) then it is not normally placed directly into C. For exceptions to this rule, see Eponymous categories and Non-diffusing subcategories below.
...
Subcategorization
...
A page or category should rarely be placed in both a category and a subcategory or parent category (supercategory) of that category (unless the child category is non-diffusing – see below – or eponymous). ...
Support, comments or objections? Mitch Ames ( talk) 12:09, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
I suggest a new category, some of the following
etc Please help me at HH Ferry route, cannot find a suitable category. Boeing720 ( talk) 22:44, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
The following statement has been in the guideline for a long time:
This statement is completely on the contrary to how the vast majority of our categorisation system works. For example, look at the subcategories and article content in Category:Perth, Western Australia. Category:Perth, Western Australia-related lists, Category:Swan Coastal Plain, Category:Crime in Perth, Western Australia: none of these are Australian capital cities, or Cities in Western Australia or Coastal cities in Australia (the parents of the given category). Effectively, this guideline suggests that even set categories on a topic (like "People from foo") should not be in the topic category ("foo") as they will almost never share the features of the parent category.
This statement should be removed from the guideline because it is completely unrepresentative of our categorisation system. We overlap the various categories when they have a parent-child semantic relationship – by design you can get to the "People in CityX, CountryY" category by going through the "Cities in CountryY" category. That's what we've all come to expect and the implementation of the above (highly restrictive) guideline's categorisation method would profoundly change the structure of today's Wikipedia. SFB 02:21, 18 January 2015 (UTC)
Category:Lakes in Foobelongs in
Category:Fooand
Category:Lakes(b) No -
Category:Foobelongs in
Category:Fooistan(the country) (and there are also "Wikipedia categories named after ..." categories) and article
Foobelongs in
Category:Cities in Fooistan,
Category:Capital citiesetc (as well as its eponymous category). The point is that there are some categories that are appropriate as parents of Foo, but not appropriate as parents of Category:Foo. Another example: the RAF article belongs in Category:1918 establishments in the United Kingdom, but the RAF category does not belong in a 1918 category (as that would have the effect of putting every RAF squadron in the 1918 category).
Subcategorization
A tree structure showing the possible hierarchical organization of an encyclopedia. Items may belong to more than one category, but normally not to a category and its parent (there are, however, exceptions to this rule, such as non-diffusing categories). An item may belong to several subcategories of a parent category (as pictured). If logical membership of one category implies logical membership of a second, then the first category should be made a subcategory (directly or indirectly) of the second. For example, Cities in France is a subcategory of Populated places in France, which in turn is a subcategory of Geography of France.
Many subcategories have two or more parent categories. For example, Category:British writers should be in both Category:Writers by nationality and Category:British people by occupation. When making one category a subcategory of another, ensure that the
members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions) to belong to the parent also.main article of the subcategory will be a valid member of the parent category. Category chains formed by parent-child relationships should never form closed loops; that is, no category should be contained as a subcategory of one of its own subcategories. If two categories are closely related but are not in a subset relation, then links between them can be included in the text of the category pages.A page or category should rarely be placed in both a category and a subcategory or parent category (supercategory) of that category (unless the child category is non-diffusing – see below – or eponymous). For example, the article "Paris" need only be placed in "Category:Cities in France", not in both "Category:Cities in France" and "Category:Populated places in France". Since the first category (cities) is in the second category (populated places), readers are already given the information that Paris is a populated place in France by it being a city in France.
Note also that as stub templates are for maintenance purposes, not user browsing (see #Wikipedia administrative categories above), they do not count as categorization for the purposes of Wikipedia's categorization policies. An article which has a "stubs" category on it must still be filed in the most appropriate content categories, even if one of them is a direct parent of the stubs category in question.
This
edit request to
Wikipedia:Categorization has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
There is a typo: on one occurrence you have "sub-category" instead of "stub-category".
2.125.15.86 ( talk) 09:20, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
I've noticed that some categories completely lack any visible parent categories, seemingly making them uncategorized, except they contain hidden maintenance categories as parents. This completely breaks navigation by category tree, since these categories are unreachable from the root category by descent (you'd have to ascend from some shared subcategory, if any shared subcategories exist)
Category:Wikipedia categories named after Canadian musicians exhibits this anomalous behaviour, where the categorized categories lack any visible parents and only have this maintenance category. Since them categories contained are not maintenance categories themselves, but content categories, this seems wrong.
-- 65.94.40.137 ( talk) 05:54, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
The categories that would normally belong on the article page, are on the category page only.
One exception and that being
Category:Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. I reversed it putting the categories on the article page but then got reverted
[4] claiming a talk page consensus[Talk:Sea Shepherd Conservation Society/Archive 12.]. The discussion is lengthy but fact is I have never seen an instance of this, categories only on the category page and not the article page before. Is [[Sea Shepherd Conservation Society}} wrong?
...William 13:13, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
What is the best way to categorize alumni so that there is a clickable link in the main article for the school? I have been using the first method, but in the past others have removed it, saying the school is not an alumni. Of course it isn't, it is there to be the header for the category list and provide a clickable way to get to the list from the school page. -- Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) ( talk) 21:33, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
If I understand your question, you're wondering how to properly link the alumni category within the article on the school, correct? #2 is the only acceptable option of the three you've listed, and you should also use {{ cat main}} on the category's description page to link back to the school article. If there is also a standalone alumni list as well as an alumni category (and please don't use confuse us by using "list" to refer to the contents of a category), then that list should be categorized by the alumni category with a blank sortkey, and then include a link to the list in the school article. postdlf ( talk) 21:41, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
There used to be three columns on category pages, but now i only see one at Category:Bandy clubs by year of establishment, which makes it strange. Am I the only one to see this? Is it a problem with my browser? 78.78.1.90 ( talk) 09:48, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
WP:SUBCAT currently says "ensure that the members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions) to belong to the parent also" and (very reasonably) an editor has asked for clarification. An example of where this applies is Category:British military personnel of World War II - it is (via several intermediate categories) under Category:British people, but there are a few people ( example) who were in the British military but were not a British person. This seems a reasonable exception to me. Has anybody got any good other examples and/or ideas about how to explain this simply in the guideline ? Note: The discussion immediately above this and the (now archived) recent long discussion are also concerned with SUBCAT. DexDor ( talk) 07:22, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
Hi, when adding categories to articles, should we be adding categories that aren't literal? For instance, here a category was added for "People from Bristol" in an article that is about a website run by a person from Bristol. The website obviously is not a person. I've seen this sort of thing before, for instance where there might be a robot character in a cartoon series, and a "Robots in fiction" category might be added. The series is not a robot. Can someone help spoonfeed this to me? Thanks, Cyphoidbomb ( talk) 22:00, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
About Wikipedia:Categorization#Eponymous_categories. I still can do not understand the explanation as it is given. Maybe more examples could help (including red don'ts), from a simple set. I can point to these confusing elements for sure:
@DePiep, the section is talking about its difficulties; there is a natural tendency to think of a category A as a concrete thing 'a', but it's not.
-- Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 14:26, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
In the category Category:American alternate history novels, there are subcategories which are Series of novels set in the same Alternate Universe. Should these be diffusing or non-diffusing. I'm trying to figure out whether (for example) 1634: The Baltic War which is in the subcat Category:1632 series books should be in the parent as well. Naraht ( talk) 10:18, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
This is one of those can of worms. I see Category:Force feeding has recently been created and been given the same cats as Force feeding, namely Cruelty to Animals, Nutrition and Torture. Now I can sort of see why the article gets the Torture cat as that's a main focus of it - but articles such as Pliers and Electricity don't get the cat. But the category is currently all about its use in food production - the foie gras article and so on. Such uses may not be nice but they are legal in many countries, unlike torture. My feeling is that the torture cat should be removed from Category:Force feeding but it's the kind of area where I'd hesitate to step without some discussion first. Le Deluge ( talk) 11:41, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography#Categorising by place of burial for a follow-up discussion after my recent close on Burials by city. – Fayenatic L ondon 09:56, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
There is a discussion going on at Category talk:Treaties extended to Christmas Island about the inclusion of categories in multiple levels of parents, contrary to the WP:SUBCAT's "A page or category should rarely be placed in both a category and a subcategory or parent category ... ". Editors interested in categorization are invited to comment there. Mitch Ames ( talk) 13:20, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
In Category:Western Europe, some countries as listed directly in the category, some are listed as subcategories, and some are listed as both. Which is the correct categorization? Kaldari ( talk) 00:17, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
I would encourage editors to vote at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 January 17#Category:Buildings and structures in Western Australia by road & all subcategories on whether it is a good idea to categorise buildings by street. – Fayenatic L ondon 15:04, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
Recently I had added, Category:20th century in music to those pages where it belonged. Although I have been questioned by one of the editor who referred me to WP:SUBCAT and told that if 1998 in music has Category:1998 in music, then there's no need to add Category:20th century in music.
He must be correct. Although we have articles such as 1998 in Ireland, they are having categories about not only the particular year but also the decade and the century. OccultZone ( Talk • Contributions • Log) 15:10, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
@ P64, Sillyfolkboy, and Debresser: I would like a more specific answer. 1998 in music should be
-- Magioladitis ( talk) 09:29, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Thoughts? Where we have: a) Category:Opera; and below it b) (sub)Categories:Opera by composer, is that a diffusing category? Tx. -- Epeefleche ( talk) 17:03, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Greetings, Today I added Category cleanup templates subsection which contains comments about templates for improving an article with not enough, too many, incorrect templates. The Category unknown title was added above the existing Uncategorized sentence. Most of these templates I have used occasionally while doing article assessments. While there may be more templates available, these should be the ones most helpful to new editors. Regards, JoeHebda ( talk) 00:24, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
where is a guideline which describes how to handle Category:Container categories and how to depopulate categories?
Case:
in the case there is no such guideline, please help me to resolve the disagreement with @ Monochrome Monitor: -M.Altenmann >t 15:44, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
Sorry, I was probably was unclear about the question. Let me clarify. Is it a correct solution to delete the article from the category to which tree it clearly belongs? For comarison, suppose some "overcategarized" category is to be deleted. We don'r simple remove this category tag from articles. We put this category somewhere else in the category tree.
