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.
What is the proper way to list sub categories in a category?
Most seem to use the the automatic alpha listing.
See Category:Major Indoor Soccer League (original) players which has listed all categories on the first page by using the following method to avoid the alpha sort which would spread the cagegories onto multiple pages: [[Category:Major Indoor Soccer League (original) players|+Baltimore]]. There seems to be some logic to this method. The category I just added used what I thought was the standard format. Dbiel(Talk) 03:41, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
The alphabetical organization is usually most helpful. Some categories use sort keys that move all the subcategories to the first page, but I think this should only be done on especially large categories, not like Category:Major Indoor Soccer League (original) players. A better solution to large categories is to diffuse the contents into appropriate subcategories. --EliyakT·C 03:13, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Categories and Templates
I'm having some trouble with categories and templates. There are some templates on Eurovision pages that automatically categorize any page with the template in a certain category. The problem is that it is sometimes the wrong category. How do i add something or change something in these templates to make the pages who have them be in the right category? I also want to add some categorizers to some templates.
For example, I want all pages having this template [1] to be in Category:Sweden in the Eurovision Song ContestGrk1011 (talk) 22:38, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Subcategories
For some reason, Category:Greek discographies is not showing up as a subcategory in Category:Discographies. The category at the bottom of the greek discography page takes you to the discography cat, but the subcat doesnt show up to get you back. I dont know whats wrong.Grk1011 (talk) 15:28, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
For categories which span multiple pages, each page of the category only displays the subcategories matching the alphabetical range of the displayed articles. In this case, the first page of Category:Discographies displays articles from "1" to "C". So it also displays subcategories from "1" to "C". If you click the "next 200" link to go to the second page of the category, you see articles from "D" to "J", and also the subcategories from "D" to "J", including "Greek discographies". Hope this helps. DH85868993 (talk) 13:32, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
I thought that that only worked for the articles, not the subcats. That's why i missed it. Thanks. Grk1011 (talk) 18:37, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
I think many people don't realise that there may be further subcats displayed on subsequent pages of a category. I think the note at the top of multi-page categories may be partly to blame for that. Consider the note displayed on the first page of Category:Discographies, which says "There are 6 subcategories in this category, which are shown below. More may be shown on subsequent pages." - I used to read that as "There are 6 subcategories in total for this category"; since I could see 6 subcats on that first page, I used to think that was all there was and didn't bother looking for any more on subsequent pages - I assumed that the "More may be shown on subsequent pages" bit was just a standard line which didn't apply in this case. I think it might be clearer if it said "6 of the subcategories for this category are shown below. More may be/are shown on subsequent pages", or "There are 20 subcategories in this category, of which 6 are shown below. More may be shown on subsequent pages." Sometimes I think it would be better to have all the subcats displayed on the first page of the category (which I guess means they would all have to be displayed on every page of the category) but I guess if there are lots of subcategories, they might fill the whole screen and people might not realise there are articles at the bottom. DH85868993 (talk) 22:19, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
Categorisation of templates
What's the view on including templates in relevant mainspace categories (in addition to relevant template categories)? Acceptable? Recommended? WP:CAT and WP:TMP didn't provide much guidance. I've recently been putting templates from (subcats of) Category:Wikipedia uncategorized templates into relevant template categories, but I'm wondering whether I should have been including them in relevant mainspace categories as well. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 13:20, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
How does doing that help? HidingT 15:06, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
I guess it offers the slight of advantage of making the templates more visible to editors who might otherwise now know about them. Consider that if I was writing an article about the song for a new James Bond movie, I would probably put my article in Category:James Bond songs. I'd probably visit the cat to make sure my article went in as expected, where I might see Template:James Bond music, and think "Hey, I should add my article into that template (and vice versa)". Of course, if I was writing an article about the song for a new James Bond movie, I probably would have visited some of the other articles in that category and thus already have seen the template, so I'm not sure that's a particularly compelling argument. Part of me says that templates are "behind the scenes" type things and so should not be included in mainspace categories (just like WikiProjects). But I know of lots of templates which are included in mainspace categories, so I guess I was really just wondering if there is a policy on this, which I just hadn't come across yet. DH85868993 (talk) 22:25, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
Where do we want this discussion to take place? It was stated that WP:VPP was the the right place and that WP:VPR might be better
"Guyz tis discussion is not policy related. Pls use the proposals section WP:VPR and read the proposals to avoid duplication of topic."
I have been working to keep primary Category:Education and Category:Schools empty and would hate to see Betacommand start filling them up. Dbiel(Talk) 20:20, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply. Your suggested location does look like the best choice. Thanks again. Dbiel(Talk) 17:02, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
Writers on photographic techniques
Only a couple of hours ago I created Category:Writers on photographic techniques (an awkward name). It then occurred to me that perhaps it should be Category:Photographic technique writers (also an awkward name). What do you think? I'm the only contributor so far, so if a name change is for the better I'll just be "bold", recategorize the half dozen or so members, and delete the unused category, all without the palaver of going through the regular channel. -- Hoary (talk) 16:39, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
New Category Page default entry
There appears to be a couple of new entries showing up on some category pages.
This category has the following xxx subcategories, out of xxx total.
The following xxx pages are in this category, out of xxx total.
Category:High schools in California is a good example.
It is very helpful to know that there are additional subcategories that are not being displayed on the first page.
It is a nice addition but appears to have some technical flaws when dealing with large categories.
See Category:All non-free media which states:
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 505 total.
505 is a major understatement for this category.
Dbiel(Talk) 02:53, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Category:Coastal cities in the United States is inconsistant in the way articles and categories have been added.
Do we want all the individual cities to be listed even if a separate subcategory is listed, or only list cities that do not have their own category which is then listed as a subcategory instead.
Example: Los Angeles is not in the city list but San Diego is. Both are listed as sub categories. Dbiel(Talk) 01:23, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
I would say just have the city articles in the category. The categories themselves will contain stuff that is not to do with coastal cities - eg. people from LA. In fact, I would go so far as to say that eponymous categories should be dealt with the following way: if an article has a category of the same name, have that category appear as a link next to the article name in the category listing, rather than putting the category in the categories you would noramlly put the articles in. Obviously, still categorise categoresi if you need to, but no need to overdo this. ie. Have a softlink appear automatically next to the article name. Of course, this would require the software to be able to detect whether a category exists or not. I will ask about this new idea at some point. Carcharoth (talk) 06:56, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
Uncategorized from March
I just finished eliminating G and Y. The backlog gets smaller! Geoff Plourde (talk) 04:32, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
I spent a while last autumn clearing =Special:UncategorizedCategories, which seems to be repopulated every 3 or 4 days, and it was rather soul-destroying work. It sounds like you may be working with articles, which may not be quite so mind-numbing ... but still, much-needed work, and congrats for doing it. I hope you have twinkle installed for easy PRODding or AfDing of the junk. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 02:23, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
In my opinion, list articles should only be part of Category:Lists and its subcategories, along with the main category of the list's topic (Category:Mon Colle Knights, if there is one). Fishal (talk) 06:36, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
DYK that the above page was vandalised (Page blanked) by an anon IP 220.237.232.182. at 12:31 UTC May 1. I have now reverted it. Maybe it should be Semi-Protected. How do I contact an Admin? Kathleen.wright5 13:16, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
I don't know much about categorisation rules, so could someone have a look at this please. People who have been criticised by the church or who have criticised it are being added - Category:Westboro_Baptist_Church -- John (Daytona2 ·Talk ·Contribs) 20:36, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
Main article to category relationship guidelines
I would like to seek some guidance as to the criteria by which the main article of any given category should have a relationship to the subcategories the head category covers. I.e. if the Main category A consists of sub-categories B, C, D and E, then the Main article for the category A needs to cover in some substance the sub-categories B, C, D and E at least as sub-sections. Is this assumption correct?(posting in two places as was unsure where this is best posted)--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 23:25, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Categorisation - planning
Can anyone prevent me from planning and executing Project wide categorisation for a long term use in a given Wikipedia Project?
Essentially I proposed a categorisation structure here which is being rejected with no alternative proposals but rather question like "How long do you recommend I wait before I made a mass CfD for all these ridiculous categories?" I was promised a discussion to reach consensus, but participation is low in numbers despite repeated main page discussions, and what participation is there, is often more obstructionist then constructive.
Do I need to go to ArbCom to get the articles into order in that Project?--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 08:16, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
The discussion is only 'obstructionist' because you have made large-scale recategorisations without consultation and are now ignoring the consensus against such actions. The talk page shows that only you support these changes and other experianced editors disagree with your actions. Nick Dowling (talk) 08:53, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
I made the changes because I needed them for continuing to work with articles. I have created 38 sub-categories of which only 6 were not directly required for articles. Some were not even for my articles. No one had bothered to create them, with many articles in the Project categorised on the "near enough" basis.
It would have been fine if this disagreement was constructive, and something was offered as an alternative. However, nothing has been. I'm not sure what experience in editing has to do with categorisation. I had been through it extensively last year with User:Kirill who is arguably very experienced in categorisation, and I had accepted most of the rationale he offered with not many taking much notice or participating. I have waited months, and nothing much happened.
It is clear that categorisation in the Project has been avoided by and large, and allowed to proceed in a haphazard manner, something confirmed by User:Woody. Most people are happy to do nothing so long as "their" category is left untouched.
My changes have not been "large scale". All I have done, the "radical" part, is to divide the area of World War II into six constituent subcategories, five related to other WikiProjects. One would think this would encourage cross-Project collaboration, but in stead it is being criticised as unnecessary. Is collaboration on video games more relevant then that of Economics to the development of the subject area? Consensus is supposed to be reached through discussion, not deprecation of what I have done with no alternatives offered.--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 09:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Inter-project protocol
Is there any protocol, or policy that this project advises its member editors as to when they start working on n active project - like forwarning changes etc - and AGF notification at notieboards etc? SatuSuro 02:11, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
Does anyone see potential in this cat? Don't all exceptionally skilled swordfighters constitute as iaidouka? Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 02:55, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Rebellions vs. Revolutions.
I've got a question about the distinction between Category:Revolutions and Category:Rebellions. Currently, I'm not sure what it is, and some articles are almost certainly miscategorized. To use Spain as an example... Category:Spanish Civil War was a full-fledged shooting war in which the government was overthrown, but it's categorized as a rebellion. Spanish Revolution was part of the Spanish Civil War, but though the revolutionaries failed, it's categorized as a Revolution. The Glorious Revolution (Spain), in which not many shots were fired but the army did turn on the government, is categorized as both a revolt and a revolution. There are plenty more examples if you hunt through both of the "Rs by country" sections, which tend to have the most entries.
I'm not saying that this isn't a relevant distinction and that the categories should be merged, but... there needs to be some well-set guidelines here. Is it a matter of scale, i.e. revolutions are big and revolts are small? Is it a matter of who wins, with rebellions the government keeping power and revolutions the government changing? Something else?
