This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:Categorization. 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.
The navigation buttons are not working appropriately on Category pages. For example: in Category:Upcoming films, when clicking Next page, it jumps to entries beginning with F. This is not what the url says, but it skips over 16 articles that started with E. You can see them if you adjust the url to start the pagefrom argument with D. Is anyone else having this issue? Is there a solution known to fix this? BOVINEBOY200810:18, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
procedure makes the category tree worse, both coming and going
“
Templates are not articles, and thus do not belong in content categories.
”
With no explanation, this one sentence labels most categories as article-only categories for no reason related to the five pillars, that I can imagine. Since most possible types of template-specific categories would have one or fewer templates in them (if were to exist) there are rightly very few template-specific categories, but if you try to keep templates out of all the other categories, it defeats the whole purpose of the categories system: to help users find things.
When looking for a templates in the category tree, allowing templates in normal categories would make it much much more possible for users to find the template they are looking for. But when looking for articles and other non-templates in the category tree, allowing templates in normal categories also does not hinder users from finding the articles they are looking for. Rather, it very likely that having templates in the category tree would make it even easier to find articles you are looking for, since that is also the purpose of many templates. This procedure makes the category tree a worse tool, both coming and going. tahcchat18:16, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
I agree. Discovering a subject-related template if that template is not allowed to be in that subject's category is almost impossible. There's got to be another way of dealing with category pollution caused by user boxes, which, according to the above seems to be the driving motive here. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:59, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
There are two types of Wikipedia users, readers (who read Wikipedia but do not edit) and editors. As I understand it, article categories are for the benefit of readers, so shouldn't contain material that is for editors' use only. Readers shouldn't be viewing templates in isolation, they should see them only when transcluded into an article. So templates themselves aren't directly part of the encyclopedia, they become part only when transcluded, and therefore belong in maintenance categories. At least I think that's the logic. -- Dr Greg talk 02:21, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
I can't see why readers would be confused/upset/disadvantaged if a subject category would contain, at the end under τ or Τ (tau), some templates related to that subject. Readers are not in any way restricted from viewing pages in non-article space. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 07:10, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
I agree, there has to be a way to include templates in categories without confusing non-editor readers, even if we assume the category tree is be for non-editor readers. None the less, think these readers very rarely use the category system, and I would consider the category system to be mostly for editors. tahcchat20:09, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
Just seeing this thread now. I raised this same issue here in September; see Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 17#Template categories as subcategories of content categories. I'm in agreement with tahc and Michael Bednarek. I think we'd be better off with templates and categories for templates integrated into the main category tree at the subject level. "Templates are not articles, and thus do not belong in content categories" isn't much of rationale. Images aren't articles either, and yet we see them integrated into the main tree. Compare Category:Images of Colorado to Category:Colorado templates. Only the image category rolls up into Category:Colorado. What's also misleading is Wikipedia:SORTKEY, which defines "τ" (tau, displays as "Τ") is for templates". I see that andrybak has recently added an addendum to this line reading "Keep in mind, template categories should not be added to content categories per WP:CAT#T." When and where is the tau sort key supposed to be used then? Jweiss11 (talk) 04:05, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
Oppose - Placing template categories under topic/content/article categories would have negative effects that imo outweigh the convenience for some editors of the direct link it would create. E.g. it would prevent the use of category tools to detect templates placed in topic categories and it adds complexity to categorization. If a direct link is "needed" it can be done by placing a link in category text. If we place Category:Foobar_templates under Category:Foobar then we'll probably have other editors wanting Category:WikiProject_Foobar, Category:Foobar_redirects, Category:Foobar_portal, Category:Wikipedians_interested_in_foobar etc placed in the topic category for their convenience. DexDor(talk)19:10, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
Please detail what is meant by "templates placed in topic categories" and indicate what is meant by "it would prevent the use of category tools..." Which "category tools" would be prevented from use?