IMO this issue must be clearly written in the policy, because there are plenty of people armed with twinkle mop work hard of "cleaning" wikipedia without applying common sense. In old times there were zealots who reverted important additions with edit "incorrect English"/"poor grammar". And the explanation that this is an invalid reason was added to policies, despite it being pretty obvious to people with a grain of common sense.-M.Altenmann >t 15:24, 3 June 2015 (UTC)
This is in regard to the categories Category:Unincorporated communities in New Jersey and Category:Unincorporated communities in New Jersey by county. If we have one parent category, for instance, the Category:Unincorporated communities in New Jersey category with 940+ entries, this would help serve as a guide for those searching for individual locations within the state (like a glossary). As for the Category:Unincorporated communities in New Jersey by county, not all readers may know what county a specific location is in. I find that both work for helpful navigation, even if some believe it is not necessary. To be consistent with states in the U.S., see the subcategories in Category:Unincorporated communities in the United States by state, where practically all, except a couple Northeast states, have a parent category and multiple subcategories. NJ should not be any exception. Plus it will be time consuming to delete the already included categories added to the pages. Thewildone85 ( talk) 20:21, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
You said the state-level categories are a "disorganized mess", yet they are auto-sorted alphabetically. That's not disorganization at all. And the easy solution to the separation of the CDPs from the unincorporated communities is to make the CDPs a subcategory, as a CDP is a type of unincorporated community. Category:Populated places in New Jersey should contain every populated place in the state, but only as a container category. postdlf ( talk) 15:46, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Given that WP:SUBCAT clearly excludes the dual categorization by both county and state, why should it be done here? Any suggestions of a policy basis for its use here? Alansohn ( talk) 20:01, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Should this be happening? Category:2000s American animated films is not a child of Category:American films, but it would be better to do that than add a redundant category to all of the other films. 208.81.212.222 ( talk) 17:30, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
Two weeks ago, above, User:Redrose64 linked a section of Ser Amantio user talk by its section heading "Please stop". Next day the link was broken by User:Walter Görlitz who changed that heading to "Please continue" [6].
Maybe-relevant talk sections, 2015 only:
-- P64 ( talk) 15:45, 27 June 2015 (UTC)
If Mercury (planet) were the *only* Mercury article which had a Category based on it, should the category for the Planet have the disambiguation in the name? Naraht ( talk) 14:46, 29 June 2015 (UTC)
The terms of what makes a category "diffusing" or "non-diffusing" are still opaque to me—I get the gist, especially re: nationalities, gender, etc., but not with the edge cases. Is Category:Video games based on films a diffusing category? I would think that it would be fine to be included in just Category:Video games based on films directed by George Miller rather than that and its parent, no? (Side note: why would an article need to be in both Category:Wii games and Category:Wii-only games?) – czar 20:00, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
Right now Category:Pseudoarchaeology is a child of Category:Pseudoscience. This is wrong as archaeology is not considered a science in the English speaking world, being taught either as part of the humanities or the social sciences. What's the process for getting this done? Doug Weller ( talk) 13:45, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
[[Category:Pseudoscience
and remove from that up to the next ]]
inclusive. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 13:53, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
<!--DO NOT delete this category-->
--
Redrose64 (
talk) 22:33, 1 August 2015 (UTC)In response to non-article pages may get added to the category: When using templates to add pages to categories, it may be helpful to test using code to check the namespace of the page transcluding the template, perhaps something like
{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|{{ns:0}}|<!-- in article/main namespace -->[[Category:Category name]]|<!-- in another namespace -->}}
, before committing a template to auto-categorize.
Or, for a userbox:
{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|{{ns:2}}|<!-- in User namespace -->[[Category:Category name]]|<!-- in another namespace -->}}
Ref. mw:Help:Magic words#Namespaces, mw:Help:Magic words#Namespaces 2. Slivicon ( talk) 15:18, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
{{
main other}}
and {{
user other}}
to do exactly that. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 15:26, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
In respect of the discussion on Burgher sportspeople I find the current guideline lacking on what I believe is a generally followed practice in categorisation:
This is, to say, that the topic isn't one which is an entirely new creation through Wikipedia. The only pertinent part of the guideline I could reference for that was the section on defining characteristics. However, this deals with whether a category should be applied to a subject, not whether a category on that subject merits creation in the first place. User:Obi2canibe cites the guideline diffusion of large categories as a relevant reason for creating subcategories on topics which have no real world application, and there is some precedent of doing this.
I've seen plenty of discussion of whether categories should be subject to a notability check on an article (i.e. "is this relevant to the person's notability" – the purpose of "defining characteristics") but I haven't seen any discussions applying WP:Notability to the creation of categories themselves. Have I missed something here? SFB 21:34, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Category:Container categories is defined as "subcats only". How to proceed with situations when there is a single page, which from my understanding is eponymous, such as the following:
Slivicon ( talk) 16:04, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
Hello, should the Category:Disused railway stations in Croydon be a sub cat of Category:Former buildings and structures in Croydon (as defunct schools currently is)? At present it does not appear as a sub cat. Thanks. Eagleash ( talk) 14:42, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
Hey guys, I just went to go and look for a category for male film directors, but saw that we didn't have any. I noticed that we did have a category for women film directors ( Category:American women film directors), but that male directors go in just the general category. Given the amount of flack we got over not having a category for male novelists, I think that it'd be a good idea to do this with directors as well before someone catches on and we get more hell from the media. I haven't the foggiest how to get this started other than posting here, though. Tokyogirl79 (。◕‿◕。) 08:21, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
Is there an efficient method for determining articles included within a project that are in 1 to 3 categories? I've realized lately that undercategorized articles may be a minor issue in that it could be the reason why some articles get less attention (reading and editing) than they should. I could probably use AWB to go through the article list and do a regex skip for articles with 4 or more categories, but if there's an easier approach, I'd rather use that. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 16:05, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
Is there any systematicity in when categories should be non-diffusing more than "Subcategories defined by gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality should almost always be non-diffusing subcategories."? -- JorisvS ( talk) 09:41, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
template:Images has been proposed for deletion, see Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2015_October_12#Template:Images -- this is a category description template -- 70.51.44.60 ( talk) 03:44, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
WP:SORTKEY's allowance for template categorization seems to contradict what's written at WP:CAT#T. I'm assuming WP:CAT#T would have priority but perhaps we should remove "(tau, displays as "Τ") is for templates" from WP:SORTKEY to avoid confusion. -- œ ™ 06:35, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
The WP:DIFFUSE section does not give a reason for or purpose of diffusion of large categories. In essence it doesn't really have any substance other than "categories are divided up by topic". Anyone care to rectify that? SFB 22:09, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
IMHO, "diffusion" should only be used by orthogonal categories. Wikipedia is on a "categorize everything" binge, I fear. Collect ( talk) 16:14, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
This is mostly for the editor TonyTheTiger, but mostly concerns categories, so this text seemed to belong mostly to this category page.
greetings Tony,
This concerns whether the Chris Young article should be double categorized in the parent category Princeton University Alumni in addition to being properly categorized in child subcategories e.g. Princeton Tigers Athletes.
Your view was No -- see here. (I put a note there, pointing Tony to this talk page.)
Yes, 'the general rule [is] that pages are not placed in both a category and its subcategory ... .'
However, 'non-diffusing subcategories ... provide an exception to the general rule ... ' (same source), such that a page should be placed, or can be placed, in both the category and its subcategory.
Such exception seems to apply to the article at issue (Chris Young), based on the following reasoning:
A Diffusing Subcategory seems to mean a subcategory created to reduce the size of the parent category. 'Diffusing large categories[:] a large category will often be broken down ("diffused") into smaller specific subcategories.' source (with italics added)
A Non-Diffusing Subcategory seems to mean a subcategory created for some reason other than size-reduction, e.g. to highlight some 'some special characteristic of interest'. source
Princeton Tigers Athletes appears to:
- have been created not to reduce the size of Princeton University Alumni, but rather to highlight some special characteristic, i.e. Princeton University athletes
- therefore be a Non-Diffusing Subcategory.
Therefore the article at issue, Chris Young, seems like it should be included in both the parent category Princeton University Alumni and in the Non-Diffusing Subcategory Princeton Tigers Athletes.
Another reason for such double inclusion is that the public might not immediately know that Princeton Tigers is part of Princeton University, because e.g. the wording is 'Princeton Tigers', not 'Princeton University Tigers', and conceivably 'Princeton Tigers' could be a team of e.g. Princeton township, not Princeton University.
Maybe this proposed chain of logic is flawed. What do you think? Thanks.
Bo99 ( talk) 15:45, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
update: TonyTheTiger replied
here.
Bo99 (
talk) 21:14, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
(this notice x-posted to the Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories page as well)
A user has placed a request for renaming all of the video game console generations pages (eg, History of video game consoles (third generation) → Third generation of video game consoles).
These pages are used to categorize eras in video gaming history not only on Wikipedia but due to what some believe is a documentable case of citogenesis, has probably helped form a standard naming convention outside of Wikipedia as well. So these pages have some level of influence and visibility beyond this site.
The reason I'm here is that the current structure of the category names is likely flawed and not up to Wikipedia standard, but historically this often becomes a contentious change debating semantics (the last time this came up it sure did) and I believe that if it's going to be changed it should be changed to a Wikipedia standard form. I just want this current vote to have high enough visibility to get a clear consensus so that we're not back here in a couple of years when the next new crop of editors decides they have a better way to phrase the category titles.
So I'm bringing this debate to a greater audience so we can hear your thoughts and help us video game editors in the process. Thanks for your attention and I hope to see your thoughts on this vote. BcRIPster ( talk) 01:08, 14 November 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I've written an article on Easy Listening Satanic music which I would very much like to remain on Wikipedia. Is it possible that it might be included in the general music category or perhaps easy listening?
Rev. Reynolds — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rev. Reynolds ( talk • contribs) 20:04, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
If you have been on WP long enough, you have probably seen at least one endless debate about whether Person X should be categorized by a given nationality, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. Such debates can get quite heated.
It seems that there is a natural desire to establish that a notable person is "one of us" (or to establish the negative version of this - that the notable person is not "one of them")... I get that... however, far too often no one involved in the debate asks the more fundamental question: "Is X's nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation (etc) worth categorizing in the first place? Is being an <insert your nationality, ethnicity or religious affiliation here> really a defining characteristic of person X?"
Note I am not saying that a person's nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation (etc) is never defining... for some bio subjects it can be. However, I don't think this is true in every case. I think we need more clarification as to when a person's nationality, ethnicity or religious affiliation should be considered defining (and thus categorized) and, more importantly, when it isn't defining (and thus not categorized). Please share your thoughts.
