Wikipedia talk:User categories

The page as it stands seems a little too tight on whether it truly is consensus that user categories be used in the manner prescribed. There's been no consensus on whether redlinked cats shgould be removed from user talk pages at the pump, and the consensus for what constitutes usefulness in a user cat differs on the mailing list to that which is argues at WP:UCFD. Personally I think every category should be judged on its own merits, and that a consensus of Wikipedians should decide the utility or lack of it. Hiding T 23:35, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Guidleline status

Does this guideline have consensus to be a guideline, and did it ever go through a proper process to be called a guideline?

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Note the above talk is older than the corresponding article text?

Where did this guideline come from? Where was it discussed? Guidelines exist because of wide-ranging discussion and consensus, not the tradition of a small group of editors who claim guideline by assertion. All previous attempts to create a guideline about user categories has failed to get consensus, and despite (or because of) its age, I don't see anything backing up this text either.

According to Wikipedia:Guideline#Proposals, a proposed guideline should go to an RfC to gain, and show, wide community support. Is there an RfC for this page? SchmuckyTheCat (talk) 03:36, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

This guideline originated in Wikipedia:Userboxes (another guideline), was split from there about 18 months ago, and some parts were added later on (like the section "Syntax for including user categories in a userbox"). It was discussed and advertised in a variety of locations, including the Village Pump and User categories for discussion; since then, it has been discussed or mentioned at dozens of other locations.

The recommendation (not requirement) to use RfC applies only to policies, not to guidelines; moreover, that recommendation was not even in place when this guideline came into being (see here).

As for the {{disputedtag}}, I replaced it with {{underdiscussion}} per the text of Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines: "The {{disputedtag}} template is typically used instead of {{underdiscussion}} for claims that a page was recently assigned guideline or policy status without proper or sufficient consensus being established." (emphasis added) This page was tagged as a guideline around 18 months ago, which is definitely not recent. I apologize for any confusion I caused by replacing the tag before I posted on this talk page.

Do you have any specific concerns about the guidance given in the guideline? –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 04:30, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

So, the userbox policy in March 2008, [1], which was also disputed and never demonstrated consensus at that time, was split to this, and carried the guideline box. It carried over about two sentences that are currently in this text. Then the rest of this text was written after those two sentences, without any discussion. So one disputed guideline split into two disputed guidelines, with mostly the same group of people writing both, in a vacuum, without actually getting any feedback from the rest of Wikipedia.

In one of your edit summaries, you said there was a Village Pump discussion and gave me a link. That "discussion" was a bot announcing this new guideline. Bot announcements are not discussions. Please, please, show me some discussions with lots of contributors!

I was glad that WP:UCFD was finally merged back to WP:CFD, since it never had a good reason to exist in the first place, except for a bit of pique by Radiant! getting tired of wiki-cops abusing CFD.

As to specific concerns - the whole section on syntax in userboxes doesn't belong here at all, that's half the page. The rest of it is objectionable as instruction creep. Some of it is good advice, but what is plainly obvious is that the users who've written it and want it to be a guideline want an excuse to go around policing, editing and controlling other people's user pages. Everything else might be good advice, but the only things that need to be in a guideline are already in a well read, well distributed, and well discussed existing guideline, the last paragraph here Wikipedia:USER#What_may_I_not_have_on_my_user_page.3F Note well the second-to-last paragraph as well. The user-space cops who use this guideline as their basis to delete user material are directly in opposition to that advice in WP:USER. User categories that are not disruptive should be left alone. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

While certain portions of the userbox guideline have been disputed at times, it is misleading to characterize the whole guideline itself as "disputed" and "never demonstrat[ing] consensus". In fact, this discussion (which came at the same time as the addition of the disputed tag) shows support for UBX as a guideline.

In my edit summary, I said that the guideline was "advertised on dozens of project pages including Village pump"; I never said that the discussion was located there. Most of what's on this page has been compiled from a variety of sources, including WP:UBX, various talk page discussions (WT:UCFD, WT:UBX, etc.), and the results of hundreds upon hundreds of CfD discussions.

A section on general syntax in userboxes would not belong here, but a section on syntax for including user categories in userboxes does not really seem out-of-place in a guideline about user categories.

I don't understand why you why you mention WP:USER, since that guideline applies to user pages and pages in userspace, not to categories.

For the sake of constructive dialogue, I would ask you to withdraw a few portions of the rest of your comment. There is no need to resort to comments like "the users who've written it and want it to be a guideline want an excuse to go around policing, editing and controlling other people's user pages"—I didn't write this guideline, by the way—and to refer to editors as "user-space cops". –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 05:42, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I won't remove any text, because policing user page content (which WP:USER says is not our job) is the goal; creating laws and asking for enforcement is what police do, and that's the goal here. There is a basic mismatch between the goals of this guideline and the goals of the Wikipedia project.