(The reason I bring this up at all is I was recently working on the Revolt of the Comuneros article, and couldn't figure out which category to put it in. It would probably normally be called a rebellion, but they did control a huge section of Spain for more than a year and had their own government and constitution, as opposed to your run-of-the-mill peasant's revolt.) SnowFire (talk) 01:36, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
DEFAULTSORT vs Lifetime
Sometime ago I found out about {{Lifetime}}, and liked it. Quite often I noticed that the template often was replaced by DEFAULTSORT and the same categories as Lifetime gave. Now I'm subst'ing the lifetime template, and find that the categories now are often replaced by an unsubst'ed template. What is the preferred solution in this regard, subst or not?. – Leo Laursen – ✍⌘ 18:22, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
There was a TfD debate here. That's something that should have been dealt with by now, but I guess it is such a big task it is difficult to sort it out. I still maintain that using DEFAULTSORT in a hidden way is bad, as it can lead to unexpected behaviour from other templates. More generally, I've started Wikipedia:Biographical metadata, which might help bring together some disparate thread on these topics of how to present such data to the reader, and ensure the data can be easily checked, maintained and extracted. Carcharoth (talk) 02:11, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll continue subst'ing the template then. Lets hope Wikipedia:Biographical metadata will help in coordinating the debate. – Leo Laursen – ✍⌘ 12:49, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
To cover artistic gymnasts that has represented the Czech Republic, and Czechoslovakia respectivly. One editor (Doma-w) is insisting that Czechoslovakian gymnasts are added to both categories, even though somedied before the Czech Republic gained its independence. Given the category descriptions are both of the form "Artistic gymnasts that have represented the Czech Republic"/"Artistic gymnasts that have represented Czechoslovakia", it is my belief that the articles should be sorted into the nationality that they represented to avoid over-categorisation; after all, the category can have a "see also" added, and it is easier to verify at a glance that they represented that country (thus avoiding the issues of ethnicity not being as clear cut as "they were there, so they must be". I'd appreciate some advice as to how this has been dealt with in the past. -- ratarsed (talk) 20:08, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
So far, the closest precedent I've found is in WP:MOSFLAG for dealing with flags of countries represented:
If someone's citizenship has legally changed because of shifting political borders, use the historically correct country designation, not a later one, and perhaps mention in the article prose the new country name, e.g. "Belgrade, Yugoslavia (today in Serbia)"
If I were to extrapolate that to categories, (I.e. use the country name in use at the time), would that seem perfectly reasonable (so remove the current country if they didn't represent it) -- ratarsed (talk) 07:12, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
Discussion on gender metadata
Please see comment I made here about obtaining and recording gender (male/female) metadata. Opinions would be welcomed. Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 02:07, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
I hope I'm in the right place to raise this. I'm concerned about the categories/subcategories used for writer's works. The main category tends to be Works by Author, and then the subcategories are Novels by Author, Short stories by Author etc as appropriate for fictional works. However, for non-fiction works, the category is Books by Author. Look, for example, at Category:Works by Martin Amis. Since Novels are in fact Books, it seems completely non-intuitive to me to use the term Books to mean non-fiction. I think it would be better to use something more specific such as Non-fiction by Author. How do others feel about this? Sterry2607 (talk) 12:14, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
We have discussed this elsewhere but "Novels are not always Books" and certainly many of the other literature forms are not books or even delivered as books. "Short stories", "sceenplays", "poetry" etc. The majority of these categories speak of literary form rather than media of delivery. I quite agree the "Books by .." for non-fiction is out of keeping, but it is what is often left. I would propose a new form name "Non-fiction by ..." to migrate such material. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 18:18, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
Of course, I didn't say they are always books but the fact is that they usually are books (though really whether they are always books or not largely comes down to how we define book since the book is now being defined pretty widely: printed book, audio book, e-book, print on demand book. E-books, for example, which are not physical things at all, cover all types of writing - nonfiction, novels, plays, poetry collections, etc etc). However, as you say the issue is being consistent - one being form, the other being some sort of generic description for a method of delivery. Thanks for agreeing. What is the process for getting wider agreement? How does a decision get made here? Cheers. Sterry2607 (talk) 11:05, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
How about this icon to identify the project? -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 18:57, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
Quick question on page sorting
Hi, i'm trying to get it so that all the articles in Wikipedia:WikiProject TUGS so that instead of being listed as "Talk:X", they are listed as "X", whatever "X" is. Is that possible? Is there some kind of listing parameter, or are they normally just kept as talk pages? --SteelersFanUK06ReplyOnMine! 03:16, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
Cleanup categories
(copying from Category_Talk:Wikipedia cleanup categories)
I propose merging all cleanup categories into subcategories of Category:Articles needing attention so that each corresponding WikiProject can work on maintaining articles that fall under their scope. —Viriditas | Talk 10:05, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
I would like this as well. The projects are far mor apt to monitor and manage "their" categories. -- Mjquin_id (talk) 20:54, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
Category:Better category needed
Hi WikiProject Categories. Is there some guidance somewhere about when to place articles into Category:Better category needed (other than what's written in the category itself)? For example, I recently saw an example where an editor moved an article from Category:Uncategorized pages to Category:Novels. Considering that Category:Novels is a sort of "parent" category, should they also have added the article to Category:Better category needed? Or is it assumed that someone will patrol Category:Novels and will refine the category appropriately in the fullness of time? Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 08:30, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
I see, thanks! Whodathunkit? --Una Smith (talk) 04:23, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
bad date categories
I keep a periodically updated list at User:Delirium/Bad lifespans of articles whose birth/death category membership can't possibly be right, because it implies either a negative or unreasonably large lifespan. I usually go through and fix these myself, but the current batch is rather large, so I wouldn't mind some help. Thanks! --Delirium (talk) 02:23, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Might be lag? don't knowFengRail (talk) 22:53, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
Yeah it's 3 now because I corrected one of them that didn't belong. The question still remains: why don't they show up in Category:People from Brooklyn even though they're subcats of it? Strange... ~EdGl★ 23:01, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
I only get 3...
Might be lag? don't knowFengRail (talk) 22:53, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
Thats were your cats were - it still needs fixing - don't know how - maybe try at help desk or reference desk:computers to find an expert..FengRail (talk) 23:04, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
Good find! changing [[Category:People from Brooklyn]] to [[Category:People from Brooklyn| ]] seemed to work. ~EdGl★ 23:15, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
You can add <categorytree hideroot=on>People from Brooklyn</categorytree> as well which adds a listing and you don't have to change the subcat pages (if there are a lot) - doesn't add the header, so that needs to be typed in too.FengRail (talk) 23:19, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
Didn't see your edit before mine so I solved it my way – hope my unconventional methods are okay... feel free to undo my edits and follow conventions... ~EdGl★ 23:26, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm ok - I didn't know anyone could edit that fast.FengRail (talk) 23:42, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
Category intersection sets, union sets
Should we populate supercats with all articles in subcats? Should we create intersection subcats (bridges of type X in country Y)? Please see Category talk:Suspension bridges. --Una Smith (talk) 02:10, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
In general every suspension bridge should be in a "category:suspension bridge by region" subcat, AND a "category:suspension bridge by type" (if it can be categorised thus)
Therefor Hakata-Ōshima Bridge should not be in "Category:Suspension bridges" because it's in suspension bridges by country.
I'd be interested in that tool as well. OlYellerTalktome 13:18, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Uncategorized pages
I'm not sure if this is the best place to bring up this issue but I can't think of a better place. I often go through new articles to add improvement tags and one that I often add is the uncategorized tag. I've also noticed that people watch for pages with this tag and will go to the page, add one category, then remove the uncategorized tag. While adding a category is is helpful, I feel that overall, the page will suffer as now there's no indication to editors that mroe tags could be added. Any thoughts? Maybe a tag like improvecat can be created to indicate that more categories need to be added. OlYellerTalktome 17:07, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
I would mention this at /uncategorized, the task force dedicated to categorizing uncategorized articles. We do have Category:Better category needed, but I agree that it may be useful to have {{catimprove}} similar to {{refimprove}}. Unfortunately, due to haste or uncertainty, sometimes we (meaning those at WP:UNCAT) don't always do the best job at categorizing. ~EdGl★ 17:18, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Looking closer, it looks like it's a javascript called HotCat. The creator is looking into making it possible to add more categories but still, I think a new tag would still be useful. The javascript could even replace the uncat tag with the improvecat tag if the user only adds one category. Thanks for the help. I'll go post this over there as well. OlYellerTalktome 17:19, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Many of the articles I come across with the "uncat" tag are so poorly written that they don't identify key characteristics of the subject, and because of that I can only fit it into one category. Also, it's possible that an article would only need one category. In these situations, automatically adding the "catimprove" tag would not be desirable. That said, it would be easy to simply remove the tag manually, and I would probably support your proposed HotCat feature. ~EdGl★ 18:20, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Good points. I've never made a template before but here is my first crack at it. I essentially made a hybrid of the uncategorized template and the refimprove template. I invite collaboration here or there. After the template is made, I'll look into adding the option to replace the uncat category with the catimprove category to the HotCat script. OlYellerTalktome 18:35, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
The {{catimprove}} template is now in the mainspace. It is also now a part of Friendly for easy tagging. OlYellerTalktome 14:24, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
Category:Advertisements
The text on the category page at Category:Advertisements suggests that it is a housekeeping category, for articles which are written in such a way that they look like ads for commercial products. However, only one of the articles in the category (Wespennest) is tagged with {{advert}}, and all the rest are about advertisements or ad campaigns. Should the text on the category page be changed (and Wespennest removed), or should the other articles in the category (as well as the subcats Category:Billboards and Category:Television commercials) be moved to other categories?
Incidentally, if this isn't the best place to ask about this, where would be better? —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 03:58, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
Hi. I have a fiddly categorization question that I hope you good people can answer. I asked at Wikipedia talk:Categorization, but nobody answered; I hope I'll have better luck here.
Any suggestions or advice would be welcome. Thanks. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 04:59, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Eponymous categories RFC live
The RfC mentioned above, on eponymous categories and what to do about them, is now live. Please read Wikipedia:Categorization/Eponymous RFC and comment at that talk page. Thanks. Kotniski (talk) 13:10, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Category pls
I've been looking for a maintenance category of articles without talk pages but I can't seem to find it - if it already exists, could someone direct me to it; if it doesn't exist, could someone create it? Articles without talk pages are often also not within all the appropriate subject categories (since adding the WikiProject banners to the talk page also adds them to related categories), so this would be an easy way to find such pages. Thanks Hadrian89 (talk) 09:54, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
I've started a discussion here about what information is appropriate in category descriptions, with particular regard to how much information should be retained if {{catdesc}} is to be deleted. Please have a look.--Kotniski (talk) 13:56, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
Cat for books/novels made into films?
Is there a category for books or novels that have been made into films? I can't seem to find it. If anyone knows, please message me on my talkpage. Thanks. --Cybercobra (talk) 00:59, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
Dashes in category names
Please see here. Comments, ideas, and suggestions would be welcome. Thank you, –BLACK FALCON(TALK) 22:44, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
C's P's and F?
Could anyone explain what F denotes in the new category listings? I can see that C denotes subcategory, P denotes page (such as an article page). What is F? I just saw this type of listing, rooted in the Contents/Categories portal, such as Category:Fundamental.
It was useful to me to see that there are 124 subcats of the Fundamental cat.
I put a watch on this page to see if there will be an answer. Thank you, --Ancheta Wis (talk) 16:02, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
I presume that F stands for Files (i.e. images, sound files, etc.)--Kotniski (talk) 16:28, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
Hard redirects
The RFC on switching to hard redirects is now open; please see WP:Hard category redirects and discuss on that talk page.--Kotniski (talk) 08:49, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
Feedback wanted from anyone interested in template programming and categorization.
Some templates add categories to the pages they are used on. This unfortunately also means they usually add categories to pages where they are only tested or demonstrated. So we have a how-to guide about how to avoid this problem. And some templates also need to use different categories in different namespaces, which can be tricky to do. So now we have made a meta-template that will make it much easier to handle categorization in templates. Here's the relevant links:
{{cat handler}} – The new template. We'd like some feedback on this template and its documentation before we deploy it. Comments and questions are very welcome on its talk page.
Wikipedia:Category suppression – The how-to guide. There's a discussion on its talk page about which parameters we should standardise for category suppression, more comments would be welcome there. By the way, some of the methods in that guide will probably become outdated once we deploy the above template.
Wikipedia:WikiProject Category Suppression – Personally I think a WikiProject for only category suppression is a bit overkill, but the project is going to widen its scope so perhaps it is okay. See its talk page.
Oh, and please don't start a discussion here, instead use the talk pages of the above pages.
Sailorsaurus (talk·contribs) has been making many categories lately and recategorizing many pages as well. A few fell under my area of interest and I've depopulated them (merely because they are extremely esoteric and made as subcategories of another category that he made). I figured I should bring it to the attention of the categories project.—Ryūlóng (竜龙) 09:15, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
Header template question.
Just wondering, but is there a template that, when placed on a category page, produces text akin to "This category contains x pages"?
I created Category Watchlist that makes it possible to watch additions and removals to categories. Comments are welcome. Svick (talk) 01:06, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
ArbCom election reminder: voting closes 14 December
Dear colleagues
This is a reminder that voting is open until 23:59 UTC next Monday 14 December to elect new members of the Arbitration Committee. It is an opportunity for all editors with at least 150 mainspace edits on or before 1 November 2009 to shape the composition of the peak judicial body on the English Wikipedia.
Pers. Problem: Categories: _BC_-births and _BC_-deaths
Hi!
I personaly have a strong problem with the evident christian tendency of the following classes of wikipedia categories: BC-deaths and BC-births.
I strongly think there is a disbalance between the claims and demands of the strong organized christian editorship in wikipedia and the NPOV-principle in general:
-Categories should not foster the wikipedia to become tendencious towards the christian habit of spreading the Evangelium (aka "good message") around the world by different and all piossible means, e.g. the wiki-catagories.
-There should -always- be the secular alternative of , e.g. _BCE_-deaths and _BCE_-births especially in my case here.
...For BCE could be rendered as both "before christian era" and "before common era" while BC only could be render3d as "before CHRIST", a claim hold up only by christian faith alone, not by evidence, historical science or other religions - never by a NPOV!!
