Wikipedia talk:Categorization

All included?

Should articles on rivers, towns etc. be all included in their base category, such as Category:Rivers of Maine and Category:Rivers of Cumberland County, Maine or just Category:Rivers of Cumberland County, Maine? It doesn't make sense to me that we should sort these further and still include them in a base category. Thoughts?--TM 14:39, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Generally once an article is included in a subcategory, that is sufficient. I guess rather then using both, the argument could be made that you don't need the subcategories. Vegaswikian (talk) 17:39, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

So it would be correct to include an article about a river in Cumberland County, Maine only in Category:Rivers in Cumberland County, Maine, not Category:Rivers in Maine and its county subcategory? User:Hmains created a category tree and has consistently fought my effort to simplify the categories and remove the state-level category when a county-level subcategory exists.--TM 11:51, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

For rivers, I would say that WP:DIFFUSE applies - if the river is categorised into Category:Rivers of Cumberland County, Maine, and that category is a member of Category:Rivers of Maine, the river shouldn't also be placed in Category:Rivers of Maine. If some of the counties in Maine don't have a "Rivers of xx County, Maine" category, the river can go directly into Category:Rivers of Maine until a subcat is created for the county.

However, similar matters have been brought up before, see this thread. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:22, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

It is highly unintuitive to only categorize rivers by county. Most readers would have no idea what counties a river passes through (and for most purposes, it is irrelevant. older ≠ wiser 13:40, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

• example a great example of "all included" is Category:Presidents of the United States - we want all presidents in there, even if some of them are in subcategories. "All included" is just another way of saying "All categories below should be treated as non-diffusing". There aren't any clear guidelines as to when this is or isn't a good idea. I think for rivers, it's probably fair to subdivide, unless the river crosses multiple counties - not clear on geography so not sure if that works or not.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 16:47, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

Article categories on Draft pages

I currently run a bot task that comments out article categories from user pages per WP:USERNOCAT. I would be happy to do the same for pages in the new Draft namespace. However, I don't see anything in this guideline that states article categories should not be added to pages in the Draft namespace. Should something be added to this guideline for the Draft namespace? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 13:37, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Would adding something like including pages in the draft namespace be sufficient? Vegaswikian (talk) 16:49, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Is there any reason to "comment out categories" rather than insert the initial colon ([[:Cat...)? Offhand I suppose it's easier for both humans and robots to perceive the latter when a page is moved to article space without category restoration. --P64 (talk) 17:25, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Unsure. Using the colon leaves the category visible in the article text, using a hidden comment hides it unless you edit the article. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:10, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

I remember reading that articles in draft namespace remain unacknowledged to the category system. Yes, confirmed, no categories. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 22:07, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

yes, only article space articles should be in article-space categories. I think commenting out is simply easier to do, and undo, than doing the whole colon trick. But if someone has already used the colons, I see no reason to change it to be commented out.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 13:13, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Limiting category moves

Now that the developers have added permission to move categories, we have evidence of regular users moving categories outside of process. Previous to this functionality existing in the system, regular users were not permitted to move categories. Thus, we should add some new text to this page to cover this case. In the meantime, we should probably start a formal RFC to get permissions to move categories restricted to admins, since there are very few cases I can think of where a regular user should be moving a category, and most can be covered by Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy anyway.

The text I propose is as follows. Feel free to edit it directly.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 13:22, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Proposal 1

Category moves
While the mediawiki software technically permits users to move categories, categories should not be moved without discussion and consensus at either Wikipedia:Categories for discussion or Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy. Any such category moves done out of process can be reverted on sight by any user. There are only a few exceptions:

1. Administrators can summarily delete categories that meet the General criteria at Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion. (Note: Admins should not unilaterally move categories unless a consensus has been reached at CFD or if a listing at CFD/Speedy was unopposed.)
2. Users are permitted to move categories without delay if the following criteria are met:

1. The move is performed by, or with the on-wiki consent of, the creator
2. The move is done within 28 days of the creation of the category
3. The category has no other edits or members added by other users

See WP:CSD#C2. Renaming or merging, subsection E for more details.