Blueboar (
talk) 14:18, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
WP:SUBCAT has long included this: When making one category a subcategory of another, ensure that the members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions{{clarify-inline|date=April 2014|reason=what are these exceptions and where would one find a list and/or explanation of each}}) to belong to the parent also.
The section which I have shown in italics was removed on 24 June 2015 by user:Bilorv.
IMHO it should be reinstated. I doubt that a comprehensive set of detailed principles could be produced for this, but common sense should suffice. Cases of dispute could be discussed on the talk page of the sub-cat, or somewhere centralised if there were broader issues. – Fayenatic L ondon 09:34, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
I saw a bunch of boys choirs in Category:Men in the United States. I think that category is a bit too general to have boys choirs in it. I think there are two possible solutions: create a specific American subcategory of Category:Boys' and men's choirs and put the article in there and that category in Category:Men in the United States, or simply delete that category. Opinions, other ideas? Debresser ( talk) 07:37, 13 January 2016 (UTC)
Further to an ongoing discussion at Category talk:Southern Levant, I would like to propose adding a clarifying sentence to WP:SUBCAT, along the lines of:
Please could editors confirm if they agree with this? It's purpose is to ensure the guidance is in plain English and even more difficult to misunderstand.
Oncenawhile ( talk) 12:55, 13 January 2016 (UTC)
I'm currently involved in a debate about whether or not politicans who received criminal convictions before their political careers began ought to be included in Category:Politicians convicted of crimes. I've no strong opinion on the matter but amn't happy with the disparity I've seen. A list of US politicians with criminal convictions stipulates they committed their crimes while in office, while the only countries I've seen that include politicans whose convictions precede their political careers are Ireland and South Africa. Both of these countries have had recent conflicts, which introduces a more fraught note to discussions. Gob Lofa ( talk) 15:49, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Misuse of categories is rampant, alas, on Wikipedia. IMHO, such categories should be restricted to only those politicians whose crimes were specifically related to their careers in politics - that an MP was convicted of drunk driving as a youth is useless as far as categorizing the adult as a "criminal". Collect ( talk) 19:53, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
[[od}}It may be me but I can't see an agreement here which reflects on the edit war here. Can we try and get a one time resolution? Adding Irish politicians as a category is contentious. I can see the argument (and have some political sympathy with it). One solution is to get rid of British and Irish from the links. ---- Snowded TALK 18:31, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
This
edit request to
Wikipedia:Categorization has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
111.118.248.6 ( talk) 14:46, 16 February 2016 (UTC) AJAY SIR PLS PLS MILO NA
An editor has proposed and partially implemented a novel system of ordering entries in categories for river drainage basins. For an explanation of the system, see the headnote at Category:Thames drainage basin.
Although WP:SORTKEY does not claim to be an exhaustive list of possible sorting methods, the proposed system seems out of line with the guidelines there, because it relies on numbers (and letters) which are not part of article titles. It seems to me that the system makes it much more difficult to use the categories as navigational aids. For a discussion see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Rivers#Sorting_in_drainage_basin_categories.
Any views?-- Mhockey ( talk) 21:32, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
Is there any guidance to what order the categories should be on a particular page? For example, first the Eponymous categories and then alphabetical? Also, does this same guidance (alphabetical) apply for the categories that a category is subcatted in? Naraht ( talk) 20:14, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
From the latest "Tech News":
Future changes
Reposting here so that editors interested in category sorting are more likely to see it. -- John of Reading ( talk) 03:25, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
{{
Deaths in century}}
, and the code for that template includes the line [[Category:Deaths by year|#{{#ifexpr:{{{1|5}}}<9|0|}}{{#expr:{{{1|5}}}+1}}]]
{{#ifexpr:
on, the important thing is that |#
immediately after the cat name which forces transcluding pages to sort under "#". Forced sortkeys like this should not change behaviour, it's those that use default sort keys - such as if you used [[Category:Deaths by year]]
We have a vast body of precedent that sub-cats may have shifts in topic, e.g. as discussed at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Categories#A_big_problem_with_our_category_structures. E.g. Category:Food- and drink-related organizations cannot be ingested, yet the latter is an accepted sub-category of Category:Food and drink.
I recently asked James Michael DuPont ( talk) why he set up Category:Open content companies as "not a subcat of Category:Open content". He replied that "a company is a subcat of company, not of content"… "Just because it is related to does not make it a sub category" and referred me to the mathematical article Subcategory. When I countered with the food example, he asked whether this is policy.
At present, the guidance WP:SUBCAT does not seem to cover the shifts in meaning to closely related topics. I propose that it be rewritten to match longstanding practice in English Wikipedia.
CN1, would you be able to help, please? – Fayenatic L ondon 22:35, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
That kind of bizarrely rigid misunderstanding of categories comes up like spring weeds every year. The category system is created and maintained by editors, primarily to facilitate navigation, and to connect related articles and topics. It is not and never has been a strict classificatory hierarchy. We do no one any favors by imposing arbitrary roadblocks and deadends in this system just to satisfy some ultimately unrelated concept such as what is "mathematically" proper (I've also heard we "must" do it a certain way "because set theory"). Doing it that way, we'd end up with thousands of disconnected little category ladders you could only go up and down rather than a network that connects everything. postdlf ( talk) 23:57, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
A big part of the category system already consists of topic categories.
Fayenatic is right when he says that despite their importance and presence, they are mentioned very little in the category policy page and we need to formulate guidelines for how to use them or at least a description of them.
@
Fayenatic london: The following is what I imagine for a paragraph in
Wikipedia:Categorization#Category_tree_organization.
Topic categories
Topic categories are categories in which the relationship between its subcategories and themselves is't an is-a relationship, but a belongs-to relationship.
The presence of an is-a relationship can be objectively determined but it is not so easy to assess if a belongs-to relationship is justified.
Every belongs-to relationship has to be assessed individually.
This is why it's always a good first step to identify the nature of the subcategories in question, which means to ask if they are themselves a topic or a set category.
Questionable belongs-to relationship
CN1 ( talk) 18:14, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
In the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey, the 5th most popular proposal was numerical sorting in categories (for example, sort 99 before 100). The WMF Community Tech team is ready to implement this, but a pre-requisite for the change is that we must switch English Wikipedia's category collation from "uppercase" (a simple collation algorithm that sorts strings based on character values, but considers uppercase and lowercase letters the same) to "uca-default" (which is based on the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA), the official standard for how to sort Unicode characters). The most noticeable difference is that UCA groups characters with diacritics with the their non-diacritic versions. So, for example, English Wikipedia currently sorts Aztec, Ärsenik, Zoo, Aardvark as "Aardvark, Aztec, Zoo, Ärsenik", but UCA collation would sort them as "Aardvark, Ärsenik, Aztec, Zoo" (with Aardvark, Ärsenik, and Aztec grouped under a single "A" heading, instead of under 2 separate headings). There are numerous other advantages to using UCA collation, but they are a bit technical to discuss, so I'll refer you to the documentation instead: [10] [11] [12]. If you would like to experiment with UCA collation, go to https://ssl.icu-project.org/icu-bin/collation.html. Set the collation to "und (type=standard)" (the default) and turn on numeric sorting in the settings. If anyone has any concerns or questions about switching to UCA, please reply here or in the Phabricator ticket. Thanks! Ryan Kaldari (WMF) ( talk) 00:24, 25 May 2016 (UTC)
|listas=
is not set in those, therefore the uppercase algorithm currently applies on those. If I remember correctly, UCI handles every variant of dash/hyphen, single quote marks and few others as separate charachters, so DEFAULTSORT will still need to be set for those cases. Depending on what "switch" is set in the UCI algorithm, de Gaule, De Gaule, de-Gaule and De-Gaule will be sorted in different orders. Other wikis have already changed to UCI. French is one of them.
Bgwhite (
talk) 06:22, 25 May 2016 (UTC)According to WP:Categorization#Subcategorization:
When making one category a subcategory of another, ensure that the members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions) to belong to the parent also.
However, geography categories don't seem to follow that rule. For example, Category:Rivers of Austria contains Category:Danube, which contains (indirectly but correctly) Aljmaš, Croatia; however, Aljmaš, Croatia doesn't belong in Category:Rivers of Austria. An other example: Category:Geography of Massachusetts contains (indirectly) Category:Boston, Massachusetts, which includes Category:People from Boston, Massachusetts - even though a person isn't part of the geography. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 15:11, 8 June 2016 (UTC)
What is the minimal number of items in a category? -- Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) ( talk) 17:34, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
Since well-over half of all articles contained in Category:GA-Class Animation articles seem to be about The Simpsons, and probably at least a quarter of the remaining articles are about either Family Guy or South Park, I feel that it would be beneficial to create subcategories focused on each of these shows. Would this be appropriate? I'm not familiar with the general guidelines on how to structure "GA-Class" categories. Ideally, I'd like to see all of the articles related to these three shows removed from the parent category and placed solely within their respective subcategories - that way, it would be easier to see which animation articles about other topics have attained GA status. I've skimmed through a handful of Help / Guideline pages about categories, but haven't seen anything written on the topic. Can someone point me to the relevant page, if it happens to exist, or if it doesn't, could someone let me know whether there are steps that I should take before moving stuff around (aside from simply consulting with the relevant WikiProjects)? Should I bring it to WP:Categories for Discussion or is that strictly for "renaming, merging, and deletion"? Also, since it seems that all GA articles within WP:Animation are automatically added to Category:GA-Class Animation articles, would it even be possible to remove the articles on Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park from the category, without also removing them from the WikiProject? -- Jpcase ( talk) 19:55, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
{{
WikiProject Animation|class=GA}}
perhaps with some other parameters. Similarly,
Category:Stub-Class Animation articles contains talk pages which bear {{
WikiProject Animation|class=stub}}
; and
Category:GA-Class The Simpsons articles contains talk pages which bear {{
WikiProject The Simpsons|class=GA}}
. These categories exist to indicate the intersection between a WikiProject and an article's class. It's all part of the way that WikiProject banner templates work. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 23:15, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
{{
WikiProject Animation}}
puts pages in subcategories of
Category:Animation articles by quality; and if |family-guy=yes
is set, the pages are also put in subcategories of
Category:Family Guy articles by quality, but are not taken out of the subcategories of
Category:Animation articles by quality.{{
WikiProject The Simpsons}}
is the banner for a separate WikiProject, and it puts pages in subcategories of
Category:The Simpsons articles by quality but not in subcategories of
Category:Animation articles by quality, so any page that is in a subcategory of
Category:The Simpsons articles by quality and of
Category:Animation articles by quality must have both WikiProject banners.{{
WikiProject Animation}}
is redundant if {{
WikiProject The Simpsons}}
is present, but that's a decision for
WT:WikiProject Animation and they may well say that The Simpsons does fall within their purview. It's a well established convention that each WikiProject reserves the right to set its own boundaries, even where they overlap significantly with those of another. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 08:46, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
WP:CATDEF currently states that "The order in which categories are placed on a page is not governed by any single rule (for example, it does not need to be alphabetical, although partially alphabetical ordering can sometimes be helpful). Normally the most essential, significant categories appear first."