Thank U for the kind reception of my suggestions here! --87.160.201.55 (talk) 13:49, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
To list a category at WP:CfD it seems that one has to have a clear proposition for what to do with it. I have no clear proposition for Category:Anglo-Burmans but am sure that it's problematic. Please see its talk page and respond there. Thanks. -- Hoary (talk) 02:58, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
I was going to say the same thing about Category:GFDL. Generally WP:CAT#Project categories and its subsections discourage that sort of mixing. In general, categories that contain articles should contain only articles, while categories that contain images should not contain articles, and the tree or article categories should not lead into non-article categories.
I think that the best fix seems to be to split GFDL into several categories, moving user pages to something like Category:Wikipedia pages licensed under GFDL. I have no idea what forum would be used to measure consensus for that. Maybe one of the village pumps. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:32, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
I think I fixed it. Articles appear in it not because they are about GFDL, but because Template:GFDLSource appears in them. Pcapping 19:43, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
This seems to be a random collection of Internet-related topics. Arguably anything having to do with the Internet is also part of Internet history, but that makes it redundant to Category:Internet. Presumably this is a {{distinguished subcategory}}. I've cleaned-up the seemingly random inclusion of categories in it, but the article list still needs work. Pcapping 22:42, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
I think the history of the Internet is not entirely contained in the history of software (hardware mattered too), so I'll remove that inclusion and use {{CatRel}} instead there. The same goes for social networks not being necessarily online organizations. Pcapping 21:13, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
You will find many more examples like this; the category tree shows extreme semantic drift if you recur too deep. For example, this is why the list of mathematics categories exists, because one cannot simply recur down starting with Category:Mathematics. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:36, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
I'm trying to produce something similar for Category:Software. But given the vastness of the tree, I need a semi-automated process for the initial tree snapshot. Pcapping 12:12, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
I have started a discussion here that may be of interest to members of this Wikiproject. --Crusio (talk) 23:55, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
Category:Wikipedia documentation
I've been having a bash at organizing Category:Wikipedia help, but can't work out what to do / whether to do anything with Category:Wikipedia documentation it sounds like a useful cat, but isn't - 72 random template help docs, but a mega subcat template documentation - which has 10,199 pages in it . This can't be useful, any suggestions or to add to the list of crazy cats and ignore it? Lee∴V(talk • contribs) 01:08, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
Those categories are automatically populated by the {{documentation subpage}} template, that we put at the top of /doc subpages. I took a look in its code: Depending on namespace it puts the pages in different categories named after the namespace: Category:Template documentation, Category:Wikipedia documentation and so on. The names of those categories are confusing, and that template is slightly messy. I should probably work it over some day when I get the time. (I just finished renovating the {{documentation}} template some day ago.)
So, what names should those categories have? The keyword here is "/doc subpages". "Documentation subpages" is too long and this is about /doc subpages, not documentation in general. So how about Category:Template doc subpages, Category:Wikipedia doc subpages and so on? And then we need a parent category that lists those categories, and lists the templates and how-to guide for the /doc subpage system. How about calling it Category:Doc subpage system ?
That's good that it is created from the template, should make things easier! Your suggestions for the subpages feel better, I would use the existing 'template documentation' as the top cat for template docs, with the template documentation guidelines and stuff - and then the - Category:Doc subpage system if there are many subcats and it is needed. Lee∴V(talk • contribs) 02:04, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
unable to create a category
I tried to create Category:Charlotte 49ers, for the articles about the sports teams of Category:University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Unfortunately, there are already 9 categories that begin with those 3 words: "Category: Charlotte 49ers". Thus, I'm unable to use the "Go" and "Search" buttoms under the Wiki "search" box, because those 2 buttons are covered by the display of the 9 existing categories that begin with "Category: Charlotte 49ers". Could someone help me with this problem? Also, perhaps we could add the solution to the Help:Category page. Thank you in advance. Eagle4000 (talk) 20:30, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
Why don't you just type "Category:Charlotte 49ers" (without the quotation marks, of course) into the search box and then hit the return key? That works the same as hitting the "go" button, as it would on many, many, many websites. Or type it in and press "escape", which clears the suggestions (ditto). Or add the category to an article as a redlink, then create it? Or click on the redlink above, then create it? Or get to the search page by clicking "search" with nothing in the box, then typing "Category:Charlotte 49ers"? Is this really a major problem for people? BencherliteTalk 21:58, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. Great suggestions. I'm going to try them. Eagle4000 (talk) 15:22, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
Using categories to promote and disseminate navboxes
I think we should be encouraging people to design navboxes with categories in mind. For example:
I am hoping for feedback on this practice; and if you approve of it, I hope you'll help promote it. Andrew Gradmantalk/WP:Hornbook 07:39, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
Sport in Munich
The category, Munich Sports, should be deleted since there is already Sport in Munich. 174.91.157.237 (talk) 07:15, 9 March 2010 (UTC)
I nominated the category for merging, see the discussion. Svick (talk) 12:27, 9 March 2010 (UTC)
Blame the devs. They've disabled it because it's inefficient. (Now if they were proper devs, they would change the code so that it was efficient, but apparently the Foundation doesn't hire people with that degree of competence.)--Kotniski (talk) 05:48, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
And it's back. See this bugzilla thread for discussion (and a complaint about turning off a function without prior warning). BencherliteTalk 08:29, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
Subcategorizing organizational studies
I'd like input from others on subdividing . I started these two discussions:
User:Hmains has continued to put Fort Nassau (North) and Fort Orange (and perhaps others I assume) in the Category:Forts in New York parent category on forts already in the Category:Colonial forts in New York after having been explained why the parent category is unneeded. Now Hmains has added a comment on the talk page of the Colonial forts in New York category stating- # As you can see I just created this category and am populating it. I also created the category purpose, which is to include forts that were built during colonial times. This does not exclude the fort from being in the Category: Forts in New York category, which includes all forts built in the area of the state of New York, no matter when built or how long they lasted. And articles can be found in both a category and its parent. This is clearly explained in WP:DUPCAT. These are called non-diffusing categories. There is nothing wrong with what I am doing. If you are changing this, then your editing is incorrect and a result of your misunderstanding of the category system.
This is an egregious violation of WP:OWN and I am hoping someone knowledgeable about category policy can help out as there is no need for a fort to be part of both categories when being a fort in the NY during colonial times automatically makes it a fort of the parent category (neither fort survived past colonial times and therefore were never part of the STATE of New York), this is not an exception to wp:dupcat.Camelbinky (talk) 22:02, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
Camelbinky: Perhaps if you would stop using your time and efforts to mischaracterize my edits and to otherwise attack my work, and instead use this forum to ask simple questions about WP:DUPCAT, you might find someone who is willing to help you understand the categorization rules. Hmains (talk) 05:50, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
At first sight, what you describe Hmains as doing seems to me to be perfectly correct. I don't see any reason for this to be a diffusing subcategory.--Kotniski (talk) 06:55, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
> there is no need for a fort to be part of both categories
Listing articles on both parent and child category pages is convenient for anyone who wants a list of all the parent's members. Making a complete list from the subcategories is especially hard when the subcats overlap.—Codrdan (talk) 12:35, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
An editor is now going around and placing a film category on places where even so much as a cameo shot has taken place. Not sure this is the place to complain about it. Projects tend to be so little attended. Student7 (talk) 12:23, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
Hello! As you may be aware, the Wikimedia Foundation is gearing up for our annual fundraiser. We want to hit our goal, and hit it as soon as possible, so that we can focus on Wikipedia's tenth anniversary (January 15) and on our new project, the Contribution Team.
I'm posting across WikiProjects to engage you, the community, in working to build Wikipedia not only through financial donations, but also through collaboration in building content. You can find more information in Philippe Beaudette's memo to the communities here.
To clarify, it is artificially inflating the category by some 40,000 articles. The Unreferenced articles project is using the {{PAGESINCATEGORY}} magic word to count how many unreferenced articles there are and it is used also by WP:BACKLOG and The Great Backlog Drive. I think the template needs to be changed so that the number of unreferenced articles can be accurately tracked. Mattg82 (talk) 14:28, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools#Category:Schools by city. When I posted my questions, I thought that they were relevant to schools, but as the discussion progressed, it became apparent that the questions had more relevance to categories. Coyets (talk) 15:45, 4 March 2011 (UTC)
I have created Template:Category banner, which can be placed at the top of any category. It replaces {{Cat main}}, {{Wikipedia category}}, {{Double category}}, {{All included}}, {{Tracking category}}, {{Hidden category}}, {{Set category}}, {{Container category}}, {{Redirect category}} and several others. It's basically a replacement for permanent message boxes, which aren't too aesthetically pleasing, and it provides all the essential info and links for readers and editors to understand the scope of the category. Most of the time, it will eliminate the need for extra text to explain a category. I've applied it to a few categories and ironed out the faults but, unfortunately, I've had an editor removing it because he thought it was an incorrectly placed talk page banner. I've reverted his edits and left him a message on his talk page but if you see this template, remember that it is not a talk page banner, nor does it even slightly resemble one. McLerristarr | Mclay1 17:17, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
Please note this template has been listed for deletion. Feel free to join the debate. --Richhoncho (talk) 11:14, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
I have set up Category:Drugs by country and I am in the process of populating it. Feel free to muck in and help. Cheers. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 09:41, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
Museum exhibit categories
In the aircraft project we had some of the aircraft categorised a while ago with the addition of Category:Aircraft in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution it was felt it was not really appropriate but were convinved it was a special case due to a co-operation agreement with the museum. The aircraft project were concerned that it would open a floodgate of similar cats. Recently another museum cat has appeared on aircraft articles Category:Industrial designs of the Museum of Modern Art. Some aircraft are on display in tens of museum and collections around the world so we have a potential to add loads of cats to each aircraft type. We list the aircraft on display is the article but not sure that adding loads of cats is appropriate. Do we have a policy or guideline on these museum exhibit cats or any where more appropriate to raise concerns, thanks. MilborneOne (talk) 11:42, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
The problem, put simply, is that although I've taken on a little bit of management in the past couple of weeks, nobody else ever deals with it at all and I'm not willing or able to deal with it all by myself. There's a backlog of over 2,700 articles, dating at this point all the way back to November 2010 — and it isn't a queue that we can or should dismiss as a low priority, because for a variety of reasons, some of the articles in that queue are actually true uncats and some others just don't belong there at all. For one thing, User:SoxBot frequently removes the uncat tag from articles which have "categories" but fails to distinguish properly between true content categories and hidden maintenance categories that don't count as real categorization, with the result that I've frequently been forced to use the catimprove tag on articles that were more properly tagged as uncats just to keep the bot from inappropriately detagging them again — and for another, some other users who do manual tagging just incorrectly apply the catimprove tag to practically every article they touch regardless of whether it actually needs more categories or not.
So, put simply, we have to start really dealing with that queue. So my question is, how do we actually want to do that?
Leave everything exactly as it is, but commit to start actually dealing with the Category:Articles needing additional categories queue. The thing about this option is that it only works if we actually follow through on that commitment; if we continue to let it just stagnate as a backlog that nobody ever actually deals with, then we haven't solved the problem.
Collapse the "uncategorized articles", "uncategorized stubs" and "articles needing additional categories" queues into a single "articles that aren't sufficiently categorized" queue. This would have the benefit of keeping all of the project's work in one spot instead of dividing it up into three different piles. I know that traditionally they've been viewed as being three different priority levels, but frankly that's bullpuckey — for one thing, as I've already noted, a significant number of the articles in the "additional categories" queue are actually full uncats. And for another, there isn't actually any discernible or legitimate difference in priority between an article with no categories on it at all, one with a stub template but no content categories and one whose only content category is Category:Living people; they're all equal in priority.
Set a target whereby any backlogged monthly "additional categories" queue older than X number of months gets culled, such that any existing categories would be removed so that the page can be swapped back into the uncats queue. This would certainly not be my preference, because it verges on being disruptive, but I'm certainly willing to consider doing it anyway if the backlog doesn't start getting dealt with through more productive means.
The bottom line, however, is that we cannot ignore the queue or deem it to be a low priority; one way or another, it needs to be dealt with. Bearcat (talk) 04:19, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
China province navboxes
Could somebody who knows, please advise on the correct categories? I will do the rest. Maybe a new category?