Again, why did I bring up WP:USER... The philosophy expressed on this page and on CfD is fundamentally opposed to this: "The Wikipedia community is generally tolerant and offers fairly wide latitude in applying these guidelines to regular participants. Particularly, community-building activities that are not strictly "on topic" may be allowed, especially when initiated by committed Wikipedians with good edit histories. At their best, such activities help us to build the community, and this helps to build the encyclopedia. But at the same time, if user page activity becomes disruptive to the community or gets in the way of the task of building an encyclopedia, it must be modified to prevent disruption."

Building a guideline on how to treat deletion discussions AFTER the discussions have already taken place is backwards. Saying you are relying on precedent and tradition, when the group building the tradition never had a good set of rules to begin with, is... broken. SchmuckyTheCat (talk) 05:57, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I've read the talk page archives for WP:UBX now. I don't see any discussion of creating this page, nor discussion of the text on it. Can you please point me to a discussion yet? The wild goose chase at VPP led to a bot, and WP:UBX had nothing resembling this text. SchmuckyTheCat (talk) 06:07, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You write as if only police organizations have and/or enforce rules... In any case, this guideline is not about user page content (you wrote "policing user page content ... is the goal"), but rather about the creation, organization, and maintenance of a separate class of pages: user categories.

I appreciate that you clarified why you mentioned WP:USER, but still I don't see how it applies. WP:USER applies to content on user pages and in userspace, but user categories are separate pages in a separate namespace. There is a big difference between adding to one's user page the comment "I like fudge" versus creating a category called Category:Wikipedians who like fudge and placing one's user page in that category.

As for your last point, I have two comments. First, this is not a guideline on how to treat deletion discussions. It's no more a deletion guideline than WP:UBX, WP:USER, or WP:LAYOUT. Second, it is completely natural that the content of a guideline reflects common practice and outcomes. Guidelines are not created from thin air; rather, they are constructed and evolve based on the outcomes of discussions.

I'm afraid I must be logging off soon, but I'll be happy to continue our discussion in a couple of hours. –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 06:28, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

"you clarified why you mentioned WP:USER, but still I don't see how it applies. WP:USER applies to content on user pages and in userspace, but user categories are separate pages in a separate namespace." Partially incorrect, and partially missing the point. WP:USER does not make a contextual separation between user pages and user categories, as you claim. Also, WP:USER contains all that needs to be said about User Categories, and has said it for years, since 2004: "Do not put your userpage or subpages, including work-in-progress articles, into categories used by Wikipedia articles (example: Category:1990 births). Be careful of templates and stub notices that put a work-in-progress article into categories." & etc. WP:USER has had advice on user categories since 2004 and is well trafficked and discussed. This page is not well-discussed, and given the number of editors, certainly not well-trafficked. This proposal takes a much more restrictive view of user categories compared to WP:USER. Why is this proposal necessary?

You say that this proposal is not about deletion discussions, but this proposed guideline, the editors who wrote it, the editors who quote it in deletion discussions, the editors defending it, the supporting pages of precedence, these are all inextricably linked together. You are in fact quoting the deletion discussions as the precedence for the guideline, when it is the same group of people in the deletion discussions creating and defending the guideline. If half-a-dozen of the most active UCFD discussion participants went away, UCFD would cease to exist. UCFD as a process, and this proposal as its rationale, have formed a bubble that is outside the mainstream of Wikipedia discussions. The "precedence of hundreds of UCFD discussions" is the WP:ILIKEIT preferences of the same half-a-dozen people. If this has wide ranging consensus, then a proper discussion on the merits of this proposal, as well as a proper proposal process, will bear that out. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

There's a fundamental flaw in your entire premise, and that is that user categories and userspace content are one in the same. That isn't true at all. As you're well aware, there is no userspace equivalent for categories. There are only category-space categories, and thus, user categories fall under the same basic restrictions of article-space categories, in that their existence must further some sort of encyclopedic goal, or they will be deleted. For purposes of user categories, the most obvious way to accomplish such a goal is to make collaboration on a encyclopedic topic easier by grouping people together by interest (although there are a few other encyclopedic uses for user categories, such as the language categories). Your position is that users should have free reign to create whatever user categories they want, so long as it isn't "disruptive". This presents another problem as what is "disruptive" to one person isn't disruptive to the next. For instance, I interpret creating any user categories that don't benefit the encyclopedia disruptive, as it disrupts the category system in being able to find users to collaborate with, hence why I nominate so many for deletion. These helpful categories become much harder to find when "funny" or "myspacey" categories that don't help the encyclopedia at all are mixed in with the rest. You, on the other hand, obviously wouldn't find these types of categories disruptive (considering you support polluting categories intented to be collaborative with your userpage as a joke, as evidenced by you repeatedly adding Category:Wikipedians by religion to your userpage, I can't imagine you would find much if anything disruptive). VegaDark (talk) 15:43, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