I would like to see it changed to something like "Although no single rule governs the order in which categories are placed on a page, alphanumeric order is useful for placing the categories into a coherent order. An exception is when a leading category is equal to or is closely associated with the name or subject of an article."
I am suggesting this from my exposure to cognitive psychology & user interface design (besides the classes for my Library & Information Studies MS degree, I have worked in IT for 25+ years & am also a former university reference librarian). I find that Chunking (psychology) is very useful to organizing information. The lack of any order among categories is chaotic & makes it difficult for a reader to follow. As one of the simplest forms of chunking, alphanumeric order is a basic & effective solution to this problem.
Peaceray ( talk) 16:52, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
Is this category acceptable? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Atsme ( talk • contribs) 3:05, 11 September 2016 (UTC)
I have created, and requested template changes to populate, two new tracking categories. Like Category:All articles with topics of unclear notability, these categories combine all the entries from corresponding month-by-month tracking categories in one category. One use for this is to allow the use of Special:RandomInCategory across all tracked months at once, though there are certainly other uses. The new categories are:
— swpb T 13:00, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
As previously discussed on this talk page, we’re going to change the algorithm for how sorting works in categories, as a step on the way to be able to get numerical sorting. We plan to do this today August 29, around 18:00 UTC. We expect the maintenance script will take about 24 hours to run, during which sorting will be a bit unreliable. / Johan (WMF) ( talk) 13:14, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
{{
RTisza}}
. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 16:57, 20 September 2016 (UTC)
What about replacing the sort-key numerals with, say, Greek letters: α for direct tributaries, β for secondary ones, and so on? (Vaguely similar to their use in chemical nomenclature to indicate the point of attachment of substituents relative to a functional group.) I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard for a bot or AWB to make such replacements in the affected categories.— Odysseus 147 9 00:49, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
Please don't be patronising Someone has erred by making a change without thinking through the implications. This change hasn't just affected rivers. For a start, the changes have also screwed up hundreds of locomotive class articles worldwide in various locomotive categories, for instance: Category:Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft locomotives, Category:Imperial Royal Austrian State Railways steam locomotives, Category:Caledonian Railway locomotives and Category:Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway locomotives. The change has clearly had a major negative impact that wasn't envisaged and should be reverted while we find a way to accommodate everyone's all requirements. Bermicourt ( talk) 14:06, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
P.S. Oh and it also seems to have messed up categories of military units e.g. Category:Infantry regiments of the United States Army and Category:Infantry regiments of France... -- Bermicourt ( talk) 14:27, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
P.P.S. ... and political article categories e.g. Category:New Jersey legislative districts and Category:Arrondissements of Paris. Bermicourt ( talk) 14:35, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
|049
was previously placed under the 0 heading;
Caledonian Railway 179 Class under 1, because of its sortkey |179
. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 09:42, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Please don't call them headers-- They are 'subheadings', OK.
Changing the sorting back to how it was before-- I do not propose to change back into sort-by -digit. I support keeping the sorting by numerical value.
Keeping the current sort order but splitting a category page into ranges of 100 (or whatever) ...-- Splitting the numbers into numerical headings (like 100, 200) sure would need a code change, but that does not make the proposal invalid. imo, it would be an improvement (and I do think this solves the current discontent people mention). - DePiep ( talk) 00:40, 14 November 2016 (UTC), edited - DePiep ( talk) 10:02, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
I propose that WP:CAT should include the following subsection, under 2. Creating category pages:
2.1 Content
Category pages are not article pages, so in general should not include text describing the subject of the category, except where required to help define the contents of the category as described in Creating category pages. Instead, hatnotes such as {{ Cat main}} should direct the reader to the relevant article.
A few current examples that I think need cleaning up:
And a previous example, which has now been cleaned up:
What do other editors think? Mitch Ames ( talk) 08:12, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
Misunderstandings of categories and category mainspace are so intertwined in the history of wikipedia in the last 10 years, I think this is a fairly limited approach to a more complex issue:
Some readers are likely to be quite perplexed at the subject and contents differentiation, and I believe to complicate as to which is which would create situations where arguments and potential conflicts would arise, where the creation of the distinction is in the end of no particular help in the long run.
For a project or subject area to have an editor keen on clarifying the context or background of the category I believe does not harm the main space of a category. I believe the allowance for editorial comments on the subject or contents at a main space area on a category can in many cases clarify something that is otherwise difficult to place.
Many editors place links to wikiprojects, to portals, and to other subjects, so that if someone does venture to the category mainspace, it is not as a 'blank' clean main space - but a space with clues as to the category (many biota categories have nothing, so that an unacquainted reader is incapable of discerning whether the category is about animal vegetable or mineral).
I believe, before this gets out of hand in time or space, that there should be an effort to allow clarifying text of either subject or content, to remain in category mains space in the name of helping anyone who might arrive at the space to know how to get out or go somewhere for clarification, the proposal to cleanup the space I believe is retrograde, unhelpful and equivalent to a building inspector asking to remove Exit signs in buildings. JarrahTree 08:34, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
Some readers are likely to be quite perplexed at the subject and contents differentiation"
the desired contents of the category should be described on the category page, ... The category description should make direct statements about the criteria by which pages should be selected for inclusion
many biota categories have nothing, so that an unacquainted reader is incapable of discerning whether the category is about animal vegetable or mineral"
One specific reason for the proposed "categories are not articles" addition to the guideline is the matter of references. Generally statements about a subject (eg "The Gordon River is ... in South West Tasmania") must be verifiable, and typically this is done by including references " at or near the bottom of the article" – ie on the same page as the statement being made. However " category pages should not contain ... citations"; this implies that category pages should not make statements about the subject. Mitch Ames ( talk) 12:08, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
Instead [of text describing the subject of the category], hatnotes such as {{ Cat main}} should direct the reader to the relevant article.
Hi, I don't normally ask for help but I really need some for a category-related issue. I've been having a bit of a slow-but-now-speeding-up edit war with a user who is intent on categorizing certain articles about coats of arms with a "key sort" that looks like this: for the article " Coat of arms of FOO", he would like it to be categorized like this
[[Category:FOO| ]]
See, for example, his recent edit on Coat of arms of Whitehorse, Yukon.
In other words, he wants to categorize coats of arms articles as "key articles". The guideline #8 of WP:SORTKEY states: "Use a space as the sort key for a key article for the category."
Shortly after I pointed this guideline out to the user, suggesting that this sorting was inappropriate, he changed the definition of "key article" in the Wikipedia:Glossary (!) to state that a heraldic coat of arms in an example of a key article (which is clearly is not, in my opinion). There was no proposal of this edit to the definition made beforehand or contemporaneous with the edit, so I have been repeatedly removing it while trying to have it discussed on the Glossary talk page, but only this user is participating in that discussion, and he has repeatedly reverted my removals of it.
I thought about an RFC, but my patience on the issue is all but spent and this is the most I can muster.
Could some users who are familiar with categories please take a look at the discussion here and weigh in?
Thanks, Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:23, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
Can someone tell me how to make Category:Articles containing timelines appear on the talk page so I can click on it. I made it a hidden category, was that wrong? -- Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) ( talk) 00:29, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
In § Sort keys, list item #10 begins
Having said that "Μ" (capital mu) was changed because it was confusing, the section goes on to reinstate the confusion, in ♠s:
Yes, they do "resemble Latin letters B, I, P etc.". So much so, in fact, that those Latin capital letters are indistinguishable on the page from their Greek lookalikes, which makes the text I have highlighted completely misleading.
In addition to clearing it up, I've made several other changes. Item #10 now reads:
-- Thnidu ( talk) 01:48, 28 December 2016 (UTC)
I have come across some cases (about 90) where a DEFAULTSORT has a space preceding a comma from the article title. This is done so that the following sort correctly:
Bush Hill , Enfield
)Bush Hill Park , Enfield
)- based on the fact that in ASCII space sorts before comma (which sorts before alpha characters). These entries were made around 2010/2011 and seem to make sense (I may even have been involved in a discussion back then).
Should we adopt this more widely?
All the best:
Rich
Farmbrough, 00:19, 9 January 2017 (UTC).
Smith-Dorrien-Smith, Thomas Algernon
)Smith-Dorrien, Horace
)Smith, Augustus (politician)
)Existential nonsense |
---|
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
|
Prior to being blocked for an unrelated issue user:earflaps left a legacy of a range of categorization issues that will dog us for a while - maybe a companion with user:wwikix of whom idiosyncracy is a polite and genteel term for the two editors legacies in the realm of categories...
The last batch that earflaps was into in his editing history was Canadian festivals... The following family still exists at List of festivals in Canada:-
And please do not let me make claims over the legacy of a blocked editor - if it can be argued that the family of categories is a genuine and valid combination - please feel free to clarify and explain!
The arguments that earflaps had at CFD and similar venues about the 'festivalization' of wikipedia were from how I read them slippery and elusive - and the specifying of what constituted 'events', 'festivals' and so on are quite unsatisfactory for the long term benefit of the encyclopedia.
Whether anyone is going to pick up the issue and work on the anomalies that wwikix and earflaps created, I have no idea.
However I do think it has to go on the record that category savvy editors need to be aware here is a legacy that needs examining, and somehow, someone needs to bite the bullet... JarrahTree 01:36, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
I have been having a discussion with User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao about the applicability of WP:SUBCAT to people-by-century categories. The discussion is at User talk:Ser Amantio di Nicolao#Lots_of_superfluous_cat-a-lots.