Your comment on that "a direct link... can be done by placing a link in category text" is also opaque. How and why would we train everyone to mention template in the category text, when in every other case we train people to not use the category tree that way. tahcchat19:22, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
Templates have 'always' been in topic categories until very recently, sorted under 'tau'. I see that the present wording was inserted in essence in 2014; such edits ought really to link to some related discussion. Oculi (talk) 01:37, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
Oculi templates or categories for templates still remain in topic categories in many places for sports in North America, e.g. Category:Michigan Wolverines football navigational boxes. I focus predominantly on American college sports here on Wikipedia. Until I was informed otherwise a few weeks ago, I thought the consensus/standard was to include templates in topic categories. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:55, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
I support the inclusion of templates and template categories in topic categories. Because there is a rule, I don't revert if I see someone else removing them, but when I come across them, I don't remove them myself, because I consider it a useful way to find them. – FayenaticLondon15:37, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
Maybe an example should be added for islands in that Isle of Wight is sorted as "Wight, Isle of" when referring to the island but as "Isle of Wight" when the referring to the county/district, Isle of Mull is a good example of one that doesn't have this variation. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:01, 5 November 2020 (UTC)
Good idea. It makes sense, as Mull is just called Mull, unlike IoW. "Isle of Mull" is used as the page name chiefly for disambiguation. – FayenaticLondon15:44, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
The point was about prefixes that are included in geographical names such as rivers and islands, Isle of May is also sorted as "May" even though that doesn't appear to be just "May" often similarly Isle of Whithorn isn't sorted under "Whithorn" except for the former islands category. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:35, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
OK, I've added the examples but not the Isle of Whithorn example for a settlement since that might confuse people since it was once an island. An example of a settlement with such a prefix should probably be added. Crouch, Swale (talk) 19:31, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
"Should I create Category "Childless with the sub-categories "Childfree", and "Involuntary Childlessness" or "Infertility" ?
I have never created a category and feel a bit overwhelmed browsing all the category help pages. So how should I go about creating, naming and branching these topics? In advance : thanks. － Cy21 ➜ discuss10:42, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
I'm not sure this is an encyclopedic topic. Relatively few people, past or present, have "childlessness" as part of the reason they are notable, nor is it something that "most readers would care to know" like gender or age.
That said, if there are a significant number of notable people where the state of being childless is something people would want to know or it's relevant to the reason they are notable, I'm willing to listen.
Also, because this information may be "out there" as "gossip" for a lot of celebrities and those same celebrities may consider their or their spouse's infertility a private medical matter, WP:BLP considerations need to be taken into account. In other words, the mere existence of these categories would be an invitation to use them, and it is likely that they would be used in ways that caused harm to living people without any real benefit to Wikipedia readers. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 15:53, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
It is defining, mostly for philosophers and writers : There is Category:Anti-natalists which is somewhat an "extreme" Childfree ideology. As for "Childless", the struggles of unsuccessful child births can be seen echoed in their writings. Also, I think there's an important distinction to make between having an ideology and putting them to practise, this is where having the category would be useful. Of course, the category childfree can only be applied to those who have clearly stated so.
Now that I think of it, there are people who support and advocate for a childfree life, that would have liked to be childfree, but they only found out after having children. Hence "Childfree" should not be a sub-category of "childless". － Cy21 ➜ discuss20:05, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
It is not a question of age but opinion. There are some living childfree personas like celebrities and those part of the VHE movement. But there are also many passed people, like Arthur Schopenhauer who was a famous childless anti-natalist. － Cy21 ➜ discuss20:05, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Edit: I should add that anti-natalists (against creating more "suffering beings") and childfree (we have a choice/one does not have to have babies.) do not agree with each other. (and VHEH is childfree, definitely not anti-natalist). － Cy21 ➜ discuss20:41, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
The quality of being voluntarily or involuntarily childless will not be good material for a category. As you put it yourself, this covers many unrelated situations. However, people explicitly members of an identifiable movement, such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, can definitely be gathered in a category. Place Clichy (talk) 21:37, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Thank you ! So just one : Category:Childfree. (So much simpler! I probably shouldn't have looked at the LGTB categories as model.) － Cy21 ➜ discuss09:09, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
A few editors and I have had some discussions about the categorization structure and relationship between four different category types that categorize according to various countries/origins:
The central issue is how category types 1–3 should relate to type 4.
Question 1: Should 1–3 be subcategories of 4?