It indents the first line but the following lines return to the left margin and it looks a bit ugly. --Stfg (talk) 08:48, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure what exactly do you mean. Can you show an example? User<Svick>.Talk(); 21:44, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
(←) The real example I noticed was at Liverpool F.C.#History. With my window at about 800 wide and text size set to largest, it wraps. As this may not be convenient for you, here's an artificial example:
(←) That page merely says what indentation is; I know that. The indentation of only line 1 appears inconsistent with other wikipedia formatting decisions, for example this one:
Hello! A BRFA has been filed for having a bot automate this task. Essentially, a bot will scan for Untagged Uncategorized Articles, and add {{Uncategorized|date={{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}}} to them. Your comments are appreciated here. Avicennasis @ 18:51, 18 Av 5771 / 18:51, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
Is this category for any biography of a person who served in the U.S. army or is it only for people whose "claim to fame" resulted from their service in the army? Personally I think it should include anyone who served. Whichever way it is, a clarification should be made on the page so there is no confusion.RyanVeseyReview me! 20:09, 28 September 2011 (UTC)
On a side note, if there is a response, can people add a talkback message on my talk page when they reply?RyanVeseyReview me! 20:14, 28 September 2011 (UTC)
How do I change the name of the new category Films set in Bagdad to Films set in Baghdad? Delete it (somehow) and start over? Clarityfiend (talk) 22:04, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
Sorry for the naive nature of the below. Categorisation is relatively new to me. I have made an effort to read the category related documentation and FAQ but I am still left with the following queries ...
It seems that there has been a change to the Mediawiki software recently. The pages in subcats are now counted in a different manner. The page count now included the category count. While this is technically correct it is now difficult to determine how many article versus how many categories in the subcat of a category (does that make sense?). I think the previous method was better since readers and editors can tell at a glance how many of each there are. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 20:06, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
Is there a way to list all categories with a name that ends with articles needing photos ? --Traveler100 (talk) 21:04, 17 January 2012 (UTC)
Other opinions
I feel it would be very helpful if anyone who is well experienced here in this project who might understand the various expectations of how parent categories might sit, against a proposal by a member of the WP Philately to keep sub categories out of of parent cat, viz; the proposal at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Philately.
Please try to keep this category as flat as possible by not adding sub-categories so that ALL of the philatelic articles relating to this country can be seen in one place
The text has been placed in the main space on some new categories- I have never seen the usage of flat or any such concern for visibility as a criterion for the structure of function of a category, as it is an internal part of the wp structure, and not a generally used part of mainspace, or expected to be as such.
It seems imho to run counter to understanding what category trees are about - to comply (in an odd way) with such a request in effect all the content articles in the children (and even grandchildren) categories would have to have duplicated if not triplicated categories on the articles to make this request work. My understanding of the WP:CAT overall process is not to have parent/child/grandchild categories in the category space of an article - this proposal seem to be encouraging it for the sake of visibility.. - if I have interpreted it correctly.
Other opinions are hoped for on this subject, thanks. SatuSuro 10:00, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
The background is that Philately articles have suffered from over-categorisation in the past (and continue to) and this is an attempt at a flatter structure so that we can see how well each country is covered. It is not an attempt to create a new rule or ban sub-categories or anything along those lines, nor is it essential to include this wording for the new structure to work. I have requested feedback at the Philately project and expressed a willingness to remove the request if it is contra to policy or the consensus. Philafrenzy (talk) 10:08, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
For the purposes of this discussion please (a) show what over-categorisation means to you - examples would help (b) show examples of what you mean by flatter structures - plenty of examples please SatuSuro 10:12, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. -- Ssilvers (talk) 06:36, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
Table of Contents for large numerical categories
I have created Template:Large Category TOC numeric (based on Template:Large category TOC) to be used in large categories with many numerical cats (e.g. cats of years). An example can be seen at Category:Politics by year (where I am busy correcting the sorting, so never mind that aspect). Where otherwise searching for the year 1512 in such a large cat is not very user-friendly, now you can use the "15" link at the top and get all the results for the years 1500+ at the start of the page. I hope it can be of use on more pages (e.g. Category:Establishments in England by year may be a candidate)! Any improvements to the template are more than welcome, e.g. a correction of the order for BC years. Fram (talk) 15:30, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
Likely to remain underpopulated we have no reason as editors to declare ages in the category system and any such user categories are used to find interests to help find other editors with related interests, knowing age will not help. MilborneOne (talk) 22:42, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
They might be helpful for demographic studies of Wikipedians. Also, knowing an editor’s age might indicate how likely that person has background experience in an area, for example, World War II.
I recently came across Eugen Relgis, a page with over 70 categories. This seemed possibly a bit excessive (however I do not edit biographies much, so it might not be too unusual). The style materials offer vague information about overcategorization, but nothing concrete. It seems like it could be useful to have some statistics on the number of pages with a given number of categories. (i.e., how many pages have 0 categories, how many have 1 category, etc. - so one could create a bar chart with number of categories on one axis and number of pages on the other.)
I would imagine that such a chart would show a large concentration of pages with a moderate number of categories (say 6 to 20 or 30), plus some sort of a long tail of a few pages with more categories. (But without having done the experiment, I don't know.)
Even if don't have data enough to get a a complete graph like that, it would be nice to know what the median (not the mean) number of categories per page is, and say what the 90th and/or 99th percentile are.
In addition, some way to locate the pages with the most categories (say the 100 or 500 pages with the most categories on them) could be useful. (Such pages might suggest problems with the categorization system, or they might just be pages that could use a bit of cleanup, e.g. candidates for {{Too many categories}}.)
Don't want to see a hard and fast limit placed on them, but having a bit of information about what is normal could be useful as guidance for editors. (e.g. judicious use of such statistics could improve the documentation on overcategorization).
In all of this I am referring to non-hidden categories.
Are there tools to generate such statistics? Where do I find them? Does this seem useful? Is there someplace else I should ask this? Thoughts? Thanks. Zodon (talk) 05:52, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
Bot to clean up article categorization
I was cleaning up the categorization of articles in one area, and noticing that it is not uncommon for an article to be listed in both a category and an immediate parent of the category. It seems like it might be reasonable to have a bot that would check for this situation, and in such cases remove the article from the "upper" of the two categories. (i.e. if article A is in categories B and C, but C is an immediate child of B, then remove article A from category B).
Of course there are a few pathological cases that one would have to handle carefully. (Article is in a string of descendant categories; there is a cycle in the category graph, (e.g. category B is a subcategory of itself)).
Bot exclusion would allow editors to suppress this behavior on a particular page that needs to be in a parent and child categories. Of course this would only be in article space.
It seemed to me that having such a thing would automate some of the busywork of categorization. Does such a bot already exist? Does this seem like a good idea? Are there other caveats or gotchas that need considering? Thoughts? Thanks. Zodon (talk) 06:00, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
List articles?
Is there a way to generate a list of all the articles to some depth in a category tree? RockMagnetist (talk) 22:06, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
In which direction??? This is what they look like: Have a try of Catgraph. It made the image above. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 04:16, 24 May 2012 (UTC)
Downward (children) only. The graphs are cute, but what I really need is a list of articles so I can create a file and apply a Special:RecentChangesLinked search to it. RockMagnetist (talk) 21:13, 28 May 2012 (UTC)
Are there categories for works of art in specific institutions?
I may be missing something, but I have not found any categories for works of art in specific institutions - for example, Works of art in the Louvre, Works of art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, etc. It seems to me these would be very useful given all of the content about specific works that are housed in museums. I for one would love to be able to find a list of articles about art in a museum that I am about to visit. Lexaxis7 (talk) 05:12, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
Both a category and a list article would be viable, but they do not necessarily exist yet. A category has the downside that it could only contain links to articles about works of art that are independently and individually notable. A list article, could contain information about even non-notable works. If you are actually looking for the information for an upcoming trip, I would say going to the museum website or a book are better in the short term, but if you want to create lists/categories, then good luck! Gaijin42 (talk) 13:21, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
There are several categories for art in different museums although some are not art specific. These include the british museum, Smithsonian, National Archives, and others. Try looking at Wikipedia:GLAM. Kumioko (talk) 14:10, 15 June 2012 (UTC)
My first thought on seeing "Category:Paintings of the Louvre" was "So many people have painted pictures of the Louvre that we need a category for them?" Anomie⚔ 20:02, 15 June 2012 (UTC)
By virtue of being in the second category it is also in the first which is the parent of the second. So it is not correct to list the article directly in both. Vegaswikian (talk) 02:49, 19 June 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, I was almost positive that was the case. I don't really like reverting editors on articles I create so I thought I'd check and make sure. If it was discovered that the Senator attended the University of Minnesota at say CAS, he should be added to that category as well, correct? RyanVeseyReview me! 02:54, 19 June 2012 (UTC)
There is consensus, that Category:Terminology should only contain articles, which discuss the concept of terminology and that articles about specific terminology should be placed in a another category. However there is clearly no consensus about, what the name of this category should be. There needs to be another discussion, where it is decided between Category:Terms and Category:Terminologies. Armbrust, B.Ed.WrestleMania XXVIIIThe Undertaker 20–0 07:30, 27 June 2012 (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 category:Terminology contain articles which define and discuss terminology (as instructed on the category page), or should it contain articles whose title is a term, as seems to be the actual practice? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spinningspark (talk • contribs) 07:54, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
Hi Jim, I'm a bit baffled by your edit summary at Signal reflection. You seem to imply that only articles that are stubs just containing a definition should be in this category. That was not how I read the category, or have been using it. I believed it was meant for articles whose title is an electronics term. That said, that particular article probably does not belong anyway. It is not a set phrase, but a sum-of-parts as they would say on Wiktionary. SpinningSpark 01:38, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
Drat; intelligent people keep making think about what I'm doing. Unfair. Anyway, however reluctantly, I have begun to think and, as usual when facing a judgement question, to look for precedents. I happened upon Category:Terminology and made it a grandparent to the cat in question. Its talk page has a brief discussion from years ago about technical terminology categories in general, and the examples given seem to have disappeared. This suggests to my possibly excessively suggestible mind that terminology categories are mostly a bad thing that ought to be industriously whittled down and maybe even eliminated. Anyway the question deserves more attention, and probably a more widely watched forum would attract better ideas. Should we carry on the discussion in the cat's own talk page, or the parent's or grandparent's, or perhaps best of all, the Electronics Project's? Jim.henderson (talk) 13:29, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
Terminology categories would certainly be a bad thing if they were being used in the way implied in that discussion. They would have been entirely populated with WP:DICDEFs, which certainly come under WP:NOT. Such stubs are either expanded into articles, deleted, redirected, moved to Wiktionary with a soft redirect, or incorporated in a list such as List of nautical terms. However, the members of these categories don't seem to be that, or they aren't any more. I agree a discussion would be useful, and as it affects numerous categories it should be somewhere central such as Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories. Or it could be on Category talk:Terminology but it should still be linked from the Wikiproject. I'll take a trawl through their archives to see if it's been discussed before. SpinningSpark 15:14, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
Back then, I was thinking something about whether these should be jargon categories, but old age and sunburn (bicycled 35 miles (58 km) today with 25 younger, stronger and mostly brighter people) have made me forget what side I intended to take or why. Nobody else has commented yet. So, kindly disregard my butting in, and exercise your probably sounder judgment. Jim.henderson (talk) 02:29, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
Jim, whichever side you intended to take, you have a good point that there is a disconnect between the category instructions and the actual practice. Something needs to change, either the instructions need amending (or deleting) or the categories need cleaning up. To my mind, the correctness of a categorisation should be intuitive from the name of the category. Nobody reads the category pages before categorising, more likely the categories will be copied from a similar article. I have added a RFC template to attract more attention. SpinningSpark 07:54, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
This is a no-brainer, much like "method" vs. "methodology". "Terminology" means a system of terms and their patterns of derivation. It is frequently misused to mean "term" (just as "methodology" is misused to mean "method", to make something sound more important than it really is), but this is a misuse. "Myocardial infarction" is an example of a medical term, not of medical terminology; the use of [-]myo- to refer to muscle and [-]cardio- (thus -cardial) to refer to the heart is an example of medical terminology; the use of both [-]cardio- and [-]kardio- to refer to the heart is a an example of conflicting medical terminological practices (possibly even conflicting terminologies between two branches of the medial field, though I don't think that's the case in this particular example).
It might well be a no-brainer, but my brain hasn't quite grasped it yet. Is the answer that much of what is now in category:terminology should really be in category:terms? SpinningSpark 09:06, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Hmm...Category:Terms was emptied in 2008 and redirected to Category:Terminology, but I can't find a CFD for it, so the reasoning is opaque at the moment. SpinningSpark 09:29, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
I think that it would make more sense for the category to contain articles about the concept of terminology. Articles about specific terminology should be placed into more appropriate categories. E.g., Category:Legal terms >> Category:Law.--yutsiTalk/Contributions 20:32, 28 May 2012 (UTC)
The discussion above 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.