Proposal 1 Discussion

• support as nominator. This captures the longstanding consensus that categories should not be moved outside of CFD discussions, while giving a lightweight out to allow people to fix categories (move to a better name, or fix a typo) that they themselves have created, provided no-one else has edited them and the category hasn't been around that long. I think this strikes a proper balance. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 13:22, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
• Comment I think you should remove #2 and replace it with "Users are permitted to move categories if the move meets one of the criteria under WP:C2." Jackmcbarn (talk) 13:45, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Jack. Thanks; however, such "speedy" moves, such as to make a category more in line with the rest of the tree, are sometimes disputed. Thus, I think the only case where a user should make an undiscussed move is under subsection E, where they are the creator (or, I suppose, if the creator has given their consent). Going forward though, since it's unlikely all users will read this, the better solution is to simply limit the permissions.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 13:51, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

• I just wanted to note that MediaWiki now includes a move-categorypages permission (see gerrit:111096). There's been some discussion about restricting the right to certain user groups, but no consensus has been reached so far (see this AN conversation and bugzilla:65221). This may be a good opportunity to reach consensus. - Eureka Lott 14:08, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I'm aware of that. The purpose of this is just to encode in policy the long-standing consensus that users aren't supposed to move categories. A longer discussion needs to happen around whether we change this and give broader permissions to everyone, or only certain people. The developers rejected the idea of limiting this to admins in the meantime, unfortunately.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 14:11, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, but consensus was established before the feature was implemented. We have not established consensus to replace the existing consensus with the opinion of the developers. Vegaswikian (talk) 15:44, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

We never had consensus that only admins could move categories. The reason it's been longstanding that that's the case is that otherwise wasn't technically feasible. That's like saying that we have consensus that you shouldn't use edit summaries over 255 characters. Jackmcbarn (talk) 15:52, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Actually Jack this is not true at all. Users have NEVER been permitted to move categories, and as I noted before, if a user did so in the past using a redirect trick, or just creating a new category and moving all of the articles, they would have been reverted and sent to CFD, this has happened in the past.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 15:59, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Obi, you're missing the point. The only reason that users were "not permitted" to move categories when they were first used in 2004 (i.e., a couple of years before your first edits) is because it was impossible for them to do so. Nobody sat down and said, "Gee, I'd hate to have mere lowly editors move categories, so let's make sure that they can't". What actually happened was more like, "Ooops, we didn't plan for category pages to be moved at all, not even by admins". You're trying to turn "Ooops, the only way to 'move' a cat is to delete it entirely" into "there was a positive consensus to permit only admins to move cat pages", and this misrepresentation of the history just won't fly with anyone who was either around longer than you or is willing to take the time to search through the old page histories. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:27, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

frankly I don't care about 2004. I'm talking about the consensus in place as of April 2014 which was that users are not allowed to rename categories. Even without the technical ability to do a category move, a user could have affected a rename by creating a new category, moving all articles to the new category, and then attempting to delete the old category (say by tagging it as empty) When I've seen this happen, the changes have been reverted and the user was told to go to CFD. The only exceptions are when it was recently created by the user themselves and they were fixing a typo, which is an exception explicitly encoded above. The consensus around this is clear, you seem to be one of the few who doesn't get it. Such moves were disruptive before may, and continue to be disruptive.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 03:00, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

• Support There is no point giving all users the permission to do an action that should only occur by consensus. There is no larger benefit to rolling out this permission and any time saved by users like me fixing typos in category names will be swiftly eroded by the time it takes other users to fix undiscussed category moves. That said, I am in favour of giving all users the permission if we revolutionise the WP:Categories for discussion venue to match the arrangement we have for pages at WP:Requested moves. I think anything other than those two outcomes is a negative step. SFB 17:48, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
• Support, although I would word users #1 as "by, or with the on-wiki consent of, the creater..." - if a user nomiantes a category at CFD, and the author agrees to have it renamed, I see no reason for any user not to do it. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:09, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

refined as requested.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 19:13, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

• Support BMK (talk) 23:40, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
• Support in principle, but exception 2.1 rubs me the wrong way per WP:OWN: I categorically oppose granting special privileges to page-creators.—Odysseus1479 02:35, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

note:category creators have had the right to delete their creations within 28 days for a long time. There are also speedy criteria for deleting pages that only apply to creators. This is standard - the idea here is that the creator would know best the intent and could correct a typo or reframe their thinking, but limit in time so they don't tweak long established categories.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 04:40, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