WP:USER has had direction about user categories pretty much since it's inception in 2004. They were considered the same then, and they are now, and you've shown nothing but your own unbacked up assertion that they needed to be treated separately. Categories are not encyclopedic content, or they would be no user categories ever, at all. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

Without getting into the rights and wrongs about what this page say, I do not think it should be a guideline until there is a wider community consensus that it should be. The banner that it was a guideline was placed on this page by the person who created it with their second edit without any community agreement on the talk page that it should be one. The guideline banner should be replaced with a proposed guideline banner, a new section should be opened on this talk page and the invitation to be a guideline should be widely advertised (Village pump, RfC and postings to related guidelines etc). Questions such as those that SchmuckyTheCat and the points that VegaDark and Black Falcon can then be considered and a community wide decision can be taken. -- PBS (talk) 08:52, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

PBS, this page was essentially split off from an existing guideline and following months of on-and-off discussions in various locations; it was neither unexpected nor hidden (see e.g., Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 42#Wikipedia:User categories has been marked as a guideline). –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 08:49, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

• If anything, this is a {{How-to}}.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 01:35, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

• The actual question, based on the problems seen in mant CfD (and, earlier, UCfD debates, is not the guideline itself, but the meaning of the sentence, "the purpose of user categories is to aid in facilitating coordination and collaboration between users for the improvement and development of the encyclopedia."--in particular, the word I have italicised. Recalling these debates, the consensus among the very limited number of people regularly participating seems to have been an extremely narrow understanding of that phrase. The defenders, each time, were limited to the people who wanted that single particular category, and so the people who consistently wanted to delete many such categories were able to pick them off one at a time. The idea apparently never got across that it would be necessary to defend all such categories that fit a broad interpretation. (this is a problem at XfD in general, not just user categories). Basically, there was a fairly successful attempt to limit tit to categories that could be shown to be directly pertinent to improving the encyclopedia, and a refusal to accept that encouraging people of common interests helped participation in a broader sense. the actual fear seems to have been that people would join to defend articles on a favorite subject--as if that were a bad thing. I do not think the narrow interpretation here had any broad consensus, and only survived because a small group made it their priority. I think the broad consensus would be better expressed by adding a phrase and saying, " the purpose of user categories is to aid in facilitating coordination and collaboration between users for the improvement and development of the encyclopedia--and for encouraging users interested in particular topics to participate in the encyclopedia." and saying: This is intended to interpreted broadly, and used only to prevent categories having no helkpful relation to the encyclopedia." DGG ( talk ) 17:28, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

"The defenders, each time, were limited to the people who wanted that single particular category, and so the people who consistently wanted to delete many such categories were able to pick them off one at a time." This. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

As far as I can tell, this RFC is simply another effort by SchmuckyTheCat to push for acceptance of categories such as Category:Wikipedians who crack boiled eggs on the rounded end, which SchmuckyThecat created in 2007 as a subcategory of Category:Wikipedians by religion. So please keep in mind, when talking about "broad interpretations", that SchmuckyTheCat is not talking here about the sort of categories that most people would view as constructive to the encyclopedia. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:13, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm aware of that. But looking back over Wikipedia:User categories for discussion/Archive/Topical index I see about an equal mix of defensible and non-defensible. I am also well aware of what happened to me when I as a relative newcomer tried to defend some against a small group who were cutting very broad swathes with repetitive arguments. I particular recall "blind leading the blind" . Perhaps I would feel better now had I not gone back and looked. And it's not that I use these categories myself. DGG ( talk ) 23:03, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Regarding my recent comment in the edit summary ("what RfC"), I see now that it was a reference to the discussion here. However, this is a discussions that never received much comment to start with, received mixed reactions, and has been dead for two months--hardly a basis for doing anything.