In favour—having a parent–child relationship between the four categories eases category navigation between subjects that are closely related. For example, France has an interest in expatriates of France being in Germany, and this interest and concern will affect the bilateral relationship between the two countries. In opposition—perhaps the connection is too tenuous or not universally relevant.
Question 2: Should #2 and/or #3 be a subcategory of #1?
In favour—a "BARian emigrant to FOO" is clearly (by definition almost) "of BARian descent", and they could be said to be a "FOOian person" insofar as "FOOian person" can mean a "person from FOO". In opposition—it could be argued that a "BARian person" is not of "BARian descent". Or that "FOOian" means nationality (or even citizenship), and that a person does not necessarily obtain nationality upon emigration. (Complicating the issue is that citizenship and nationality are two separate but related concepts—a person can be a national of a country but not be a citizen, such as in permanent residency.)
I am not unbiased in my opinion. I think that the answer to both questions is "yes", mainly for ease of navigation between these topics. As long as category types 1–3 exist (and there are good arguments that they should not), I do not think we should be overly strict in applying a relationship between them all for what are at best fuzzy concepts. But, I am interested in getting a wider discussion going on these issues. Good Ol’factory(talk)02:25, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
Weakly, yes and yes. I'm pretty concerned about Category:French expatriates in Germany, my sample of which (Francois to Lefebre) consisted entirely of French people born in Germany, where their parents were "expatriates" for work - in the sense I understand the word, who returned to France while the children were still very young. It seems ridiculous that General de Gaulle's daughter (born during a 2-year army posting) is in there but he is not! Johnbod (talk) 03:28, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
I think this is a pragmatic question. Relations between Britain and Ireland are affected by migration. Relations between Britain and Estonia arent. Most expatriate categories are dominated by sportspeople. I dont see how they affect relationships between governmentsRathfelder (talk) 08:50, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
Those "relations" categories' parent category is Category:Bilateral relations and its main topic Bilateralism says "bilateralism is the conduct of political, economic, or cultural relations between two sovereign states", so those "relations" categories may also contain something that's not directly about goverments/politics; i.e. also content about economic or cultural (sports = culture) relations between two countries. 87.95.206.253 (talk) 13:29, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
BARian emigrants to FOO are not the same as FOOish people of BARian descent. Most emigrants do not take on the nationality of their host country. FOOish people of BARian descent are generally the children of migrants. If they do become FOOish that should be dealt with in the article, not by mass categorisation. As far as categorisation is concerned FOOish people is about nationality, not location. Rathfelder (talk) 08:50, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
"Most emigrants do not take on the nationality of their host country". Don't they? Most emigrants I would think become permanent residents in the new country – if they do not, they generally cannot stay in the country. A permanent resident is a national of the country that they live in. Nationality does not equal citizenship. FOOian categories in Wikipedia have always categorized to refer to nationality, not citizenship: Category:People by nationality, etc., not Category:People by citizenship. Good Ol’factory(talk)23:03, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
In practice nationality and citizenship are pretty interchangeable concepts in day to day terms. e.g. in my passport the heading "Nationality/Nationalité" has the entry "British Citizen". And Permanent residency is another concept. I know a lot try to create rules here that split hairs but often that does not reflect day to day usage of the terms in the sources. Timrollpickering (talk) 23:19, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
In common usage they are often interchangeable, but at international law permanent residents are nationals of the state in which they reside. A person can live in one country and be a citizen of a second. They are a national of both. If the intent is to limit the nationality categories to citizens, then they should be renamed. Anyhow, this is getting a bit into the weeds and is not that important – I'd much rather just address the questions posed. What should be the categorization relationship between these 4 types of category? Good Ol’factory(talk)23:50, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
I think this discussion needs a legal advisor. Nationality and citizenship law is complex and varies from country to country and over time. It is completely untrue to say that "in international law permanent residents are nationals of the state in which they reside." There is no applicable international law. In the UK and Europe it is quite possible for foreign nationals to live for 50 years in a country of which they are not citizens. Rathfelder (talk) 00:05, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