• Support. This encodes the current consensus (which shouldn't have to be reencoded, but the WMF is Mother, the WMF is Father...) and establishes it clearly. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 07:28, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
• Support We need to reinforce the process that this "fix" has undermined. Timrollpickering (talk) 20:32, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose as written. I don't want a lot of people to mess around with moving cats. Caution is warranted. However, the 'exceptions' smack of WP:OWNership and WP:BUREAUcracy (don't you dare fix an obvious spelling or capitalization error in a cat name without a discussion!). The restriction on not moving cats applies to admins, too: Obi's proposal permits them to delete cats but not to move cats, unless they undertake a formal discussion.
  At the same time, I think that the proposal misses the more important point, which is that the bigger the cat (both in terms of the number of pages listed in it and its place in the cat tree), the more caution that is needed. Who cares if you fix a punctuation or spelling error in a cat name if only a dozen articles are affected, no matter who created it or when they created it? But if you're talking about moving Category:People to Category:Persons, or if you want to move a cat that has a thousand pages listed in it, then I don't care what your claim to owning it might be: you need to discuss that move.
  Also, did anyone pay attention to "Any such category moves done out of process can be reverted on sight by any user"? So you move a category, a bot changes the cats in a thousand pages to match your new name, I call a WP:BURO violation on you and move it back, and the bot goes forth and re-edits the thousand pages again. And flooding everyone's watchlists twice with our little move-war—and maybe a third time, if the discussion agrees with the first move—is supposed to prevent disruption? Spinach. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:41, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Your ignoring the fact that this is the process in effect today which actually works. You are also ignoring the fact that frequently 'obvious' changes get shot down when you have an open discussion. Given the number of articles potentially affected by these changes, discussion seems to be the wise on conservative choice to improve the change that we get it right the first time. Is there something to be gained by not following the established process? So far, there have been a number of reverts and probably some edit waring about this. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:57, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
    • What's written above is not the process in effect today. What's written above is carte blanche to move-war over moves that are done without jumping through the exact named bureaucratic hoops, without any regard at all to the damage this does to people's watchlists or the likely outcome of a CFD.
      I don't oppose limiting category moves in principle. I oppose the particular poorly written set of restrictions listed above, which focus on trivia (like preventing even admins from correcting typos: under this rule, a cat that qualifies for speedy deletion under WP:C2A because of a capitalization error may not be moved by an admin without a weeklong discussion at CFD. The admin may only "summarily delete" such cats Does that seem smart to you?) and ignore the bigger problems with category moves, like damaging the cat tree or repeatedly flooding people's watchlists. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:28, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

whatamidoing you are misunderstanding the state of things. Admins can delete cats that qualify for speedy deletion, not speedy renaming. They aren't the same criteria! Speedy deletion is for obvious BLP violations, patent nonsense, or empty categories, etc. Speedy renames are for several reasons - capitalizations, consistency, etc. and yes, our admins dutifully submit such renames to the CFD/speedy process, it's not a week long discussion it's a 48 hour listing that basically ensures at least one other set of eyes. As pointed out sometimes what may be obvious to one admin isn't so obvious, if it's contested it goes to a full discussion at CFD. I've seen, and even proposed, a number of seemingly simple fixes - eg capitalization, spelling, that were opposed and resisted and never ended up meeting consensus. The CFD process works right now, and I fear you misunderstand it hence your opposition. Finally you call it 'move war', this is not move war, this is simple BRD - reversion of undiscussed moves. I don't see editors doing this out of spite and reverting a category back to an obviously misspelled name in bad faith would be pointy, and I doubt anyone could defend themselves by saying 'but the rules!' An in any case, the same rules apply to undiscussed page moves, which can be reverted on sight by any editor. And stop worrying about watchlists or 'damaging' the category tree, what are you talking about? It's highly unlikely that someone would create a new category, add it to a thousand pages, and then decide to move it 6 months later to a name that was so wrong that someone else would decide to revert said move, leading to 1000 pages being changed on watchlists twice. A far more common outcome would be for someone to move a category, and for someone else to immediately (or shortly thereafter) revert, which wouldn't even leave time for the articles to be moved by the bot, thus no pings to the watchlists.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 03:00, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

• I like the fact that the history can be kept, but I don't think there was anything wrong with the process. Since even the bots had to handle the category moves, all this functionality should do is now allow the histories to remain intact - but its the bots that should perform the move following the CfD or speedy process. I suppose admins can be given this right but moving categories also involves moving all the individual pages within it, which is not handled automatically on a straight move. Whoever moves a category should be held responsible for changing the category in all the articles placed in it, too.
  • Scenario 1: I create a category with a misspelling and added a number of articles to it. I discover the misspelling almost immediately. This can taken to CfD-speedy but there's really no category history to maintain, so I should also be allowed to simply recreate the category with the correct spelling and fix the individual articles (which would have to be done anyway on a manual "move" of the category, so there is no saving of "labor" by an editor) It is just as simple to have the editor recreate the category in this case and blank the previous one ({{db-catempty}} or {{db-author}} can be applied}}).
  • Scenario 2: I come across a category that's existed for a while but has a not-so-common misspelling. No one has caught it before or it has just been left to survive as is. Other parent categories have been added or removed, descriptions changed, etc., so it has a significant history. If I've just come across this, should I simply be able to just move it? What if there are hundreds of articles within it? What if the entire category tree has the same similar mistake that I'm not paying attention to (a "drive by" move, say)? Maybe what I think is obviously incorrect is actually the way it's supposed to be. Either way, the process in place needs to be followed, and an editor shouldn't be allowed to move it on their own. Through process, the bot will handle the change and the history will stay intact upon being moved. --Starcheerspeaksnewslostwars^{Talk to me} 15:21, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Star. Yes, one purpose of the above is actually to explicitly add permissions for users to do moves like scenario 1. Yes you could also recreate and delete and reapply, but if you had already tagged a number of articles you could just move it and then the bot would handle the rest once the redirect was in place. And I agree, on scenario 2, you need more than your set of eyes - that's what CFD/Speedy and CFD are for.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 16:40, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I will support. Already dealing with an out-of-process mess by the move of Category:Led Zeppelin songs to Category:Led Zeppelin songs and instrumentals. I hope something gets done here because this is going to cause a lot of headaches. --Starcheerspeaksnewslostwars^{Talk to me} 04:33, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Fixed that Led Zeppelin one for you, Starcheer. Wow, what a perfect example of the havoc that can result from well-intentioned but ultimately non-consensus-based category moves! Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 10:23, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