We have been unable to reach agreement, so please can other editors review the discussion and offer their input on that user talk page?
Thanks! -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 10:16, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
User:Look2See1 is a reasonably prolific editor in category space. I'm looking for input from other editors about the questions posed at the end of this post.
I admit that this is a little bit unusual, but I have recently raised the issue on the editor's user talk page, and after another editor also said they were interested in the answers, we have waited, and waited, but it looks to me like we're being ignored by the user.
Basically, I have found the user's edits in category space to be unusual, generally unhelpful, and in some cases problematic. I have used this as an example for points #1 and #2 below, which was chosen more or less at random. There are hundreds of similar edits to choose from.
I have three questions about this editing pattern:
My comments:
So, there appears to be consensus that Look2See1's edits are unconventional and problematic and something should be done. I agree.
I must disagree with Pyrope. What is causing this is not incompetence. He wrote this and this. He can think and express and understand others expressing themselves.
Considering his willingness to drive off a cliff rather than do things how the community at large sees fit, this appears to be a case of "I am helping shape pages the way I see fit. I am not a big fan of people telling me what to do."
Look2See1 is here to help build and has made 173,817 edits, many, many of them very constructive. A strong effort ought to be made to solve this without it ending in his leaving. The collateral damage of his next 100 edits is small (reverting/fixing) compared to losing a future potential 200k edits. Let's be patient and look at outcomes.
To me, the problem is about willingness to edit according to convention. And don't get me started on the lack of edit summaries. :) So, what to do? I will take a shot at a very friendly plea at his talk. How about that? :) Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 01:23, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
@ Good Ol’factory: You and I go back many years, almost as many as User:Bearcat and I, and during that time we have never managed to agree on much. So with this introduction I guess we can do away with wp:AGF, and I would like to start by saying that my first impulse on reading your wall-of text above was who/why is he lynching this time?
Let me ask a simple question: If you have a problem with an edit why not do what most others here do, revert it and see what happens? …and just a note to other ADMINs who I know have good intentions: rushing to reason with User:Look2See1, who is obviously into main-space editing and not into talking, on his talk-page, would not have seemed sincere to me if I was on the receiving end and did not know the posters. Especially since you all posted here as well, after User:Look2Se was pinged.
Looks like the threading here is the pits. That’s all I have to say, I out of here. Ottawahitech ( talk) 14:26, 1 January 2017 (UTC)
Update: User talk:Look2See1#Update
Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 02:34, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
At Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval#BHGbot_3, I requested permission to run a bot to create a set of a few thousand category redirects from "Foo organisations" to "Foo organizations" and vice versa.
If anyone has any views on whether this is a good or a bad idea, please add your comments at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval#BHGbot_3. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:41, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
An editor added some material (shown here bolded) to the "Articles" section ( WP:CATDEF):
And was reverted with the comment more of less to the effect "let's discuss this first" (which is proper IMO, changes to rules should be discussed first).
So let's discuss it. Is this a welcome addition, or not? Herostratus ( talk) 17:13, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
My post below was written before I noticed that the above section was about this very topic...: This page has had some copy on it for a long time that reads "Articles on fictional subjects should not be categorized in a manner that confuses them with real subjects." A couple of months back, I expanded it with a suggestion on how that would apply. Using this as an example, do other users feel like categories such as Category:Fictional characters with bipolar disorder belong as subcategories of the type Category:People with bipolar disorder? Would {{ Catseealso}} be a better solution? In my mind, I may be seeing this as a difference between set and topic categories--what do others think? @ Dimadick: for his perspective. ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 08:37, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
I would say not. The editor who added this, Koavf, is extending a guideline about disambiguating reality-based and fiction-based articles to their category tree. The result is a broken category tree, where interested users can not locate a related article because it does not appear at all in the parent category. This defeats the purpose and has no visible benefits. Dimadick ( talk) 08:43, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
"See also" in categories serve to display a related concept or category, but not a daughter category. An example is Category:Parliament of England leads to the succeeding political body: Category:Parliament of Great Britain.
This does not work well in categories where the common point is the diagnosis or misdiagnosis of a relatively common psychological disorder. These are not related concepts, it it the same concept in reality and its portrayal. Dimadick ( talk) 08:53, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
If I change a page the user or user talk space and the owner changes it back indicating that they know the policy, but simply prefer to keep it, what's next? Naraht ( talk) 16:50, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
There is an RfC about the guidelines as pertain to user categories at Wikipedia talk:User categories#Request for Comment on the guidelines regarding "joke" categories. I figure people who watch this talk page might be interested. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 21:01, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
What do cats have to do with categories? The first line of this project page says: Multiple shortcuts redirect here, you may be looking for: Wikipedia:WikiProject Cats.." I think that's a discrimination for dogs. Or birds. — Ark25 ( talk) 20:00, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
Editors interested in categorization are invited to comment at Talk:Strasserism#Category:Nazism, where there is a disagreement about inclusion of articles in both parent and child categories. Mitch Ames ( talk) 02:54, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
Similarly at Talk:White pride#Category:White supremacy. Mitch Ames ( talk) 03:25, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
The same editor who thinks that WP:SUBCAT ought not apply to White Pride apparently also thinks that WP:SUBCAT is " nonsense" when applied to Great White Fleet in Albany, Western Australia in 1908.
Editors are invited to contribute to the discussion at Talk:Great White Fleet in Albany, Western Australia in 1908#Category:Albany, Western Australia. (I use the term "discussion" loosely here, because the editors who don't like SUBCAT haven't yet indicated why). Mitch Ames ( talk) 09:21, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
I've noticed that there are quite a few comedians who are categorized under both Category:American Jewish comedians and Category:Jewish comedians. Is there any reason why the usual parent/child categories rule doesn't apply here? NewYorkActuary ( talk) 00:46, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
Thoughts on this category? AusLondonder ( talk) 15:24, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Should the "politicians-by-century" categories ( Category:20th-century American politicians, Category:20th-century Indian politicians, etc.) be treated as container categories under WP:SUBCAT? -- Ser Amantio di Nicolao Che dicono a Signa? Lo dicono a Signa. 01:05, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
Relevant discussion here. It lays out, generally speaking, my reasons for having acted as I did. I'm generally not a fan of overcategorization, and frequently work to battle it when I run into it, but this is a slightly different case, to me (as indeed all the people-by-century categories are, when I think about them.) Happy to elaborate further if asked - I will say that in my opinion a large part of the problem is that the politician-by-country-and-century category trees are not all quite created equal, so to speak, and if that were to be changed it would go some way towards fixing the issues I see.
(Please be gentle - this is my first RfC, and while I think I've done everything per instructions and by the book I may have missed something, in which case my apologies. :-) ) -- Ser Amantio di Nicolao Che dicono a Signa? Lo dicono a Signa. 01:05, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
This proposal may arise out of that long discussion on Ser Amantio di Nicolao's talk page, but it does not address the problem which was discussed there. It proposes a solution which nobody sought, and which is likely to be universally opposed.
The problem is quite simple. Ser Amantio di Nicolao (who I will abbreviate to SAdiN) has been flouting WP:SUBCAT on an utterly massive scale, by using Cat-a-Lot and AWB to copy the contents of categories such as Category:Assam MLAs 2006–11 to its parent Category:21st-century Indian politicians.
WP:SUBCAT is very clear. Apart from certain exceptions (i.e. non-diffusing subcategories, see below), an article should be categorised as low down in the category hierarchy as possible, without duplication in parent categories above it.
Yet despite being aware of this guideline, SAdiN made tens of thousands of edits which clearly breach it. SAdin had treated Category:Assam MLAs 2006–11, Category:15th Lok Sabha members etc as non-diffusing sub-categories, which they weren't. None of them was tagged as non-diffusing, and given the tools used, SAdiN must have been aware of that. Even more troublingly, SAdiN did not himself tag any of these categories as non-diffusing, which would have alerted others to what he was doing. Instead, he acted sneakily, on a huge scale.
Despite the fact that this was clearly in breach of WP:SUBCAT, and that SAdiN's edits received no support from those who responded to my call for outside commentators, SAdiN has steadfastly refused to revert their edits.
As that refusal dragged on, I told SAdiN that unless they could demonstrate a consensus for their massive changes, I would go to ANI to seek to have these changes reversed.
Bizarrely, what SAdiN has done here is not to see approval for their treatment of these categories as if they were non-diffusing.
What I and others have sought is for SAdin to ensure that normal WP:SUBCAT rules apply: articles in a subcat of Cat:xxth-century fooers are not also in Cat:xxth-century fooers itself. That Cat:xxth-century fooers containing only those articles which are not already in a sub-category.
Instead what SAdiN has proposed is to containerise Cat:xxth-century fooers, so that it contains only sub-categories. That would involve a massive purge. It would not just diffuse the articles which are already in subcats ... it would purge all the articles which are not in sub-cats.
What is going on here?
SAdiN is the most prolific editor in the history of the English-language Wikipedia. He has been an administrator for a decade. Most of his edits are to categories. So why this straw man RFC?
Did SAdiN intentionally set up a straw man RFC?