Surprise—I am an international lawyer. There is some international law on point. [...further explanation removed...] I'm much more interested in how we deal with the questions as posed. If users want to answer question 2 as "no", that's fine. I think it's much more conducive to a categorization system to assume that "FOOian person" simply means a "person from FOO". Being from somewhere is defining; having a particular nationality, maybe not. And an emigrants to BAR is certainly from BAR. But I'm pretty sure this is a minority view. Good Ol’factory(talk)00:23, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
The way we handle this, as I understand it, and these seem to be conventions rather than policies, is that FOOish people generally refers to nationality. But to say a person comes "from" a city or region is just about location. So plenty of People from London are not British citizens. British people are supposed to be British citizens, even if they are not in the UK. I think these conventions are too well embedded to remove. Rathfelder (talk) 19:23, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
I agree, though things are complicated by the fact that Category:People from London is, ultimately, a subcategory of Category:British people. If we allow for that sort of flexibility – essentially for ease of navigation and ease in finding things – I think that these sorts of loose parent–child relationships should also be allowed, for ease if navigation and ease in finding things. That's essentially what I'm suggesting. Good Ol’factory(talk)04:44, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Question 1: Yes. Ideally, these would be altogether in a category called BARian diaspora in FOO (e.g. Category:Russian diaspora in Germany) or in some cases BARian FOOian society (e.g. Category:European-American society, emphasized by thic CfD started by Fayenatic london which was unfortunately not yet extended to the subcategories). That way, they do not clog the parent BAR–FOO relations category. To refine even more how I usually structure these categories when I come upon them, there is often a BARian ambassadors in FOO category as a child of the expatriates category (which is correct). As an exception to WP:SUBCAT, I consider that the Ambassadors category deserves to be placed directly in the FOO-BAR relations category in addition to being a 3rd-level child through Relations→Diaspora→Expatriates→Ambassadors precisely because they manage the diplomatic relationship and have therefore a direct and defining link to it.
Question 2: Yes for emigrants (#2) but No for expatriates (#3).Emigrants to Foo are Fooian people while expatriates to Foo are not. Indeed the very difference between an emigrant and an expatriate is that they make the new country their permanent place of living. Place Clichy (talk) 19:22, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Yes and Yes (but not for expatriates). Simply because it is useful for them to be for navigation purposes. Which is, after all, what categorisation is all about. Being pedantic about the terminology doesn't help Wikipedia. If someone moves to a country permanently, whether they take citizenship or not, then they effectively become Fooian people. One of my pet peeves is them being directly under Fooian people by Fooian descent, but I have no problem with the emigrant category being under it for navigational purposes. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:26, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
Q1: Yes — it makes some sense as a parent category, although perhaps renaming #4 "relationships".
Q2: No — this is one of my pet peeves in recent trends. Nobody who is naturally born BAR should ever be in "BARian descent". Heck, the parentage could be an entirely difference BAZ. That is, the parents move from BAZ to BAR, where the child is born, who then moves to FOO.
Also we should prohibit grandparentage. That used to be in the formal guideline restrictions, but was removed sometime in the past decade. It's made a terrible mess with so much fractional heritage categorization. Especially descent based upon names, where the names may very well be a century or two ago.
Proposal for bot to populate the size of categories over time
My proposal is to have a configurable bot that keeps track of the size of categories over time, such that you can create charts like {{Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Backlog chart}}. You can then display these at the top of the category page or in a WikiProject, for example to invite editors to help reduce backlogs and to show off your progress. It doesn't have to be for backlogs, either. For instance we could have a chart showing the growth of Category:All WikiProject Women in Red pages over time.
How it works
Administrators can add new categories to the bot's configuration page. I've created User:MusikBot/CategoryCounter/config as an example. Each entry should have the category name, granularity ("daily", "weekly" or "monthly"), and the title of wherever the data should be stored (probably a subpage of the chart template). There is also a 'cutoff' option, which specifies the number of days after which the dataset should be truncated (so older data is removed as new data is added). This may be necessary especially for the "daily" granularity because after several years the dataset can become too large.
The bot would go off of this category to populate another JSON page with the data, for example Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Backlog chart/daily. You can then make charts that display this data, such as with Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Backlog chart. The bot won't create the chart for you, only populate the data, however there will be thorough documentation on how to set it all up.