Regarding the claims that user category discussions tended to involve a small group of people... well, there's a saying about leading horses to water. Consensus is formed by those who show up, and as long as discussions are properly held and advertised (i.e., tagged and left open for the proper amount of time--by the way, UCfD discussions were often left open for weeks), it makes no sense to invoke the possibility that others who didn't bother to participate in the discussions may have felt differently had they cared enough to comment in the first place. –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 08:41, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

A few questions

I would like to pose a few questions to those who believe this page should not be a guideline, and I would ask you to consider that sentiment in light of your responses to these questions:

• Do you agree with the notion that a guideline should reflect common, consensus-supported practice?
• If you do, then how would you justify the existence of categories such as Category:Wikipedians who like to eat cheese, Category:Well endowed Wikipedians, and Category:Wikipedians that poop (if you think I'm pulling these examples out of my ass, then please see SchmuckyTheCat's user page), especially in light of the fact that these types of categories have been discussed tens of times and rejected virtually every single time (see index)?
• If you do agree that there should be some guidance regarding user categories (for example, to exclude categories like the ones above), then would it not make more sense to discuss modifications or adjustments rather than to do away with all portions of the guideline, including uncontroversial ones such as that "user categories must be sub-categories of Category:Wikipedians" and should not be mixed with mainspace categories?

Thank you, –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 19:54, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

1. There already is a guideline. WP:USER has verbiage on acceptable uses of categories on user pages. WP:USER has existed for many, many, years and expresses very wide consensus. This page was created as a guideline with no discussion at all, and remains known only to a few users.
2. The redlinked categories on my userpage have never existed or if they did, I just joined them for giggles and left them on my page even after being deleted. So please don't make this an RfC about me.
3. There already is a guideline. This is superfluous to WP:USER. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)
   1. Firstly, WP:USER is and should remain primarily about user pages not user categories. Secondly, you did not answer my question. If you agree that a guideline should reflect common, consensus-supported practice, then you cannot ignore the hundreds upon hundreds of CfD discussions that form the basis of this guideline. Thirdly, this guideline was advertised at the Village pump, is linked from Wikipedia:List of policies and guidelines and multiple category-related policy/guideline/proces pages, and was and is referenced routinely in user category discussions (both at UCfD and CfD), so any insinuation that it was somehow hidden or kept secret simply lacks credibility.
   2. The redlinked categories on your userpage may have never existed, but plenty of others just like it have (e.g., Category:Wikipedians who are zombies, Category:Wikipedians concerned about their weight). Your comments here and elsewhere (as well as the fact that you continue to have the categories on your userpage) suggest that you consider user categories of this type to be valid, and while this discussion is not about you, the fact that you initiated it makes your position on user categories relevant.
   3. See my first point. Also, where exactly does WP:USER say anything about user categories? All it says it that user pages should not be placed in categories that contain articles. –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 09:22, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

This guideline was not advertised at VPP for discussion, it was announced as being marked as a guideline by a bot. This has never been through the guideline approval process. The CfD discussion you reference all were backed by this text by the same people who wrote it - a process that has been incredibly divisive and controversial. That resulted in a user category of users who think CfD is broken. Saying there is consensus here is not backed by evidence. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

Yes, it was announced as being marked as a guideline so that anyone who objected would have the opportunity to voice their objections. Advertising is advertising, whether it's done by a bot, a human, or some higher power. There was no need to undergo some bureaucratic "approval process" because the guideline's text was taken verbatim from an existing guideline. The fact is that this guideline was announced at VPP and no one contested it, it was added to Wikipedia:List of policies and guidelines and no one contested it, and then (naturally) it started being used in CfD discussions.

I don't really understand your comment about "the same people who wrote it" ... your complaint seems to be about the fact that people who work with category-related guidelines also tend to participate in category-related discussions, and vice versa. Nonetheless, it is patently inaccurate: many editors initiated, initiate, participated, and participate in user category discussions who did not directly edit this guideline (however, their participation in user category discussions shaped its content, as it should), and you should be well aware of that, considering the fact that you were involved in at least one such discussion (Category:Wikipedians who say CfD is broken). –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 17:51, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Stumbled here from AN or thereabouts. Was mildly surprised to find my own name as the first entry on the talk page, but I guess I do like the sound of my own voice. I still stand by what i wrote up there, I agree with what DGG has said on this page, but I also agree with Black Falcon. Asserting that the page was created with the guideline tag on it is a view which is interested only in pushing a point rather than reflecting a fact. The fact of the matter is that the page was split from another guideline, therefore it remained a guideline after that split. Do we question the legitimacy of our oldest policies because they were moved from article namespace to project namespace? We are not a bureaucracy, we are an encyclopedia and a community which builds it. If you want to dispute the current status of the page, feel free, it's not hard, I tend to do it myself at least twice a year here or there. But there's no point disputing an historical version of the page, because of the way consensus works on Wikipedia. I hope that helps somewhat. Hiding T 22:14, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Hiding, thank you for commeting.