I will reactivate category:Terms and move the appropriate sub-categories into it. Even if it is decided to rename at a later date, it is still useful to do the work of separating out the entries. SpinningSpark 17:46, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
The proposed policy change is rejected. Instead, the discussion establishes consensus that image files - at least those that are hosted on Wikipedia - should be categorized on Wikipedia. (I am closing this discussion per a WP:AN request for an admin to do so.) Sandstein 19:09, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
This proposal for content rather than project (maintenance) categories. It does not cover Category:Featured pictures which are a special case.
Issue
At present categorisation of images is haphazard. One or more images are sometimes placed in a category with no thought as to its appropriateness. Sometimes a category is used for images as well as articles and subcategories, and in other cases a specific image category is used. What I would call drive "drive by categorisation", where editors add a category to an article and fail to check the actual category, appears to be a regular occurrence for pages of all types. This is one source of cses were there are stray images scattered amongst content categories.
"To help editors find images, please remember to add categories to the image description page. Well-categorized and well-described images are more likely to be used."
"A category can mix articles and images, or a separate file/image category can be created."
However, a revision of the guideline from May 2012 reads as follows:
"On Wikipedia, category tags can be added to file pages, but a category generally should not mix articles and files."
There was no discussion on Wikipedia talk:Categorization of this significant change. As an aside categories should not be seen as being metadata tags. This contravenes categorisation guidelines.
The Wikipedia:Categories guideline should have the current text (quoted above) deleted and the following added to it:
All images mustshould be in appropriate image specific categories (those that includes the word "image") rather than in categories containing articles.
Rather than creating new image categories on Wikipedia use the {{commons category}} template for linking to the associated Commons category.
Non-free images should only be categorised with the appropriate file copyright tag.
Any other related guidelines should be rephrased to suit this new proposal.
Proposal updated 22:41, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
Rationale
This proposal will give certainty to editors as to how images are categorised and it ensures that readers are delivered a consistent pattern across all Wikipedia content categories. It also improves web usability by reducing page clutter and therefore allowing readers to focus on what they are actually seeking. There is sufficient links made available to the reader that can be followed to the more comprehensive image repository at Wikimedia Commons.
Wikimedia Commons is the recommended repository for all free images and that is where image categorisation is done on behalf of Wikipedia.
The goal of Wikipedia is to create content for readers. Content is categories and articles that is of interest to readers as opposed to project related pages that are used for creating the actual content. The image itself is content when displayed in an article page of course, but the image page is of a lesser interest to the majority of readers. Interested readers can browse the image categories and click on an image to get further information. An image page should be seen as a project page and should be treated in the same way as templates and Wikipedia namespace pages.
Wikimedia Commons is a sister project to Wikipedia and it essentially a "subcontractor" to handle image related work. It does not make any sense to duplicate the work done on Commons, especially since there is a strong correlation between the category structures. There are huge backlogs of work to be done as it is - including categories - without making unnecessary extra work for ourselves.
Category:Maps - currently contains three random images, one of which is unrelated to the category.
Some of the subcats have image files as well. Although a map itself is an image there should be separation of map images and the actual articles about maps.
Category:Animal rights advocates - 23 images. This category has the __NO GALLERY__ magic word so the images are displayed as links rather than thumbnails. In this case the images page names are quite descriptive so it is easy to choose one but image names are not always as descriptive as this particular set.
Category:Ministry of Environment, Housing and Territorial Development - contains seven non-free logos as links (hidden with __NO GALLERY__). They are essentially logos for what is in the articles in the category, and having them in the category (especially as links) serves no purpose to readers.
Category:Indianapolis Museum of Art artworks - 17 images (mainly non-free?) displayed as thumbnails. Categorisation guidelines for images stipulates that they should be hidden. If they were they would be of less use to the reader. They could be incorporated into some sort of gallery of images on an article page to be of better use to readers.
Support the idea behind the proposal. I would like to agree with Alan, and improve usability by not mixing various type of contents in categories. And I regret that images should be searched via different pathways, as it can potentially confuse the reader. However, the MediaWiki software and our licensing policies prevent us to solve this issue at the moment. Dodoïste (talk) 19:48, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
Proposal updated 22:41, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
Oppose
This looks like a solution in search of a problem. Images are content, and not just when displayed within articles; the image description pages (should) function as extended captions about the images, which readers as well as editors should be interested in. Not that there's a firm division between editors and readers on Wikipedia anyway.
The category pages already separate articles from media, so I don't know where this concern comes from regarding clutter, and it shows that the system was designed to handle both at once. Image-specific categories simply aren't always going to make sense as an absolute requirement. If there is a category for articles on subject X, and only one or two files hosted on en-wiki of subject X, it doesn't make sense to create a category for images of X. Nor does it make sense to only categorize images by their license type but not their subject. And that images are sometimes miscategorized by the wrong subject is of no relevance to whether they should be categorized by the right subject.
The proposed language is also apparently contradictory: it first says to create image-specific categories, but then says not to do this, but to instead link to a Commons category. If what is meant is simply not to categorize Commons-hosted images on Wikipedia, well, sure, but that's not clarified. And there's no reason not to keep images categorized here pending their move to Commons if they are eligible for upload there. I have actually performed many such moves myself after finding the images in a category I was interested in (it would also be a strange use of time to remove categories someone has already added to such an image rather than taking that time to move it to Commons). And regarding images that are non-free or otherwise ineligible for upload to Commons (e.g., free in the U.S. but not in their country of origin), the existence or non-existence of a corresponding Commons category has no relevance to whether those en-wiki-hosted images should be categorized by subject on en-wiki. postdlf (talk) 14:11, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
The changes to Wikipedia:Categorization, which Alan says were not discussed, actually restored a long-standing version of the guideline that was changed in November 2011. [3][4] This had previously said that images could be added to categories. It was changed after a brief discussion, based on Alan's word that it went against current practice. But in fact editors regularly add images to categories, though Alan often removes them. There's no need to create a separate category for images, or to insist that categorization take place only on Commons. So long as images are uploaded to Wikipedia, we have to be allowed to categorize them here, in whatever way makes it easiest for readers to find them. SlimVirgin(talk) 16:33, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
Proposal updated 22:41, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
Oppose, per postdlf. While it can sometimes make sense to create image-specific categories, there are many instances where it just would not make sense to do so. In such cases, the general principles of categorization should apply; that is, the Wikipedia-based image should be able to be categorized in a general category according to topic. At a more fundamental level, I don't understand the squeamishness of mixing image files with articles. They are placed in an entirely separate section of the category, so it's unlikely to confuse anyone or "clutter up" the category's listing of articles. Good Ol’factory(talk) 23:28, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
Images are content and ought to be categorised if they are hosted at the English Wikipedia. There is no down-side for readers, but an enourmous up-side for editors. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:59, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Oppose, no reason why non-free images, or free images not already at Commons, shouldn't be categorized together with articles. In cases where cats are very crowded, a separate subcat for the images may be useful, but should not be the first option in most other cases. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fram (talk • contribs)
I hope we realise that non-free images should not be on display in the category, per WP:NFCC#9? --Dirk BeetstraTC 05:12, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
Which has nothing to do with either the RfC or my opinion on it. As you can see from the link you provided, there are means to avoid it being shown, so this is not a problem that needs to be raised here. Fram (talk) 06:34, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
I mainly raised it as a concern that we do need to address at the same time - not in any form as a criticism of oppose (it applies equally to support, actually, though there it may be easier to handle). --Dirk BeetstraTC 06:38, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
Oppose Images are hosted either on Commons, or on the local Wikipedia. Either way, they should be categorised on the project which hosts them. Images hosted on Commons should not also be categorised locally, except in very special circumstances: this would involve the creation of an orphan file description page, which is subject to speedy deletion per WP:CSD#G8 (see {{db-imagepage}}) or WP:CSD#F2 (see {{db-fpcfail}}. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:59, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Oppose Image categorisation is particularly useful in the case of architectural works that are allowed to be uploaded to the English Wikipedia, due to {{FoP-US}}, but are not allowed to be uploaded to Commons, because they're not free in the country of origin (e.g. File:Chamber of Commerce - Ljubljana, Dimič Street 9 - March 2007.jpg). However, it seems to me that there's no point in the obligatory separation of categories containing images and articles because they're in different sections anyway. Also it would be redundant to categorise images uploaded to Commons here too. --Eleassarmy talk 19:16, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Oppose as has been said before, sometimes there are one or two images in a certain subject area; an entire image subcat does not make sense, and there's no reaason not to have the images along with the other relevant subject area. That the reader may be primarily looking for articles does not mean they would not want to see anything relevant. LadyofShalott 03:34, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
Oppose not categorizing non-free images is a bad idea. All images should be correctly categorized by topic. 70.24.251.208 (talk) 05:05, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
I hope we realise that non-free images should not be on display in the category, per WP:NFCC#9? --Dirk BeetstraTC 05:12, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
Yes, I do, but I don't see why images should be displayed at all. It is just bandwith intensive. Files should be named in such a manner that they can describe the subject, and if they aren't should be renamed. 70.24.251.208 (talk) 05:44, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
See the GALLERY/NOGALLERY discussion below. It was just a concern, no criticism of oppose or favour (it concerns both sides of the medal, actually). --Dirk BeetstraTC 06:06, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
Oppose I often move files to Commons and when doing this, it is convenient if they are categorised according to their topics. A lot of time is spent on finding an appropriate Commons category, but if files already are categorised on Wikipedia, this process often goes faster as all files in the same Wikipedia category tend to belong to the same Commons category. I have never seen any reason to have separate categories for files and for images; images appear in a separate section on the category page anyway. I would be happy if a bot could try to guess categories for images based on which articles the images are used in as this would make it easier to search for images to move to Commons based on categories. Such a bot would presumably add lots of article categories to the images. I will comment on WP:NFCC#9 violations further down. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:06, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
Alternative proposal(s)
Attempt to reach a consensus. "Images hosted on Commons should not be categorized on Wikipedia. Images hosted on Wikipedia that cannot be moved to Commons should be categorized [on Wikipedia]." I believe the above sentences are consensual. Any thoughts? Cheers, Dodoïste (talk) 19:43, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
That's fine by me but it does not address the nub of my proposal, namely the mixing of articles and images. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:54, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
Oppose – Images at Commons must not be categorised at the English Wikipedia. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:59, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
But see Category:Featured pictures. I don't know if there are other examples; I can't think of any other good reasons to do so here. postdlf (talk) 11:39, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Support/Oppose Commons images must not be categorised on Wikipedia, unless they need specific templates, e.g. {{badimage}}. If a Commons image gets a local file information page, this local file information page should only contain one or more of these specific templates. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:20, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
I object to "Non-free images should only be categorised with the appropriate file copyright tag." I don't see why images should not be properly categorized by topic. As most images on Wikipedia should be non-free this makes the act of categorizing images useless, since those categories will be deleted for being small. Removal of that entire statement would be a good idea. 70.24.251.208 (talk) 05:04, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
I hope we realise that non-free images should not be on display in the category, per WP:NFCC#9? --Dirk BeetstraTC 05:12, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
That's what __NOGALLERY__ is for. They can still be categorized if this is added to the category text. Good Ol’factory(talk) 05:34, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
That still doesn't explain why images should not be categorized by topic. As pointed out, there is a NOGALLERY flag. Considering that most images on Wikipedia should be non-free, why not just turn off Gallery for all categories? 70.24.251.208 (talk) 05:45, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
Good idea—I have often thought that it would be a good thing to turn off the image preview for WP categories. The default on WP should be to hide the image preview, not to show it. Good Ol’factory(talk) 06:01, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
I was not suggesting this as an oppose of an oppose - just that we need to consider the point before 'going wild' and categorising non-free material in 'normal' categories. Otherwise it is a one-way ticket to many (hidden) NFCC violations. I like the idea of standard NOGALLERY .. does GALLERY work (of course we want to have the featured images category display the images ..). --Dirk BeetstraTC 06:05, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
The current version of the guideline for categorizing images addresses this issue. I believe as it stands now, there are plenty of NFCC violations happening because users do not add the NOGALLERY tag; I run across them quite frequently in doing category work, at least. Good Ol’factory(talk) 07:22, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
I am aware that NFCC is a mess already, having images categorised on en.wikipedia may increase the problem (unless we pre-emptively stop it by a standard NOGALLERY - we will however run the risk that editors are going to argue that it defies the whole principle of having images categorised like that - editors will want to see them - but this is diffusing from the original issue). --Dirk BeetstraTC 07:27, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
Some questions:
What is the purpose of categorising non-free images? They are only supposed to be used in one or two articles anyway. Why would anyone need to search for such images?