Any concerns?
Does the above system make sense? Any thoughts or concerns? I thought about using templates as some archiving bots do, but this is a fairly fragile system compared to JSON, and I'd prefer administrators maintain the configuration so as to prevent additions of very small categories that unnecessarily strain the system. That said, getting the size of a category is a pretty cheap query, so I imagine we could have many hundreds if not thousands of categories set up before the bot would run into scaling problems. If the bot ever does break or stops running, the dataset pages can still be manually edited (by anyone) and the chart will update accordingly.
This is a great idea. Would you consider adding Template Editors to the group of editors who are allowed to modify the configuration? Template Editors are entrusted with modification of tricky code that is sometimes transcluded in tens of thousands of pages, and it seems to work pretty well. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:26, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
@Jonesey95: That seems fine, but historically with my bots the config pages have lived as subpages of User:MusikBot, meaning they are automatically sysop-protected. But we could find a different home for this one, I suppose. — MusikAnimaltalk05:29, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
Sounds great! Thanks again for volunteering to put this together. I'm happy to watch the page to help folks add categories and setup the charts. I assume any enterprising category historian could manually add historical data once the bot makes the JSON page? Ajpolino (talk) 05:40, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
@Ajpolino: Yes precisely. If you use the same format (like Template:Articles lacking sources chart/data), you can add as many data points as you want – with caution that sporadic or fewer data points might make the chart look odd. The whole data page can be edited freely. The bot merely adds a new one on the bottom at the frequency you tell it to. — MusikAnimaltalk05:47, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
For example, this biography: [1]. Had about 25 categories, and an IP added 10 more. Should we try to limit the # of categories to a certain number, or should we always add a person to the categories that they fit into? –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:48, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
One issue is that editors often disagree about whether a particular category is “defining” or not. Indeed, a particular category can be “defining” when applied to one subject, but not for a different subject. Blueboar (talk) 17:09, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
It is pretty ridiculous, but he gets a head start by being able to claim two nationalities and two centuries. With the hidden cats (many for clean-up), he must have about 50. Johnbod (talk) 19:02, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
Someone should build a "Category sanitiser" tool that would automatically detect redundant categorisations like this one. – SD0001 (talk) 08:18, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
Its hard to see how we could enforce a numerical limit. There are some people who really are notable in a lot of ways. There are a lot more who are over categorised.Rathfelder (talk) 23:53, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
The "defining characteristics" rule seems to be widely ignored — or perhaps I don't understand it. I've included two examples below. My point is not to litigate particular cases of categorization in these examples, but to try to clarify the rule.
Defining category? — Jeffrey Epstein
For example, I'm not sure how Category:Jeffrey Epstein is supposed to work. Many of the articles categorized under it are clearly related to Epstein and unproblematic: TV series about him, properties he owned, people primarily known as his accusers, etc.
But others are only tangentially associated with him: Eva Andersson-Dubin's relationship with him is that she dated him and socialized with him; Leon Black used him as a financial advisor and put him on his charity's board; Peggy Siegal worked as a publicist for him; Space Relations is a novel that supposedly inspired his crimes.
Then there are several people who were named by Virginia Roberts Giuffre as "participants" in Epstein's sex trafficking scheme with whom she was "directed to have sex" (Jean-Luc Brunel, Glenn Dubin, George J. Mitchell, Bill Richardson). Giuffre's allegations are of course shocking, but so far they are just uncorroborated allegations by one person, these people deny them, and in fact she didn't even allege that she had sex with these people — the deposition was about the actions of Ghislaine Maxwell. It may well turn out that all these people are guilty of horrible crimes, but in the meantime, adding them to the Jeffrey Epstein category functions primarily as a sort of character assassination by association. It seems quite a stretch to say that these allegations are a "defining characteristic" of these people.
Defining category? — Christmas food
Category:Christmas food certainly includes some foods which are specifically associated with Christmas, such as Christmas cookies and panettone, but also a long list of things which are consumed on Christmas, but also on many other occasions, in a variety of cuisines.