• Support. Seems reasonable, and reflects previous consensus on the related issues. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 21:58, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Issue

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.

---

It would be very appreciated if anyone who habituates this talk page might have a look at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive842#User effecting major category changes for biographies - satusuro 14:00, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

I swear it wasn't me who habituated this talk page, it was my little brother. BMK (talk) 19:52, 3 June 2014 (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.

Category suggestion

Couldn't find where to suggest a new category, but after looking at stuff like Motorways in London, Transport in Staffordshire, and Constituent roads of European route E30, I think we need a category for Roads with a reversible lane. As seen in the article, there are many roads all around the world, as well as bridges, tunnels, etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.65.102.177 (talk) 22:37, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

I think you should try Wikipedia:Article wizard/Category - it gives you a way t make a precise request for what you want, and allow users to review it. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:40, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Change proposals to WP:COP#N relating to WP:DEFINING

WP:COP#N is that part of the Wikipedia:Categorization of people guideline that talks about categorizing biographies along lines of notability and definingness.

Several changes to this part of the WP:COP guideline have been proposed. Input welcome!

Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Categorization of people#Proposed language change to WP:COP#N

--Francis Schonken (talk) 06:36, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Categorization advice

I've recently started adding the Category:Fungus genera to relevant articles. As there are many 1000s of genera, this cat will soon become unwieldy, so I'd like to make it more manageable by make fungus genera categories specific for each fungus order. Should the parent cat of Category:Agaricales genera by Category:Agaricales or Category:Fungus genera? Would like some advice on how best to organize this before I start making 100s of changes. Sasata (talk) 19:11, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Biology categorization is usually based on biological taxonomy systems - I'd suggest bringing the discussion to a WikiProject about biology or similar, then if there are questions once you've developed an approach, bring them here for broader categorization advice.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 20:12, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Exceptions to the rule that members of subcategories should always fit into the supercategories they inherit

@Hyacinth and Obiwankenobi: I'm afraid I don't understand this edit summary. Under what circumstances should a page belonging in category X be allowed not to fit into the supercategories of X? Lacking any further information, I would understand this as a sign that the subcategory has not been properly categorized. Frankly, I'm baffled. Paradoctor (talk) 20:05, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Categories aren't really like mathematical sets. for example, Bibliothèque municipale de Nancy is in Category:Buildings_and_structures_in_Nancy,_France which is in Category:Buildings_and_structures_in_France_by_city which is in Category:Cities_in_France. But the Biblotheque is clearly not a city in France. This sort of inconsistency abounds here. Generally we try to keep it clean one level up, but even that isn't always possible - there are sometimes entries in the subcategory that wouldn't really perfectly fairly fit in the parent - this is the case for example all across the Category:Ireland tree, where many items have dual parenting of UK and Ireland (due to the complex nature of the politics there). Thus, it's much better to leave that flexibility in, and leave people's judgement to decide when adding a super category that supports 99% of the content is reasonable, or not.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 20:15, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Yep.

If we were to treat categorization as an exact tree-like hierarchy (like a phylogenetic tree) instead of a network of relationships, it would be impossible to have a single integrated category system because the whole universe of topics just don't relate in that way, and we'd just have a lot of confused readers who couldn't find the articles they were looking for. The purposes of grouping related articles and aiding reader navigation trump any strict classification. I've never encountered anyone honestly confused about whether the Eiffel Tower is a member state of the EU despite its placement deep down in that structure (Eiffel Tower -> Cat:Landmarks in France -> Cat:Visitor attractions in France -> Cat:Economy of France -> Cat:France -> Cat:Member states of the European Union), though there has been the occasional editor who nevertheless complains that this violates some kind of conceptual consistency that ultimately has no relevance or practical value in this context. postdlf (talk) 20:46, 28 June 2014 (UTC)