Would it be possible to have an image setting so that specific images never display in galleries? Maybe some magic keyword could be added to all non-free licence tags? There are lots of images which appear in both Category:All free media and Category:All non-free media, and so they violate WP:NFCC#9 in the category listing for Category:All free media. For example, it is common to combine {{Non-free 3D art}} with a free licence for the photographer's copyright, and so these images appear in both free and unfree categories.
Would it be possible to automatically define non-free images as "bad" outside the article namespace so that they are blocked in the same way as files on MediaWiki:Bad image list are blocked from most pages? --Stefan2 (talk) 22:20, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
Why would anyone need to search for such images? Not everyone searching for images are editors or reusers. Some just need to look at the images. This group, probably the largest, will not be concerned about the licence of the image, only how to find it. SpinningSpark 22:49, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
Triple-category heirarchies would be fine by me. (free, non-free, all-files. Every all-files category would have two subcategories, free and non-free; Free/non-free would have atleast two parents, the free/non-free parent(s), and the all-files parent)
As for why would anyone search for images, why have two or more similar or almost identical images on Wikipedia when one will do? Instead of adding image after image of virtually the same thing over a range of articles, reduce the number of fair-use images by adding FURs and removing similar images. If you can't find similar images, you'll upload another image. A range of related topics can end up using similar non-free images, but do they need different images? If you don't know the entire range of article names, you may never see the similar images, so just add another non-free image to Wikipedia. Why should we be encouraging adding more non-free images, instead of just adding FURs to existing images?
If it is an NFCC violation, then you can go to Commons and see from its equivalent category to where the non-free image is categorized, if a free alternative is available, or in the Wikipedia category it occupies.
Why should we enable gallery view on categories in any case? That takes up bandwith, and makes categories with images exceeding hard to load, especially over a slow connection, or on a limited system (say an Android tablet) What is the point of having galleryview? We are not supposed to use images for decoration, and galleryview is just decoration.
Disband Commons As an experiment, commons has failed. The sooner we realize this, the better off we will be. The backlog of images to be moved to commons isn't a problem, it's a symptom. There just isn't enough manpower at commons to maintain things in a timely manner, and that's with what they have now. There are 15,000 unclosed deletion discussions in the commons deletion request system, dating back to December 2011. Some of them are pretty obvious copyright infringement ("no evidence of permission"), that commons has left to linger for over 7 months after being nominated. We'd never accept that sort of thing here. Any discussion of file maintenance that ignores that massive backlogs and lack of volunteers over at commons is missing the forest for the trees. Gigs (talk) 00:50, 13 June 2012 (UTC)
And the situation with such material here is anything better than that? I am sorry Gigs, but Wikipedia is acceptingnot doing anything about that sort of thing all the time. --Dirk BeetstraTC 03:53, 13 June 2012 (UTC)
Yes, it's much better here. Our files for deletion doesn't have a massive backlog, and copyright issues are dealt with as they are discovered. Gigs (talk) 14:57, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
Commons deletes a lot more files than Wikipedia. At most a few hundred files are deleted each day on Wikipedia whereas I believe that the Commons deletion count is much higher. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:20, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
A quick scan of FfD here and delreq over there, it looks like we do on average about 50 a day, and commons does about 100 per day. En has 33 expired discussions waiting to be closed vs commons with over 15,000. Gigs (talk) 15:32, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
Keep in mind that about half the Commons DRs are from May and June. They're certainly not all from 7 months ago. And DRs aren't the largest backlog by any means; there are 77,000 files lacking a description, for instance. The file workload on English Wikipedia is trivial in comparison; Commons had more than 30 times more uploads in the last 3 weeks, for instance.[5] So I don't think it's credible to glibly claim that enwiki editors could easily do it better, although having five times as many admins and active editors could certainly help. --Avenue (talk) 17:00, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
It also seems a stretch to claim that Commons is failing due to a lack of volunteers when enwiki's active editor numbers peaked in early 2007,[6] while the number of active editors at Commons has doubled since then and is still climbing.[7] --Avenue (talk) 17:15, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
Discussion
As expected the inherent conservative nature of humans, and by extension Wikipedians themselves, is preventing changes made to Wikipedia:
postdlf makes some valid points but they may not be relevant when looking at the issue on a project wide basis.
Ancheta Wis dismisses the proposal outright based on one word (which I have since changed). The use of the word "must" should not be contentious. Giving guidelines a more prescriptive basis than the descriptive language currently used will make it a lot easier to resolve content disputes.
SlimVirgin kindly links to a long forgotten discussion and makes the valid point that it should be easy for readers to find images. I concur but that is what Commons is for. Also, since articles are more often visited that category pages it would make sense to incorporate image there. Article are sometime embellished with image galleries, done to varying degrees of quality.
While of course consensus can change on Wikipedia, it is not mandated that it must. And it's looking fairly clear that in this case, it has not. - jc37 13:13, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
"[T]hat is what Commons is for" is a non sequitur to the question of how we can make it easy for readers to find images hosted here. For as long as they are hosted here, the problem of organizing them must be solved here.
Article usage is also not a substitute for categorization, because while we only host images here that are being used in articles, it doesn't follow that such images are presently or should be used by every possible article that could use them. For example, we might have a free-in-the-U.S.-but-not-free-elsewhere painting that can't be moved to Commons, is used in the artist's article, but it may not be an appropriate fit for the article on the painting's subject matter. A category may also group together images that are used in separate though related articles that form subtopics of a broader topic (such as a subject's history divided by period). It would really be completely backwards to stretch article content to include galleries of all possible relevant images just to avoid "cluttering" categories. postdlf (talk) 13:51, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Comment As regards Commons images, it's perhaps a pity that Commons categories don't "show through" in the way that the Commons image description does. I wonder how many ordinary readers even realise that those categories exist and can be navigated for such images. Jheald (talk) 07:49, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
The discussion above 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.
I suggest a new category: "Biography of Living Person Who Published an Autobiographical Book"
I suggest a new category for Wikipedia under the title of the "Biography of Living Person Who Published an Autobiographical Book" in addition to the "Biography of Living Person" Because, If a person wrote and published an autobiography, so he accepted to be criticized and his biography will consist of criticizings of his autobiographical statements. Isn't it?--Fightingagainstlies (talk) 18:15, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
No, we are not going to let you violate WP:BLP on Oktay Sinanoğlu. if that is your only interest in Wikipedia, there are plenty of other online forums that have lower standards. postdlf (talk) 18:37, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
All these highlight a number of different but related issues, which I will try to divide in the next sections. Feel free, of course, to modify them or add more as deemed necessary. Fram (talk) 07:34, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
1. General discussion
At the moment, the year by country cats, and the underlying establishments by country and year cats, are created rather haphazarldly, with many near empty cats and many gaps inbetween. An effort to systematically create and populate these led to some protest, and ultimately to this RfC. Note that the current situation is a view of a work in progress: the final result would have been considerably different from the current one, with on the one hand still many more categories, but on the other hand alot of categories with (much) more entries, and less gaps in the coverage by category. Fram (talk) 07:34, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
2. Specific issues
2.1 More cats or larger trees?
Should we have more specific, combined cats in the articles, and larger category trees with less densely populated cats beneath, or more cats per article, but with smaller category trees and more densely populated cats?
You get more precise information from the more detailed categories: if you would only have century-establishment cats by country, you wouldn't note the specific spikes you get in e.g. Category:1536 disestablishments in England or Category:1803 disestablishments in Germany; and the tree shows that the 1536 events not only happened in England, but also in Denmark and Sweden (Category:1536 disestablishments by country; these two would get quite a few additional entries once that all articles had been categorised): these cats show the history and reflect the events that happened in specific years and countries, in a way that categories without the countries or without the specific years never could.
The categories are less populated (this one is on purpose noted in both the advantages and the disadvantages section)
Disadvantages of specific cats:
The category trees get one or two levels deeper.
The categories are less populated (this one is on purpose noted in both the advantages and the disadvantages section)
2.2 How far back in time?
In general, but with exceptions, the farther back you go in time, the fewer entries there are for a specific year, since there are less articles for those periods, and sources are often less precise (so we often have centuries, but not specific years). This leads to smaller categories, and more gaps in the category tree.
Advantages of going far back
Consistency, no (arbitrary?) rules about which centuries or countries get year cats and which ones don't.
Clarity: the few year categories indicate for which subjects we have specific information, and the more unclear ones are listed in the more general ones (centuries mainly); in this way, the categories reflect the actual knowledge we have and the actual information we provide; no dumbing down
Disadvantages of going far back
Very sparsely populated cats
Large gaps between cats
The link between the current country and the entity at the time of the cat is very loose (see discussion of "which country?" below)
2.3 Minimum number of children per cat?
Should there be a minimum number of children per category? Or does it depend on the circumstances? If you have a number of years with enough cat members, and inbetween one or two years with only one or two members, should these be created to fill the gap (and for consistency), or should these be kept at a higher level (per the rules, i.e. also a form of consistency)?
Advantages of setting a minimum number of children
Clear rules give less discussion afterwards
Too much categories is disruptive
Disadvantages of setting a minimum number of children
You get gaps between years which reach the limit, and years which don't get there.
Unequal treatment for different countries (systemic bias in categories?)
You sometimes need to categorize at a very high level: at the time of writing, there is only one establishment in Frech Polynesia categorized, in Category:2003 establishments in French Polynesia. Disallowing this categorization (no matter at which level) because it only has one member seems harsh and counterproductive.
The category trees get unbalanced: e.g. Category:1963 establishments by country has 34 member cats, but only a few of those have themselves a lot of members: should all these be removed from this cat (by changing them e.g. to century cats), or should they be allowed to stay as underpopulated cats because in this way, they are easier to find through a number of trees?
2.4 Decades?
What's the point of having decade cats between the years and the centuries?
Advantages of decade cats
In cases where you know the decade something happened, but not the exact year, you can still use the most precise available category
Disadvantages of decades
Make the category tree unnecessary longer
If we have too many categories with all these year cats, then the decade cats are an easy target to reduce this again
There are only 100 years per century, so there is no need to subdivide these by decades
It is not that often that we know the exact decade, but not the year
The 00 decade category belongs in two century categories since the 00 year is in an earlier century then the others
2.5 Millennia?
What's the point of having millenium cats on top of the centuries?
Advantages of millennium cats
In cases where you know the millennium something happened, but not the century, you can still categorize it
For the very old events (especially things that happened BC), going lower than the millennium is often impossible and will yield few entries anyway
Disadvantages of millennium
Make the category tree unnecessary longer
If we have too many categories with all these year cats, then the millennium cats are an easy target to reduce this again
There are for most countries only two millennia with articles, such a division makes little sense
It is not that often that we know the millennium, but not the century
2.6 Which country?
This may seem a strange question, but it causes a lot of discussions. Do we use the current country something is located in, the contemporary one, or both?
Advantages of the current country
Easily understandable qua location
What many (most?) readers are interested in: what happened in a current country in the past?
Allows for historical correctness by either adding the correct contemporary category to the articles as well, or by adding another category to the current country one: e.g. all establishment in Russia, Ukraine, ... categories during the Soviet period are added to the "establishments in the Soviet Union" cats for the same year, making navigation both from the historical Soviet Union point of view and from the current (and former) independent countries point ofview possible at once.
The "establishment" and "disestablishment" cat get the same country, even if the contemporary countries wete different (e.g. things established in then Burgundy, diestablished in France, currently located in Belgium; having both the "est." and "disest." cat in Belgium is easier to follow than the "historically correct" ones).
Disadvantages of the current country:
Harder to understand: how can anything be established in 1918 in Slovenia, when Slovenia didn't exist in that year?
When going far back in time, the link between the current country and the former state gets unclear; what is the link between Cyropolis and Tajikistan? On the other hand, Marseille has a quasi uninterrupted documented history from 600 BC until now: should it be listed as an establishment in Ancient Greece, an establishment in France, or both?
Falsification of history: we shouldn't be combining years and country names which didn't exist at that time.
People interested in a certain continent may find the information grouped here
Disadvantages of continent categories
Even more categories and longer trees
Few things happen on a by-continent basis
Comments
Thanks to Fram for laying out the issue in so much detail. The list of questions is so long now that it is a bit difficult to find a good format to comment though. I'll just give my opinion on a few points:
A single category page with, say, thirty to forty entries is far easier to navigate than a category tree with the same thirty or forty entries divided across a dozen subcats in three levels.
There is no need for uniformity. Category trees should be expanded down just as far as it makes sense locally for each topic area.