If not, I hope that they will sort this out. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 23:09, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
When is a "people from FOO" category justified? Only if a person was born in FOO, or also if they lived there? Debresser ( talk) 16:23, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
Opinions are sought at WT:CATP#Ongoing dispute re duplication in child and parent categories, regarding the use of WP:SUBCAT. Mitch Ames ( talk) 12:43, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
I know I'm drawing attention to a problem without proposing a solution, but the guidance in WP:EPONYMOUS isn't sufficient to know which categories to apply to an eponymous category. The section gives an example, but doesn't make it clear how to generalize from that example. What categories are "relevant to the category's content"? If better explicit guidance can't be given, then some more examples would help a little. — swpb T 15:55, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
Morning, the above category seems to have exceptionally unclear inclusion rationale and has accrued some both obviously unrelated, or tenuously associated, events. Most just seem to be times when something controversial has happened involving race, sex or religion, and just then been bucketed in. Others are claimed by someone involved to be about Political Correctness, but the actual controversy is about something unrelated (such as violence, suppression of freedoms etc relating to wider political issues). I don't want to nominate it for deletion without understanding what we think should actually be in here first and whether it can be redeemed in any fashion. Any comments or ideas how this can be improved? Thanks Koncorde ( talk) 10:32, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
Koavf has been removing alumni categories of people who also (for a different reason) belong to a different category that happens to be a child category of the alumni category. Two examples:
I think this issue goes well beyond alumni categories, and that our categorization guideline provides poor guidance for this case. It allows articles to be in both a parent and a child category when the child is non-diffusing (often gender-based or ethnic subcategories of non-segregated parent categories) or when an article is the main article for a subcategory, but it doesn't describe any other exceptions. I think it is common sense that, when an article has a reason for being in a parent category that is independent of its reason for being in a child category, it should be in both, but this does not seem to be codified in our guidelines. Perhaps it should be? — David Eppstein ( talk) 05:41, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
Another similar case: Patrick C. Fischer for whom Koavf has created the one-article category Category:University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts alumni to avoid simultaneously listing him in the parent category (for his undergraduate degree) and the business school category (for his MBA). It is plausible enough that Fischer's undergraduate degree actually is in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, but our article's text and its sources only say that he earned a bachelor's degree from Michigan. We can guess that he probably majored in mathematics (in LSA) but the sources don't say so, and he could as easily have majored in engineering (a different school) or business (same category as for his graduate degree, but we can't list an article twice in a single category). A quick web search also shows that Michigan undergraduate diplomas do not mention the name of the college, only the university, the degree, and the name of the degree program, so the case for this category being defining seems quite dubious to me. — David Eppstein ( talk) 06:51, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
The North-American Interfraternity Conference is an organization composed of American Social Fraternities. In recent years a few of them members have withdrawn from the conference. There are also Fraternities which are no longer members of the North-American Interfraternity Conference any more because they have merged with other fraternities in the NIC (or in a few cases merged with another group which then merged with a group still in the NIC!
There is Category:North-American Interfraternity Conference, but i'm wondering what the best way is to categorize groups that fit into either of the "no longer member of" category. Separate subcategory? Two different subcategories? Include them in the main category (with an unusual sort key????)? Ideas? Naraht ( talk) 21:41, 30 June 2017 (UTC)
Categorization deletions are harming the encyclopedia. Organizing is wonderful, but deletions should be discussed. Deletions should go through a comment and consensus process. I also detest the practice of well-meaning, good faith category editors going through my contributions/created articles and category edits when I post a concern or revert their deletion. My personal email inbox will now overflow with WP messages that detail the mass category removals from the articles that I have on my watchlist. It is predictable.
I was appointed a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar with the University of Pittsburgh with the purpose of adding archival library content into Wikipedia and commons. Part of the process is to facilitate the 'finding' of such historical content by readers, historians, school children and authors - not category editors. That is to say, if someone reads the George Washington article, finds an archived image from Pitt that has been uploaded to commons, then appropriate and possible numerous categories should appear as part of the article. Readers find archived content by seeing and clicking on categories. The requests from WP readers to the Pitt archives for more historical information has doubled since I began this work. This is the whole idea behind the Visiting Scholars Program. With zealous un-categorization those links to other historical topics are disappearing. Readers don't care about guidelines related to categorization. They want to find historical connections. Of course parents and children will appear connected to articles. That is how you find related topics. Readers don't know or care what a parent or child category might be. Categorization might tidy up the encyclopedia a bit, but I hear precious little about making WP more reader-friendly. Readers like categories. Categories are finding aids. Category deletions are harming my work and the encyclopedia.
Best Regards, Barbara Page — Preceding unsigned comment added by Barbara (WVS) ( talk • contribs) 11:00, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains#Emptying of Category:Locomotives by wheel arrangement
Should both/either/which of 4-4-0 and Category:4-4-0 locomotives (it's the EPONYMOUS lead article) be members of Category:Whyte notation? Thanks Andy Dingley ( talk) 20:53, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
Hi all. I've been whittling down a WikiProject Tennessee backlog, unassessed articles, for about a year and a half and have gotten it from a high of 800 down to less than 100. I hope to empty it soon. (Note that this is all manual editing, no semiautomated tools.) My problem is that I have in the past seen templates that say something like, "administrarors, please do not delete this category even if it is empty" and I now can't find it when I want to add it to the category page. Obviously the category needs to exist even if it's empty, because people will tag without assessing. Can anybody give me the link to that tag? White Arabian Filly Neigh 21:37, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
{{
Possibly empty category}}
--
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 22:53, 27 July 2017 (UTC)I noticed that the advertised count of pages in some maintenance categories does not reflect the actual page count. Delayed update may have an impact but IMO the message should not be misleading. I started a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Discrepancy between count of pages in a category and actual number of pages, so responses are probably best put there. PBS, you were interested. David Brooks ( talk) 00:28, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
I've seen some category talk pages occasionally get tagged for wikiprojects, but most aren't. Any thoughts on which of the two is best? – Uanfala 18:39, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
I work on cleanup at Wikipedia:Database reports/Uncategorized categories, and I've long struggled with the the guidance of WP:EPONYMOUS: "An eponymous category should have only the categories of its article that are relevant to the category's content." Other than one example, there's no expansion on what that means – what makes a potential parent "relevant"? I think, for the sake of consistency, we should try to flesh out this guidance more – so this is a call for ideas for how to do so, with an eye toward drafting new text for the guideline. Some questions to jumpstart with:
Hopefully there are some ideas floating out there already. Thanks! Please ping me in your reply. — swpb T 14:42, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Several characters (including [space], "*", "+", ans sometimes even "-" or others) are used to place entries before the main alphabetized list on category pages, and sometimes these appear in combination, so that the same category contains entries under multiple pre-alphabet characters. WP:SORTKEY's guidance is lacking regarding which prefix to use and when:
It seems that these two rules are mostly already followed, so I think this is a least-effort, least-disruption solution to the hodgepodge of uses we have currently. — swpb T 14:11, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
I am just starting to learn about categories, and I was taking a look at North American Prairies Province. There are a lot of overlapping categories there and I'm not sure which ones to retain. For instance, Category:Native grasses of the Great Plains region is a child of the following categories that are also tagged to North American Prairies Province:
Are there any good tools to visualize the category trees of a page? Also, how does one decide if a page should have both the parent and child category or just the child? It seems very confusing. - Furicorn ( talk) 04:35, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
Should a defunct cycling team be place into, for example, Category:Cycling teams based in France and Category:Defunct cycling teams based in France? I have previously asked this Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cycling/Archive 15#Category:Defunct cycling teams, but looking back I don't think my question was clear ( Severo?). I have come back to this as Kasir has removed a lot of articles from the parent categories and want further opinions to potentially form a consensus. Bald Boris 13:29, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
In analyzing the 8/20/2017 database categorylinks table, I discovered two reasonable self-linked categories, Category:Hidden_categories and Category:Noindexed_pages, and a dozen or so non-reasonable ones, most of which have already been corrected in the current data, although there are new ones as well. This phenomenon is already tracked via Wikipedia:Database_reports/Self-categorized_categories.
I also discovered many more link cycles of length greater than 1. For example, Category:Tracking_categories and Category:Container_categories are members of each other, thereby forming a cycle (loop) of length 2. This is probably reasonable as well, but there are many more cycles, most of which are non-reasonable -- in fact, a total of 5551 different cycles, when considering categories reachable from regular articles and other categories (namespaces 0 and 14), and not following links beyond Category:Articles. (None of this is taking into account redirected categories or articles.)
The longest cycle is 933 links. There are 849 different cycle lengths. Cycles of length 20 or less, while generally the most common, constitute fewer than 1500 of the 5551 cycles.
I don't have any suggestions at this point for what to do, but I'm sharing this in the hope of helping to improve Wikipedia over (a long) time as a natural language processing (NLP) resource.
RVS ( talk) 21:48, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
I sometimes uses Wikipedia for natural language processing (NLP) research. I was looking at Category:Sports_competitors and discovered that the Ahmed_al-Darbi page (he's a Guantanamo Bay detainee) had Category:Sports_competitors as an ancestor, due to a clearly wrong-directional and otherwise inappropriate link (which I deleted) making Category:Kenyan_male_marathon_runners a parent of Category:Kenya. (Kenya was involved via another questionable link making Category:Wars_involving_Kenya a parent of Category:War_on_Terror.)
Exploring the categorization links further, I also ran across the following series of links (A <- B indicating that page B is in category A), where all the pages listed are in the category namespace except Ahmed_al-Darbi: Natural resource management <- Hydrology <- Hydrography <- Basins <- Depressions (geology) <- Rifts and grabens <- Great Rift Valley <- Gulf of Aden <- Horn of Africa <- Arab world <- Politics of the Arab world <- Political movements in the Arab world <- Islamism in the Arab world <- Islamism in Saudi Arabia <- Saudi Arabian Islamists <- Saudi Arabian al-Qaeda members <- Ahmed_al-Darbi.
Here the whole sequence Great Rift Valley <- Gulf of Aden <- Horn of Africa <- Arab world seems problematic to me. I looked around for the best way to report this and settled on the present page (Wikipedia_talk:Categorization). I also noticed a related older discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Archive_16#Subcategories_and_geography-related_categories, and of course Wikipedia:Categorization#Subcategorization. (By the way, there seemed to be at least a small consensus at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Archive_16#Subcategories_and_geography-related_categories that Category:Rivers_of_Austria should not be a parent of Category:Danube, but no one has changed that to date.)
I see there's a Template:Check_category one can add to point out a problematic category, but there are two major limitations to that. First, it only allows you to specify the problematic parent category, but not which specific parent <- child links one has an issue with. Second, there are no additional template parameters that allow one to specify, say, a short explanation of why one thinks the category or link is problematic.
So I'm writing this for three reasons. One is to solicit opinions on the categorization links Great Rift Valley <- Gulf of Aden <- Horn of Africa <- Arab world. The second is to raise the issue of a mechanism to identify and discuss specific problematic links. The third is to have something I can make reference to when I edit some of those problematic links, probably starting by deleting the Horn of Africa <- Arab world link. Thanks for your attention.
RVS ( talk) 18:50, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
IMO a more detailed guidance should be given about deciding which categories are non-diffusing. The description " simply subsets which have some special characteristic of interest"
is rather vague. Why Albania in "Rivers of Albania " makes it diffusing while "Women" in "Women novelists" is non-diffusing. A river being in Albania looks pretty much "special characteristic of interest" of the river to me, while "Woman" is pretty much decisive classification. Of course, I remember the politically correct shitfall with women writers, which actually reinforces my question: how to decide.