In what way is apple pie "defined" as a Christmas food? — the article don't even mention Christmas. Chicken and dumplings doesn't even say it is a holiday food, let alone specifically a Christmas food; the same for nut (food). Apple cider is mentioned as traditional for various winter holidays, among which Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas — does that make "Christmas food" a "defining characteristic"? Kourabiedes in Greek cuisine are popular for all special occasions, not just Christmas. King cake with a fève inside is generally served for the Christian holiday of Epiphany (holiday) (also known as "the twelfth day of Christmas") — is that enough to associate them with Christmas foods? The Menudo (soup) article mentions menudo as traditional for wedding receptions and for hangovers, and "in the 1930s, among migrant workers in Arizona, menudo parties were held regularly to celebrate births, Christmas, and other occasions" — can we really say that being a Christmas food is a defining characteristic of menudo because it was a celebratory food among some Mexican migrant workers in the 1930s? Sarma (food) (sarmale) is apparently served year-round, but "especially for holidays like Christmas and Easter" in Romania; but in the rest of the formerly Ottoman world where they are widely eaten, they have no special association with Christmas. And so on.
How specific does the association between a food and Christmas have to be before it is a "defining characteristic" of the food?
It seems to me that the minimal criterion to be mentioned as a "Christmas food" is that some reliable source should explicitly say that it is "common" or "traditional" or "characteristic" of Christmas specifically, not just that it is served on many holidays. Beyond that, I'm not sure what "defining category" means. How broadly known does the association have to be?
Its a matter of judgement. No easy answers. But you can be bold and remove the ones you think are not defining. For a start if there is nothing in the article that merits it - like apple pieRathfelder (talk) 11:21, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
@Spudlace and Rathfelder: I'd rather not be bold here, because another editor (User:Spudlace) has been systematically adding these categories, and I have no intention of edit warring with them. We need a clearer definition to work off. For example, we currently have 248 articles categorized under Category:Christmas food, including such common foods and dishes as bread pudding, trifle, stuffing, apple pie, biscuit (bread), pickled herring, etc. etc. which are no doubt served for Christmas and other holidays in some families, but are not "defined" primarily as Christmas foods as far as I know. Heck, in some families, wine and gravy are served primarily at holiday meals, whereas in others, they are common daily foods. If the association with a given holiday is restricted to some families, some region, or some group, how can we possibly say that it is an essential, defining characteristic? --Macrakis (talk) 17:53, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
Its a matter of judgement. No easy answers. And as far as Category:Christmas food no doubt varies from place to place and time to time. But I generally remove categories if there is nothing in the article to justify them. There should be evidence to justify categories, not just the opinion of an editor. Rathfelder (talk) 17:59, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
I didn't add the cat Macrakis. The "Christmas food" category was added to apple pie by an ip editor on 23 August 2020 [3]. The next several edits were vandalism. If you don't want to remove it yourself, one of us will do it, because there is nothing in the article about it. Spudlace (talk) 18:23, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
This discussion is about the general principle, not specific examples. As I say above, I'd like to see some clear consensus on the definition.
But if you want to talk about holiday cats that you have added, here are some examples:
No doubt there are reliable sources with holiday menus including these foods, but does that make them defined as holiday foods? --Macrakis (talk) 18:51, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
@Macrakis: as various editors have pointed out, it's a judgment call. But if you break it down from the description at WP:DEFCAT, you can see that it's something "that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having". How can we know if it does or doesn't? By checking reliable sources. Google books and scholar are good sources for this; you can also use the {{find sources}} template to generate a bunch of links that might help, for the "apple pie" example:
If you look through those links, do the sources commonly and consistently describe apple pie as a Christmas food? If so, then you have some support for adding Category:Christmas food to the article Apple pie; if not, then it would be better to avoid it, or at least, raise an issue at Talk:Apple pie, and see what other editors think.