I don't see it as a particularly troublesome burden if articles will have one or two more direct category assignments (say "2nd-century BC establishments in X" and "155 BC", rather than a single "155 BC establishments in X")
(Note: there seems to be some confusion in section 2.5 above, where it talks about decades when it should be talking about millennia.)
1: but this is solely looking from the point of view of one tree, one search; the flipside is that the dozen subcats are not located just in one tree together, but also in many different trees separately, so that they not only may be found from e.g. the "year" tree, but also the "country" tree. See e.g. Category:1983 establishments by country: using an arbitrary limit of 10 pages or more, one would keep the Australia, Canada, England, India, Japan, Norway, Scotland, UK, and US cats, and upmerge all others to the generic year (without country) cat. This would also mean that all the upmerged articles need to have a "20th century establishments in country" category added to them, and a "1983 in country" cat as well. In what way would having some countries in, and some countries out of the Category:1983 establishments by country help anyone? How would it benefit Wikipedia or its readers? (I have corrected the error you pointed out, thanks) Fram (talk) 08:28, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
The "1983 establishments by country" is only a technical grouping cat anyway and not really relevant to what ought to be in and out of what. (In fact, in some cases one might consider getting rid of it altogether: if "1483 establishments" will have no other alternative subcat tree than the "by country" one, then "1483 establishments in France" could go directly into it, rather than into an intermediate "by country" cat.) The article on the 1483 establishment of the University of Lesser Elbonia can still go into "1483 establishments" (directly), as well as into "15th century in Lesser Elbonia". It might not even need "15th century establishments in Lesser Elbonia". I see your point about this making more direct category assignments in articles necessary, but as I said above, I don't see that as a heavy price to pay. Fut.Perf.☼ 08:43, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
I thought about whether the "by country" sublevel heading was useful (and may create a new discussion topic above for it if needed), but look at e.g. Category:2011 establishments; it has 26 subcats, of which the "by country" is one; if you remove that sublevel, you get 91 subcats instead, mixing the countries with the other ones. I don't think this makes things any clearer. Fram (talk) 08:50, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
True, if there are alternative parallel subcat trees, then a "by country" intermediate cat makes sense. That's why I so deviously exchanged "1983" against "1483" in my example above. Fut.Perf.☼ 08:59, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
Fair enough ;-) But I like, without taking it to extremes, to have some consistency, some general approach, instead of the more complicated "if X then Y else Z except for X' and Xbis" kinda rules. Let's hope that there is enough participation here to get a good impression of at least the consensus among editors (pure readers rarely participate in RfCs, I fear) so that we can come up with some workable rules and guidelines which have some level of general agreement. Fram (talk) 09:29, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
No category should be created to house a single article. Having a single article in a category defeats the purpose of having a category, which is to ease navigation to other related articles. Having categories that consists entirely of subcategories and then one single article at the bottom only makes navigation more difficult and confusing. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 03:34, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
Not so; no category should be created to house a single article where no other article can be reasonably expected--except when they form a consecutive series. Chronological listings or categories need a certain degree of consistency to be useful. We go by decades , though they are wholly artificial, because it is more helpful than going by 9 years here are 11 years there, whatever fits the flow of events in a particular instance. If we have a series of decades , in a century with 9, 3, 2, 3, 5, 1, 8,1, 3, 2 actual or expected events, they should be created equally. I'd even say we can create an empty category, if there is no event presently available, in order not to break the pattern. Anything irregular makes navigation more difficult and more confusing. DGG ( talk ) 05:42, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
This looks like to me like the typical template-filling mentality: we have a template with all years, so we have to blue-link every single year by whatever means necessary. You end with several identical articles where only the year has been changed. IMO, categories and articles should be created only when there is actual content to fill them. --Enric Naval (talk) 09:01, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
Some thoughts here:
I would suggest, at first, an approach with breaking up too large categories. I agree with DGG here that there should be no missing cases, but the whole should be consistent as well. Start with millenia - if such a millenium category fills too much, break it up by centuries. If a century gets too full, break it down by decades. And so on. Not the other way around - split them already up by year and hope that the tree will be full enough in the end. Too full would, to me, mean that there are more than 200 articles in a category (one page-full on a normal cat-page), but we could break it down to 100 as 'too full'. 100 articles in a millenium would mean, on average, 10 articles in each decade (and that may have a '9, 3, 2, 3, 5, 1, 8,1, 3, 2 actual or expected events' pattern, though that would sum up to 37 .. which IMHO would still be reasonable to group into a bigger group). The 20th millenium now would easily break up to a century level, and if the 15th, 16th, 18th, 19th and 20th century have more than 100 articles each, they should be split up further, as should be the 17th century then (as otherwise the system would break, even if the 17th century would be less than 100 articles. The 14th and down (presuming that none have more than 100 articles) should NOT be split up further. What we now have are categories per year for millenia which at most have 1000 occassions happening - on average 1 per year, and by far, far the most will likely not have more than 10 occasions (and those will likely all be in the very end of the millenium). In summary, I can agree with a '5, 3, 9, 8, 1, 17, 15, 19, 12, 21' (sum 110) split-up, I would disagree, strongly, with a '5, 0, 1, 2, 1, 7, 3, 4, 2, 5' (sum 30) split-up.
Then there are things split up per year ánd by another property, which are not really suitable to be split up like that. One example is Category:1536 disestablishments in Sweden - does this mean that 'the establishment is disestablished (in 1536) and is (now) located in Sweden', or does it mean that 'the establishment is disestablished while it was located in Sweden in 1536' - the latter suggestion given by the name of the category (which hence is ambiguous) is patently wrong, since the establishment in question (Börringe Priory) was located in Denmark at the time of disestablishment (this in fact is an 'object' that was never in Sweden, except that the remainder of the original 'object' is now in Sweden). A solution which has less disambiguity is categorising it as Category:1536 disestablishments and Category:Establishments in Sweden (although already the latter is confusing). Wikipedia:CatScan would help intersecting the two and could be of interest if one really needs the intersection of the categories (which is something that I doubt many people would need). Similar is Guan (state), which is categorised as a Category:1040 BC disestablishments in China. First, at least the disestablishment is likely to have been in the Guan state itself, secondly, what we now know as China did not exist at that time (and see point 3). (added another example Dirk BeetstraTC): this version of Bođani monastery places it in a category Category:Bač, Serbia, a descendant of Category:Bačka, descendant of Category:Regions_of_Serbia, descendant of Category:Geography_of_Serbia, descendant of Category:Serbia, and in Category:1478_establishments, descendant of Category:1478. Running CatScan on that (depth 4 - now needed because of the category the article Bođani monastery is now in Category:1478 establishments in Serbia), gives as results: Bođani monastery and the new cat Category:1478 establishments in Serbia - if the article would not have been subcategorised, the standard 'level 3' would have been enough, and the only result would have been the page.(end added example) - just realising that maybe Bođani monastery is the only 'thing' established in 1478 in Serbia - if CatScan does not find any other overlaps between Category:Serbia and Category:1478 - in other words, this may be another 1-article category.(+comment Dirk BeetstraTC)
(consequence of 2): This is likely to result in many non-existing (or empty) or excessively small categories. If we are talking about 5000 establishments in the first millenium, we end up with 25 establishments (on average) per millenium per country (granted, certain parts of the world did not have any establishments worth mentioning, which takes down the number of countries we would need to worry to find establishments, or some countries are so small that the number will be really small as well), which would if split per year be on average 0.025 establishments per category (inverse, we need about 200,000 notable establishments to get to an average of 1 per category ..). We have Category:1st millennium in Korea, which has now a tree of 11 subcategories to hold one page. If there is in the first millenium another establishment in North Korea, it is unlikely to be in the same year. For that we need to add 4 categories (if it is a year in the same decade) or 7 categories if it is not in the same decade, but in the same century, or 10 categories if it is not in the same century. If it is in South Korea, we need 8 - 10 for the first, then similar counts for the then next. It is now 1:12, it may depending on the year become 2:16 or 2:19 or 2:22 for the second article. And for that whole tree to make significant sense in the end, we would need (if on average we need 5 pages per category) 5000 establishments in the 1 millenium in North Korea and (if I count right) >2200 categories to hold them all. I doubt if we have so many notable establishments in North Korea (which, by the way, did not exist at that time). Similarly, Category:10th-century establishments by country is a tree of 72 categories (including self) to host 25 articles; with ~200 countries and 100 years, it would need 20,000 articles to get at average to 1. --Dirk BeetstraTC 12:09, 9 June 2012 (UTC) (added example Dirk BeetstraTC 13:50, 9 June 2012 (UTC))(+comment --Dirk BeetstraTC 13:59, 9 June 2012 (UTC))
Comments from Wikiproject History were specifically solicited. From that perspective these categories are infantile chronology and of no historical value. Fifelfoo (talk) 16:14, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
In what way? How is a grouping of all disestablishments in England in 1536, 1537, ... "infanitile" and "of no historical value"? How is it "infantile" and "of no historical value" to have categories for all disestablishments in France during the years of the French revolution, or for the neighbouring countries like Italy in the next few years (when Napoleon rules there as well)? How is it "infantile" and "of no historical value" to note that immediately when Slovenia became a country (of sorts) in 1918, they established a "National Gallery"? Please explain your rather negative view, and please specify which elements you find "infantile" and so on. Would you get rid of all year by country categories, or is your comment targeted at specific subgroups? Fram (talk) 07:52, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
".. for the neighbouring countries like Italy in the next few years (when Napoleon rules there as well) .." - In other words, categorising those which are NOW in Italy (Italy was unified in 1861 - before that many loose states existed), but where then under the ruling of France (the French Revolution was in 1789–1799) is historically confusing. I just fail to see how that is historically correct. In fact, the Museo Egizio in Turin was established in 1824 when Turin was the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia, on the other hand, the Borsa Italiana was established in 1808 in Milan was at that time part of the Kingdom of Italy - which is however not the Italy that we now know as Italy. Stranger is the example of Börringe Priory above (which in its established state was never in Sweden). --Dirk BeetstraTC 09:14, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Such "historically confusing" categorization has been done for ages at Wikipedia, e.g. Category:18th-century Italian people was created in 2009. Most of the people in that cat never lived in "Italy" either, just like your example of the Börringe Priory. Most people don't seem to have any problem understanding what is meant though. If it helps you, read the cats as "1824 establishments in CURRENT Sweden" and so on. Note that Category:18th century in Italy was created in 2008, just like e.g. Category:1786 in Italy, so these things aren't new or recent, but don't seem to have caused any problems until now... Fram (talk) 10:32, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
That it wasn't noticed does not make it right, and I think that is why we discuss it now. --Dirk BeetstraTC 10:46, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Also note that for this specific categorisation scheme, earlier discussions (which you linked above) do show that there is room for such discussion - maybe we should clearly write that down into a proper guideline. --Dirk BeetstraTC 10:48, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
I agree with Beetstra. Taking the above-mentioned case, it is fine to categorise the Ljubljana National Gallery to 'Establishments in Slovenia', because the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs may be seen as the first realisation of the idea of the United Slovenia and there's no point in having a category for just this one item. It could be controversial to categorise earlier events, for example events in Carantania or Carniola, to 'Events in Slovenia'. Whereas the historians say that the Slovene nation and the idea of Slovenia developed only in the 19th century, nationalists claim that these entities existed already in the Middle Ages. The administration and the upper classes in these countries were primarily German and the residents did not self-identify with the Slovenes and even not with the Slavs. It's not only historically imprecise to use such metonymies, but also gives support to the fringe nationalist claims. There must be similar cases as well in other countries. --Eleassarmy talk 12:18, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
NPOV: we should not care whether anything we do can give support to nationalist, regionalist, ... claims. Categorizing things which are now in Belgium but used to be in France as being "establishments in Belgium" is not giving support to Belgian nationalism, and categorizing them as "establishments in France" doesn't support French nationalism. Please let's leave such arguments out of this discussion. Apart from that: a current entity (country) is formed by what happened on its territory in the past. Belgium as an entity is established in 1830, but is formed, influenced, defined by things like the growth of Bruges in the 13th and 14th century, or the Sack of Antwerp, or the creation of the County of Flanders in 875, and so on. Categorising these as "establishments in Belgium" or "Events in Belgium" isn't meant to be exclusive though, and multiple cuontries or regions can have cats in the same article. Fram (talk) 12:36, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
I don't mind including entities from the Slovenian past in both 'Establishments in Slovenia' and 'Establishments in Austria', but per the reasons stated above - German upper clases, self-identification, it's better to do it via a subcategory 'Category:Establishments in Carniola'. This also reduces the number of categories in the article, if that is what's aimed for. I'm not acquainted with the history of the County of Flanders though, so I can't comment on it. --Eleassarmy talk 13:12, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