Staszek Lem (
talk) 18:29, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
What is the rationale under the decision that templates are not categorized by content? IMO It would be useful for maintenance. Templates are akin to lists and categories, they are navigation aids. The categorize the latter two, but not the first one. Staszek Lem ( talk) 17:48, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
It would be useful if some other editors could have a look at recent edits to Category:Gunpowder and Category:Explosives (etc). DexDor (talk) 06:55, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
I've recently discovered a number of categories in the format "Fooish children's animated <genre> television series" (examples: American children's animated adventure television series and American children's animated comedy television series). I remember reading in a guideline or discussion that a category should only have so many intersections, but I can't remember exactly where. So: are these categories too specific? Trivialist ( talk) 23:40, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Should MoS shortcut redirects be sorted to certain specific maintenance categories? An Rfc has been opened on this talk page to answer that question. Your sentiments would be appreciated! Paine Ellsworth put'r there 16:37, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Layout#Conflict with Category:Kvng RTH -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 09:47, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
I am attempting to improve the categorisation in this area and my attempts are being resisted by people from the WP:FTN group who will not let me, for example, put articles about acupuncture into that category. As far as I can see they fundamentally disagree with the heirarchical nature of the category system. They want to use categories as labels. I would like some help and advice please. Rathfelder ( talk) 23:28, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
Yes I am. Rathfelder ( talk) 15:39, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
I know that, but when I do it I get repeatedly reverted. I don't want to get involved in an edit war on my own. Rathfelder ( talk) 15:39, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
A discussion has been started by @ Ser Amantio di Nicolao at WT:WikiProject Women_in_Red#Categories about his creation and population of yet more huge people-by-century categories, including some of which have already been deleted at WP:CfD.
These categories potentially contain many thousands of articles, and are being populated with stealthy edit summaries which give no clue as to what is being done. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 17:32, 12 January 2018 (UTC)
I note that there has been some editing recently to the one sentence paragraph saying "Interlanguage links work on category pages just as they do for articles, and can be used to link to corresponding categories on other language Wikipedias
".... While this is true (the links do work on category pages), I don’t think we have ever discussed the more fundamental question... do we WANT interlanguage links on our category pages (and if so, HOW)?
Perhaps I am misunderstanding what this sentence is trying to convey, but it appears to be telling us to place articles at (say) the French or German WPs within the categories here on the English WP... if so, I have to question whether this is something we want to allow. I question whether linking to articles at our sister projects fits with the purpose of our categorization system. I have always thought of our category system as being for internal navigation - helping readers find related articles located here on WP.en.
I do think it helpful to point readers to articles at our sister projects ... but I am not at all sure whether linking to them in categories is the right WAY to do this. Please discuss. Blueboar ( talk) 13:40, 20 January 2018 (UTC) Blueboar ( talk) 13:40, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
My reading of WP:Categorization is that the category structure should not contain loops; i.e. A is a member of B is a member of C is a member of A. All categories should (eventually) be sub-categories of the root category, Category:Contents. However, loops do exist, for example:
Category:Truth -> Category:Concepts in epistemology -> Category:Epistemology -> Category:Knowledge -> Category:Truth
Should these loops be broken? If so, how? power~enwiki ( π, ν) 22:24, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
I'm not at all a fan of these Fooian female/women barbazzes
categories in most cases because they have a "ghettoizing" effect, especially a psycho-social one. Every time we use a category like "Category:British female artists", etc. without a well-sourced reason for having it, it's like describing someone as "my Jewish friend Jimmy" instead of "my friend Jimmy".
Previous RfCs and other discussion about such categories have been sharply critical, yet we still keep having the categories. Why? As far as I can tell it's just for the convenience of some individuals. By this reasoning, WP:OVERCAT should simply be marked {{ Historical}} and ignored, since every intersection of topics turned into a category is convenient for someone. The more obvious ghettoizing effect, of women not being found in general categories but only in "women" or "female" subcategories, is partially resolved by making them non-diffusing categories; however, this still depends on editors actually listing these subjects in the specific and the general category, and them remaining categorized that way, which is often not the case. And this doesn't nothing about the perception problem. [PS: All of this applies to other such "socially charged demographics" categories like "gay", "Catholic", "Hispanic", etc., though we're mostly rid of those that are not well-justified.]
We need to come up with a compromise that draws an easy-to-understand line. The one I suggest is this: Such a category is created/kept only if we're certain that a properly encyclopedic article can and should be written about it (or already has been), at least at the top of the category tree.
Here's a detailed example: I wanted to delete Category:Female pool players as ghettoizing, when it was first created, but I would !vote to keep it now, because it would be both possible and desirable to have a comprehensive Women in billards (or whatever) article that covered this history:
It's fair to say that our coverage of pool is sorely incomplete until this article is written. (Some basics can be found in select bios like Jean Balukas). The same is not true of most occupations; the typical arc is that they were virtually all male-dominated in a simply de facto way, until women entered the non-domestic workforce in massive numbers.
Counter-example: There's nothing like the women-and-cue-sports story when it comes to women playing particular musical instruments. Women drummers (to use an example from a thread at Wikipedia talk:Categorizing redirects) are actually quite common, they're just not very common among touring pros probably simply because drum kits seem to appeal more to males on average (whether that's a factor of marketing or what is off-topic for now). It's exactly the same as the relative lack of women construction contractors; it's not a line of work that seems to attract many women. It is not like the lack of women fighter pilots or female players of American football, which are in fact due mostly to institutionalized discrimination, exactly as with pool: we have clear proof of long-term, organized efforts to bar women's entry. We do not when it comes to drumming or working with power tools.
Our coverage of drumming in popular music isn't incomplete without an article on players who are female, and writing one would be an exercise in original research and PoV editorializing, due to lack of secondary sources for "women as drummers" being a subject of coverage of its own. There's lots and lots of material about women as billiardists and the industry response to them (though much of it is in speciality publications like Billiards Digest and not available online, so doing the article will require library work).
What's current practice? We seem to keep keeping stuff like Category:Actresses and its zillion subcats (despite decreasing support for even using this term at all in female actor bios), on the sole basis that there are some separate awards (Oscars, Golden Globes, etc.) for actresses and male actors, despite there being no particular difference between an actor and an actress in what they do and how they do it. This doesn't really seem good enough to me. It's really quite flimsy.
The reason we have these separate categories has nothing to do with the people receiving them but with the nature of human fiction, which usually involves a love interest which in turn is usually heterosexual; it violates average public expectations that the two main stars in a movie that is at least partially about their relationship are directly competing with each other for a single award. So, they have separate awards to make people happy – and it also lets them give out more awards per film, which makes the awards show go on much longer, which means more sponsor advertising dollars, and so on. It's a business decision.
What's the problem? The actor/actress sort of thing is a very poor rationale to differently label and categorize bios in an encyclopedia. The problem with this weak "sometimes some separate treatment, like for awards" standard is it could be used to "women-fork" any occupational category of any kind as long as someone can find, somewhere, a case of women and men receiving recognition in a sex-divided way. We can do better than this, by tying it to there being a sourceable distinction on many levels, about which a proper article can be written. Important: Actress redirects to Actor, and any attempt to fork it would fail. And "sometimes separate treatment" doesn't cut it anyway. We don't have separate articles on driving cars and teenage driving cars, despite there in fact being separate laws about the latter.
What about other categories? When it comes to bios, the craptastical ghettoizing effect can be mitigated a little by other categories; e.g., Georgia O'Keefe is in the arguably pointless Category:American women painters, but also in Category:20th-century American painters which is not divided by sex. This should be probably be done in all cases in which we have a gendered category split and the members of it span more than a century and there are enough in the categories for a split. But this only works when the main category (here, Category:American painters) is a container category and stuff is all supposed to be in subcats [that category badly needs work in this regard].
It doesn't work for, e.g. Category:Women eSports players; the number of notable pro gamers is too small for such a split, and it's an occupation almost entirely confined to the 21st century (some 1990s, but not enough for a century split). And Category:Women eSports players is perhaps the worst example of all time, since there are not reliably sourceable differences between male and female gamers, other than that some of the former have been total asshats to some of the latter; half the time no one's even going to know what their sex or gender identity is unless they disclose it or they show up for an in-person, live-action competition, and even then people can "pass" if they try hard. It's not sufficient (yet) that we have articles at Women and video games and Sexism in video gaming, almost entirely about video game marketing and amateur player experience, respectively. They're not focused on women as pro gamers, game developers, or other professionals, and it's unlikely that a proper encyclopedia article can be written about that; there simply isn't enough history there, and what there is isn't sufficiently distinct from men doing the same work.
What about wikiprojects' tracking needs? The argument is offered that we need these categories, and lots more of them, to help wikiprojects keep track of the level of article development in particular topic areas. But this is not what user-facing article categories are for. This can done by creating lists at the wikiprojects, by applying hidden categories with talk page wikiproject banners (e.g. {{
WikiProject Women|sports=yes|...}}
), or both.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 07:30, 1 January 2018 (UTC); addendum: 04:50, 4 January 2018 (UTC) substantially revised to address some issues raised below: 06:38, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
they have a ghettoizing effect (of women not being found in general categories but only in "women" or "female" subcategories)— It's quite common for such categories to be non-diffusing, e.g. Category:American women painters, so they are in the general category as well. That's not a justification for keeping the gendered category though.
Such a category is created/kept only if ... a[n] ... article can and should be written about it ...— Corollary: such categories should include a {{ Cat main}}, and if no such article exists a stub should be created.
Women drummers...— I don't think it invalidates your argument, because it's about a specific organisation rather than women drummers in general, but we do have Women Drummers International, which some might claim is a justification for Category:Female drummers.
We seem to keep keeping stuff like Category:Actresses and its zillion subcats— Some of those subcats may be justified by the existence of an article, e.g. Category:Best Actress Academy Award winners and Academy Award for Best Actress.
Category:Women eSports players is perhaps the worst example of all time, since there is really, really, really no difference at all between male and female gamers— "eSports" and "gaming" are not synonymous, but we do have an article Women and video games, which could give some justification for the existence of the category.