I wonder to what extent, if any, the course of user category discussions changed following the merging of UCfD back into CfD... If the same types of categories that were deleted before by a consensus at UCfD are still being deleted now, then that would suggest to me that there is de facto consensus for the guideline in its current form (that's not to suggest, of course, that it cannot or should not be modified if there is consensus to do so). If categories that were being deleted before no longer receive consensus support for deletion, then that may suggest that the guideline may need to be made more or less stringent.

I have not been tracking the outcomes of user category discussions at CfD (I've been on break for several months since April), so I have no idea what the results will be. However, given that guidelines are supposed to reflect common, consensus-driven practice, I think that this would be a fair test of sorts. Any thoughts? –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 17:33, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I'd suggest tracking DRV as well, although I'm not sure there's that many instances there, but tallying those will also give an indication of consensus, for example if the majority are endorsed then that strengthens the original close. But it's no good asking me about past cfd's. Everyone knows I only pop up there when I get a bee in my bonnet about something. ;) Hiding T 10:17, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

That's a good idea. Once I've finished with the UCfD and CfD archives, I'll check the DRV archives for any user category discussions. –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 19:39, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I've finished, so here are some statistics regarding user category discussions at CfD from April, when UCfD was merged back into CfD, through November of this year (please note that I've counted only discussions which appeared to have relevance to consensus regarding deletion or retention of particular types of user categories, so I have excluded most discussions involving renaming and/or speedy deletion):

General statistics: Of 87 user category discussions (an average of 11 per month), 71 ended as "delete", 3 as "delete per CSD G7" after some useful discussion, 3 as "merge" (for categories, this is equivalent to deleting), 7 as "keep", 1 as what amounted to "keep but rescope", and 2 as "no consensus". So, just under 90% of discussions ended with a consensus to not retain the category and 9% ended with a consensus to keep the category in some form.

Analysis: While one cannot conclude from these numbers that there is consensus to keep or retain particular types of categories, one can conclude that there is consensus to delete certain user categories and, consequently, that the 'keep all user categories' position advanced by a small minority of editors is not consensus-supported. For the most part, those types of categories that were being deleted at UCfD are still being deleted at CfD and those that were being kept at UCfD are still being kept at CfD.

Deletion review: Of the 87 discussions, two were brought to deletion review (1, 2) and closed as "relist". Subsequently, the original "delete" closures were confirmed in both cases. This translates to a 2% raw "challenge rate" and a 0% "overturn rate".

Analysis: The high challenge rate (yes, 2% is high for category discussions) is most likely just an artifact of the low number of total nominations. During the period April 2008 to March 2009, which saw several hundred user category discussions, only four outcomes were challenged at deletion review (3 "delete" outcomes were endorsed, and 1 incorrect "rename" outcome from 2006 was overturned). Also, one of the DRVs

Participation: I did not keep track of the number of participants in user category discussions, but I did not see anything outside the norm for CfD: discussions of controversial categories involved multiple editors and discussions of uncontroversial ones involved only a few. However, there was participation from many editors who neither had any direct involvement in writing this guideline nor were "regulars" at UCfD. –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 23:59, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Merge

• Wikipedia talk:Overcategorization/User categories

Merge discussion is actually at the link above. - jc37 20:59, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Mixing user and content categories

I propose clarifying the third bullet point of Wikipedia:User categories#Categorization so that it applies not only to userspace pages but also to user categories:

User pages and user categories do not belong in mainspace categories such as Category:Living people or Category:Biologists, which are reserved for articles of the encyclopedia (in mainspace). This applies also to user subpages that are draft versions of articles.

It is my understanding that consensus is and has been that user content (including user pages, user subpages and user categories) and article content (taken broadly to include templates used within article, categories containing articles, and so on) should remain separate. The former is intended for use by editors, the latter by readers. There are a variety of reasons to enforce this separation, not least of which is that user content is almost entirely unchecked and largely exempt from the policies and guidelines that govern article content.

In the interest of full disclosure, it was Template:RCdoc/cit that motivated my proposal. The template has a built-in function that places a user category such as Category:American Wikipedians within Category:American people. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 02:01, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

AFAIK, that's already stated at one of the main categorisation policy pages. So it should indeed be reflected here.

And that template needs to be changed asap if it places wikipedian cats in article cats. - jc37 04:41, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Support. Seems like pretty obvious, and readily assumed, but just not written in before. User categories do not belong in mainspace, and I'd non-technically consider mainspace categories to be part of mainspace. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:06, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

I've changed the text of the guideline and also modified the template. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 19:47, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Agree with the above, this is longstanding practice and common sense to keep user categories and mainspace categories totally separate. VegaDark (talk) 09:37, 5 February 2012 (UTC)