As one of the people who recently submitted a large chunk of date in X type categories for merging I want to clarify that I have no problem with these categories in general when they are needed. I do not however think that we need to go and create what ends up to be thousands of categories for every year and decade and then have only 1 or 2 articles in each year. I would highly suggest that we stay at the decade until a sufficient number of by year articles are tagged for it, say at least 10, then we create the year. Other than that the effort that it takes to categorize the article starts to become more onerous than is necessary and we spend more time categories articles into groupings that are of minimal value. Kumioko (talk) 13:23, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
A second note to your remark 'read the cats as "1824 establishments in CURRENT Sweden' - the whole point here is, that the establishment is not an establishment in CURRENT Sweden, as it was .. disestablished in 1824 ... --Dirk BeetstraTC 13:25, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
And what is so unclear about "1824 disestablishments in what is currently Sweden"? I don't see how "est." or "disest." makes any difference here. You can't see that there is a fundamental difference (next to fundamental similarities) between things which were diestablished in 1824 in what was then Denmark but is now Sweden, and things that were disestablished in 1824 in what was then Denmark and is now still Denmark? E.g. for abbeys, the ruins, the archeological remains, ... would not be situated in Denmark, they would be in Sweden. Fram (talk) 13:42, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
What is unclear: so where was it? That it is currently in Sweden suggests that it may not have been in Sweden when it was disestablished. --Dirk BeetstraTC 13:52, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
What do you mean, "we agree"? These would be useful parent cats, not actual cats. Readers don't get to articles using catscan, they use single cat trees to get there. Cat scan is not a tool used by average readers, suggesting this as a replacement for actual categories is not helpful. Fram (talk) 14:59, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, and how do you think that it is helpful to a reader who is looking for buildings/organisations that were originally in Denmark, and now in Sweden - this categorisation scheme is just historically unsound. And secondly, I wonder how many readers are really using categories to get to what they want. I really doubt that an average reader is looking for which buildings were disestablished in 1256 in Frisia (which they could not find .. because they are categorised in the Netherlands, or Germany, or even in Denmark) or looking for establishments in 1949 in Vatican City. --Dirk BeetstraTC 15:04, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
I hope that the average reader is not looking for 12th century castles in Sweden, or 12th century monasteries in Sweden, but only for 1536 disestablishments in Sweden. --Dirk BeetstraTC 15:13, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Is 'location' really a defining property of these (dis)establishments? --Dirk BeetstraTC 16:03, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
"In what way? How is a grouping of all disestablishments in England in 1536, 1537, ... "infanitile" and "of no historical value"? How is it "infantile" and "of no historical value" to have categories for all disestablishments in France during the years of the French revolution, or for the neighbouring countries like Italy in the next few years (when Napoleon rules there as well)? How is it "infantile" and "of no historical value" to note that immediately when Slovenia became a country (of sorts) in 1918, they established a "National Gallery"? Please explain your rather negative view, and please specify which elements you find "infantile" and so on. Would you get rid of all year by country categories, or is your comment targeted at specific subgroups?" Fram, you solicited opinion from WikiProject History. The utter decontextualisation present in these categories makes them of no historical purpose whatsoever. Apart from the attempt to produce nationalist ideologies in wikipedia, for example, pan Slovenianism; the simple fact is that these categories introduce specious specificity, fail to account for the actual establishment or disestablishment of institutions (that generally occurs across a spread of years, decades or centuries). If WikiProject Categories wants to play in a mudheap of juvenile and anhistoric antediluvianism then go ahead, but these categories have no justification in historiography and any pretence they claim to being of historical value should be utterly rejected in this discussion. Go read historiography if you want more details about why this is a false taxonomy that you're forcing onto historical articles. Fifelfoo (talk) 02:10, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
A comment on the accuracy of dates. In the past month I did some digging into articles that lacked a specific year. What I found is that if you take the time to find an exact year, you probably will succeed in maybe 50% of the cases. The more current the date the better your chance for success. I also observed that the decade categories had not been correct when you got the specific year for a number of these. My best guess would be around 5%, maybe less. So unless the decade categories serve a real purpose, I really wonder if they are worth keeping. They may actually facilitate sloppy research. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:18, 13 June 2012 (UTC)
I applaud this discussion taking place. I am the editor who started the establishments by year and country hierarchy back in 2010, and I have created the templates for years, decades, centuries and millennia (and I could note that this has recently been expanded with a separate set for the newly begun sub-hierarchy for states of the United States). Unfortunately I am unable to read the discussion taking place here. I'm no good at reading through long discussions.
I have previously proposed reform and formal guidelines for dealing with, certainly the establishments by country but all years by country categories in essence with regards to some of the problematic issues that are discussed in the introduction to this Rfc. __meco (talk) 21:53, 16 June 2012 (UTC)
Suggestion
Let me try to suggest a category tree and how that could be handled. Just a though experiment, maybe I am missing a significant part here.
In this, the top level categories are necessary, for US the tree goes down to year-level (for 2011 will easily hold >5 articles), for the Vatican City, the grain size stops at 21st century (which, at least for now will be small enough to be easily searchable).
Again, this only looks at this from one angle, one tree separately. The cat Category:2009 establishments in Vatican City currently also appears in the "2009 establishments by country" tree: your proposal would remove the article(s) from the bottom cat from that higher cat, the bottom cat also is part of "2009 in Vatican City" (and so a part of Category:2009 in Europe), but would in your proposal also be removed from that cat. So removing this cat would remove it from three different trees, not just one. How would you solve this? Fram (talk) 11:34, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Yes, in the same or similar way. "2009 in Vatican City" is part of "2000s in Vatican City", which would contain "2000s in Vatican City" (if it exists; otherwise, "2000s in Vatican City" is in "21st-century in Vatican City" which would very likely contain it"). A similar reasoning can be applied to "2009 in Europe". --Dirk BeetstraTC 11:41, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
As I think that you have been programming a pretty nifty template for these pages, adding such 'clauses' to these templates would already make that part work - Add a sentence like 'For countries or years that are not in this categorised here, please see <one level up category>'. --Dirk BeetstraTC 11:44, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
So, to avoid having too many categories, you would add more different categories to articles instead (i.e. in this example, instead of one bottom category, you would need three different categories in the article from higher up the three category trees). And the result of this would be that you get in e.g. "2009 establishment in Europe", you would (for example) get 30 country-specific categories, and then 20 articles directly in the cat, where the cat reader would have no idea from which country they are. How exactly would this be helpful? Fram (talk) 12:43, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Maybe you misunderstood the placement of the template, I mean the templates on the category-pages, e.g. {{Estcatbycountry}}. --Dirk BeetstraTC 13:21, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
You don't explicitly suggest adding more categories to a template, this is the result from your actual suggestion though, or else you clearly lose a lot of information. Any reason, in the 2009 example, why you would remove all "2009" establishment or in country cats from the page, and only keep a 21st-century one? Why not the cats "2009 establishments" and "2009 in Europe"? If you don't add these, your suggestion means that these pages can't be found from these relevant categories. This is a loss for the reader, with the only gain that a category tree would be shorter. Fram (talk) 13:48, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
I am afraid we are talking on different frequencies here. No. the 2009-establishment would point clearly up to 2000s, which would point up to 21st century. If 'C:2009-establishment-vatican' does not exist in the 'C:2009-establishments', 'C:2009-establishments'would still point up to 'C:2000s-establishments', which may have the 'C:2000s-establishments-vatican' - if it is not there, 'C:2000s-establishments' would again point up to 'C:21st-century-establishments' - which has 'C:21st-century-establishments-vatican' (with the pages in it). And the categories, implicit, ALREADY point up, I just suggest to make it more implicit. --Dirk BeetstraTC 14:10, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
So the effect would be: I am a reader somehow interested in what was established in Europe in 2009. I get e.g. 30 country-specific categories, and a pointer that the establishments in other European countries in 2009 can be found in the 21st century in Europe category, mixed with those from 2001, 2002, 2003, ... ? Again, what is the benefit of this? Fram (talk) 14:18, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
So, we get to the same conclusion as above: We agree on Category:2009 Establishments, we agree on Establishments in Vatican City. And the cross section of those will tell you what you need - I get however more and more convinced that the combination per year ánd country is maybe not working as it should. --Dirk BeetstraTC 14:55, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
As above, no, we hardly agree on anything except that it now is clear that you are indeed suggseting replacing one category in the article with multiple categories. Like I said above, suggesting Cat Scan as a replacement for actual categories is not really helpful for the average reader, the person we are doing this for. Fram (talk) 15:00, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
Well, I think that it is similarly clear that you insist in replacing multiple categories by one combination category which is (sometimes) historically unsound, and leads to a categorisation scheme that is unlikely used by an average reader. --Dirk BeetstraTC 15:05, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
I am composing a comment for this RFC but need time to write it so will reply later. Tim! (talk) 06:25, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
Starting from the top we have a series of year categories for example Category:2012. This needs some subcategories because it contains hundreds of articles and would be hard to navigate. There are two main types of subcategory here, things which happened in the year 2012, e.g. Category:2012 controversies and Category:2012 elections, and things which came into existence in 2012 (or ceased to exist) Category:2012 births, Category:2012 introductions. Some of the subcategories are further subdivided.
We then have a subcategory for 2012 by country e.g. Category:2012 in France which contains both things which happened in France in 2012 and things which came into existence Category:2012 establishments in France. I think it is a very important distinction between "things that happened" and "things that came into existence". Therefore I don't think you can move something from Category:2012 establishments in France into Category:2012 in France because there is a loss of meaning and ambiguity is created.
The next thing is to consider is that while 2012 is heavily populated, 1012 for example is sparsely populated. We won't need such a complicated breakdown for that year, but think we should maintain the distinction between "events" and "creations". The point between the two years where it stops being useful to break down by country is going to be different on a country by country basis. We know a lot of things that happened in England and other European countries in the 11th century, but almost nothing in African countries. I think there should be a point for each country where you decide to go to the higher levels of category, decades, centuries or even millennium, but I don't think it should be arbitrarily set. I am not too worried about sparsely populated categories , but think the categories should form a sequential series with only a few gaps. So if you have category for the year 1012 and then the next category not till 1612, it is not very useful. But if you had 1012, 1014, 1018, 1020 with a few articles in each, and a template that lets you jump to the years with content (these templates are in use), I think this provides a satisfactory navigational experience.
There will be some countries with a very small number of articles say for example Vatican City. I think if we have a recent year such as 2008, and when you look at Category:2008 by country almost every single country is represented, then it is not unreasonable to create 2008 in Vatican City with perhaps only 1 article in it. If it were 1008 and Category:1008 by country contains very few if any countries then it makes less sense.
The last point I want to make is that I think we should where possible, and it doesn't get too messy, we should stick to the name of the country matching the year in question. There are series for example Category:Years in the Thirteen Colonies, Category:Years in Great Britain and I think their meaning is very plain. I think a category like Category:1606 in the United Kingdom looks very odd and should be avoided. Tim! (talk) 18:10, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
I haven't mentioned continents, but think years by continent are useful there are many events especially in the modern era which are continent wide. They can also be useful if we decide not to create year categories for historical countries e.g. something like Southern Netherlands which may not correspond to a modern country's boundaries. Tim! (talk) 18:16, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
Status
Thanks for the responses. There haven't been many respondents, but that's hardly the fault of those who did take the time to comment of course...
There seems to be not a lot on which there is a clear consensus. From here and from other recent discussions (CfD), it seems that for recent years (say 19th-21st century, cats for every year and country combination (when populated) are mostly supported, with the caveat that for years before the existence of the current country, there is some disagreement (with e.g. North Ireland upmerged to Ireland, but Italy or Germany kept instead of being split into the earlier Länder or States).
Further back in time, there seems to be less of a consensus, apart from the fact that if there is little chance that a lot of years will get entries, it is better to have century cats instead (probably valid for most years pre BCE 1000). For roughly speaking the 11th to 18th century, things are less clear.
While not very heavily discussed, there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for the decade cats or for the millennia cats. Perhaps a separate RfC (or two massive CfDs) for those may be necessary to make sure that they indeed can go. Fram (talk) 08:48, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
Template:R from move has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. — Paine Ellsworth ( CLIMAX ) 09:36, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Moved from User talk:Jim.henderson
You are invited to join the discussion at Category talk:Year of birth missing (living people)#Privacy of personal information. -- Trevj (talk) 11:12, 5 July 2012 (UTC)