Some detailed reply material:
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Agreed on male categories; there may be some defensible ones, but some clearly are not, including
Category:Male models and
Category:Male nurses; male models have existed as long as there have been models, they're just in lower demand; male nurses have not been unusual for generations now. I'll address the "non-diffusing is the solution" idea below, since two others raised it. Agreed on the inconsistencies point; though fixable it's widespread and annoying and causes cleanup to be needed (either duplicate categories, or categories not being applied because the editor thinks the cat. doesn't exist). Should probably stick to "female" and "male" since so many of these do not have adulthood as a criterion. Corollary: agreed, though it shouldn't be implied that creating the stub is required to create the category if the category is genuinely justified. Orgs: I wasn't meaning to imply at all that the existence of a professional association is sufficient; I could create right now an organization called the Men's Political Consulting Association, with full 501(c)(3) status, but that would not justify a "Category:Male political consultants", regardless of any diffusing question, even if we had 20× more articles on people in that line of work. The pool example was about the entire history of the billiards–women relationship, so I would have to clarify that in a real proposal. Yes, we would keep Category:Best Actress Academy Award winners, etc., but there's no reason for them not to be in non-gendered Category:Actors container cats. like Category:Film actors by award, with the pointless Category:Film actresses by award simply going away. Sourcing: This isn't an article, as you say, and the point isn't to mire people in citations for the obvious (even WP:CIRCULAR ones. I would remove rather than source. Given comments below challenging the obvious; it's a political distraction. Women and video games could potentially be justified, in combination with Sexism in video gaming (see below), but only if there's focused, sourced material clearly established noteworthy distinctions between men and women as pro gamers, which is not presently the case. Experiencing some (sometimes a lot of) prejudice isn't enough; that would be true at one point or another for women in every non-domestic occusation, often within living memory of many of us. And changing demographics aren't enough by themselves (and may even mitigate against such categories, as the statistical differences recede). Could write on article Women and tool ownership about increased tool purchases by women, cheesy pink-tool marketing, gender gap in picking up tool skills from an early age and consequent safety/injury issues, etc., etc., but it wouldn't justify categories of women contractors, women set constructors, etc., if the article didn't strongly show gender differences in tool-related occupations. |
I can't accept the "it's hard" argument. It's part of WP's job as an encyclopedia to "determine whether [the subject] activity and occupation has some form of bias against women" and cover it adequately if so. (And yes, that can be politically tense, as is much of what we do in writing proper articles.) Until that's been done, the article is incomplete, and an insufficient basis on which to create a gendered category. Yes, this means way fewer gendered categories, and I would hope that was obvious, being the central idea of the draft proposal.
Cavils about statistics are a distraction:
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I'm not going to get into distracting side arguments about demographics. I've just trimmed the material instead. But go to any Home Depot and note the M:F ratio (and after registering the low number of women, also note how many of them are there with their men and buying non-tool household items while the men are getting tools). Go to 50 rock, pop, jazz, etc., shows over several years and count the number of female drummers; depending on where you live, should be in the 5–15% range at most. I'll just drop such material from any actual proposal rather than invite pointless side disputes about it. |
They also provide a set of examples which article creators can use to improve their own articles.— Why are the "female fooian" articles any better than or different to the "fooian" articles as examples? Is there any reason to believe that articles about females are generally better than articles about males? (If there is, perhaps we need "male fooians" to help find the articles that need improving.) Are there specific characteristics of articles about women that are missing from articles about men? The only one I can think of (from my Western male perspective) is handling name changes due to marriage. ( recent example)
... they list many names from ... non English-speaking countries which would not normally be recognized as women's names.— That could apply equally to male categories. But in either case it's a circular argument, since presumably the only reason you'd need to recognise the names as female (or male) is because you're explicitly looking for people of a specific gender - in which case the advantage of the category is simply that you can find people of a specific gender.
Furthermore, they can be used as a straightforward basis for creating lists of women in a given occupation,— Isn't that simply perpetuating the status quo, rather than justifying it? I.e. the reason for categorising by gender is to make it easier to create lists by gender - but why do need/want lists by gender? (in the absence of a specific article about that gendered list criterion)
{{
WikiProject Women in Red|sports=yes|...}}
. The entire idea "we should keep these categories because it helps my wikiproject work" is completely wrongheaded when it comes to categories that exist for readers. Integrated this into the draft material. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:21, 4 January 2018 (UTC); revised 06:38, 4 January 2018 (UTC)I agree that categories exist to aid navigation for readers "looking for related articles". But two articles on artists that happen to be women (or lesbian, or black, or Hindu) aren't "related" in any meaningful way. It's just another WP:OVERCAT, an intersection that is convenient for someone but doesn't indicate a connection or sensible comparison.
In some cases, like
Category:Female players of American football, there clearly is a meaningful relationship (which I needn't belabour here). That's the kind of gendered, non-diffusing category we should retain. However, as I predicted elsewhere in this thread, some of the entries are still completely diffused, and do not appear in the appropriate non-gendered equivalent category (which might be quite a bit more specific, like
Category:American football quarterbacks or whatever). I fixed a couple of these, but gave up after a while, since it's not one of my topics of interest and my to-do list is already huge. If we're not even doing this right with gendered categories that make good sense, "non-diffusing is the solution" is very obviously not the solution when we're contemplating thousands of way less justifiable categories. They will in fact ghettoize subjects and are already doing so right now.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:21, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
I haven't been involved in categorization much in the past, so I'm a little hazy on the subtleties. I recently published American Bank Note Company Printing Plant. I put it into:
and I'm not sure if those were appropriate. In all of those cases, those categories don't describe the main topic of the article, but things that are mentioned in the article (a park that's nearby, and several tenants of the building). Is that what we're looking for, or should I stick to more core categories? -- RoySmith (talk) 16:44, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
There is a dispute at [[Josh Longstaff] regarding the inclusion of Category:High school basketball coaches in the United States. I contend that his time as a high school coach is a non-essential and non-defining feature of his career. He is notable because of his experience in professional basketball, not his time in high school. Another user argues that his time in high school is mentioned in the article and in hiring announcements, therefore it must be included. Can you clarify help clarify this? Should we include every facet of a biography or just what they're known for?-- TM 01:10, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
I'm confused about appropriate parent categories for topic categories. WP:SUBCAT says "If logical membership of one category implies logical membership of a second (an is-a relationship), then the first category should be made a subcategory (directly or indirectly) of the second." This makes me think that articles in the subcategory would also belong in the parent category, eg. all members of Category:Borders of France also belong in the parent category Category:Geography of France. However, for topic categories, I find this is not the case.
For example, Category:France has a parent category of Category:Countries in Europe, but articles in Category:France include France's 35-Hour Workweek, which should not be in Category:Countries in Europe. Similarly, Category:National Science Foundation has a parent category of Category:Independent agencies of the United States government, but only the main article in this category should be categorized as such.
Should members of subcategories always belong in parent categories? Should topic categories be categorized like their main articles? Is there a guideline, essay, or similar somewhere which clarifies these issues? Daask ( talk) 20:53, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
Here's another example that might help clarify the question.
How can I or a tool avoid drawing this incorrect conclusion? Is it invalid to link via Shakespeare because Shakespeare is a topic category, and if so how is this status recorded in Wikipedia? Or should Shakespeare not be a member of any parent categories, other than those which classify categories rather than articles? Certes ( talk) 12:01, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
"Would it be helpful if topic categories could have no parents other than container categories and maintenance categories...?" No, that would be the opposite of helpful, because it would fragment the category structure and make it harder for readers to find articles. postdlf ( talk) 15:10, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
Hi. There's discussion on how sort keys should be used for Thai people and/or Thai people categories at Wikipedia talk:Categorization of people#Thai names (specific options outlined below at Wikipedia talk:Categorization of people#Moving forward. -- Paul_012 ( talk) 14:48, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
WP:CATVER says, "Categorization of articles must be verifiable." WP:VERIFIABILITY says, "All content must be verifiable. The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material". On 5 March 2018 at 17:37 (UTC), I removed the "living person" categorizations from the article Noley Thornton because the most-recent verified activity by the subject was in 1996, 22 years is a not-insignificant amount of time, and an admittedly-cursory search found no newer evidence.
This is not an articular battle, I've not reverted subsequent re-additions of "living" categories, and I have zero intentions of edit warring. I'm only looking for guidance on our assumptions of individual viability, and timetable(s) therefor. — fourthords | =Λ= | 17:52, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
Individuals of advanced age (over 90)can be moved out without there being evidence of death. For a person who was born in 1983, there's no reason to remove that category. power~enwiki ( π, ν) 17:56, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
You seem to think we have to keep searching for evidence that someone is still alive in order to keep them in that category, even where we have no sources reporting their death. Why on earth would you think that?WP:CATVER says, "Categorization of articles must be verifiable." Ergo, to say that an individual is living such categorization must be verified. That's why I would think that.
The methodology you describe above to support your inference that someone well within normal lifespan was deceased is nonsensical and, ironically, total OR.I'm not inferring anything, nor did I say I was. In fact, barring reliable sources, I'm explicitly not assuming anything: hence the crux of my inquiry here. — fourthords | =Λ= | 16:02, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
You're thinking that you're entitled to change the content of an article just because…I removed the "living person" categorizations from Noley Thornton IAW WP:CATVER. After they were replaced, I came to this page for clarification. That's all I've done. If you see that as acting out some sort of unacceptable expression of entitlement, I can't help that. Since my initial inquiry: (a) I learned from power~enwiki ( talk · contribs) that a BLP policy footnote says, "People are presumed to be living unless there is reason to believe otherwise." (b) I've simply suggested we clarify WP:CATVER with a few words about the "living" categories—an edit I could boldly make myself, but wanted to get input on to avoid ruffling others' feathers. — fourthords | =Λ= | 16:09, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
The application of WP:SUBCAT is the subject of a Request for Comments taking place at Talk:Andrew Wakefield#Request for Comments regarding categorization of this article. Your input at that discussion will be appreciated. NewYorkActuary ( talk) 19:21, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
For some reason, categorisation now appears to be adding articles to the end of the initial letter section (e.g. anything beginning with 'A' is added at the end of the 'A' section on the category page) instead of alphabetically. Anyone got any ideas as to why this should be so? -- Necrothesp ( talk) 09:35, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
A category I started, Category:World Series-winning managers, is having the same alphabetization issues I've seen discussed on this page. I'm sorry to be a pain in the neck, but I need to know if maintenance can be performed on this category. Mr. Brain ( talk)
Hi how are you doing Mohammedhaqq ( talk) 04:01, 5 June 2020 (UTC)