One thing to be careful of if you execute your own searches, is to avoid WP:CHERRYPICKING. If you search for what you are trying to find, the internet is a big place, and you are going to find it; for example: are Rutabagas a Christmas food? This search would seem to say yes; but that is a cherrypicked search; because it includes both search terms, it's going to find them, no matter how unusual or rare the combination might be. But that violates the "common and consistent" part of the criterion; so, don't do that. Instead, search just for "rutabaga", and then click the top ten results, and look for the term "Christmas food" in any of those rutabaga articles, to see how common it is. You can use {{Find sources}} again:
Oops—no mention at all of "Christmas food" in the top ten results? That means that "rutabaga" is not commonly and consistently described as a "Christmas food", therefore, should probably not be categorized that way. You could also flip the search around: what foods are listed under "Christmas foods":
^Technical note: If you use {{Find sources}} be aware that the default version of this template executes a quoted search, which means it searches for the exact phrase you enter. This works adequately for one- or two-word searches; but the longer the search query is, the less likely you will find an exact match. For longer article titles or search expressions, use a 'complex search' as described in the documentation.
Request for comment on the naming of Category:Faculty by university or college and its subcategories
None of the categories "Sportspeople from …" are marked with Template:Non-diffusing subcategory, no? So why should they? Apart from what's mentioned at WP:DUPCAT, there are no general rules, but there are of course oodles of categories that are marked as non-diffusing. I don't know the process that determines that. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:29, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
For those who don't hang out at Template talk:Title year, I've created some new templates that will hopefully be useful to editors working on categories - {{Title year+1}}, {{Title year-1}}, {{Title year2range}}, {{Title year2range+1}} and {{Title year2range-1}}, the latter using the new {{Year2range}} template. I've also fixed {{Copycat}} so it works off the sidebar again, and it now looks for year ranges as well (although doesn't work quite the same way for them). I've been on a Wikibreak for a bit so I don't think I thanked Pppery for sorting out all the safesubsts on Copycat, I'd got as far as thinking that safesubst might be useful but the documentation was particularly opaque! Le Deluge (talk) 00:12, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
Subcategorization of erotic photographers and pornographic actors
Removing Category:fooian photographers as parent to Category:fooian erotic photographers is clearly against the principles of WP:SUBCAT. Helpfulwikieditoryay's remark, "I'd rather be correct than just take mob rule", doesn't bode well. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:36, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
You don't put British writers under British people, because British people is not for listing out occupations. There is a British people by occupation category under British people. Similarly, you don't put British pornographic actors under British actors, because British actors is not for listing out genres. You would put that in British actors by genre. British actors by genre can go under British actors. We need to go parent-child. Not grandparent-child. Helpfulwikieditoryay (talk) 04:53, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
British writers are British people and are so categorised, via Category:British people by occupation. Not having Category:American photographers by genre doesn't mean that American erotic photographers are not American photographers. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:33, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
On substance, erotic photographers are photographers, and pornographic actors are actors. They need to be categorized as such per the categorization guidelines, as well as in the correct geographical which were also removed by these edits. A self-imposed noble cause of cutting off the racy stuff from the tree falls in direct contradiction with WP:Wikipedia is not censored, part of a Wikipedia policy.
The BOLD, revert, discuss cycle is appropriate at this stage. Helpfulwikieditoryay made a number of bold edits, which is encouraged, was reverted and invited to join discussion first on their talk page and now on the present general discussion. I hope that these discussions will help us reach (or repeat) consensus. However the editor should be warned that new attempts to repeat edits that have been reverted by several editors and while a discussion is in progress amount to WP:edit warring, for which a policy may result in having them blocked from editing. Place Clichy (talk) 08:47, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
Agree - he has now started on subs of Category:Printmakers with equally dire results, completely removing from the tree people with no appropriate national sub-category. He should be banned from making category edits at all, something we are much too slow to do. No doubt he means well, but that does not reduce the damage. Johnbod (talk) 13:34, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
Please don't ask for users to be banned over minor disagreements. I wouldn't be able to work on wikipedia at all if I was prevented from something so important. I wouldn't be able to create full articles and the articles would be left incomplete. It's crazy that you are asking for someone to be banned over this. Edits like mine are very common on wikipedia (and have not had complaints), hence why I did them in the first place. I haven't asked for you to be banned. Helpfulwikieditoryay (talk) 03:05, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
User:Helpfulwikieditoryay created yesterday Category:Lohengrin and started populating it. It's not clear what the scope of that category might be. However, it is clear, given the category's members, that the original categories of that category were inappropriate:
So I removed them and added Category:Wikipedia categories named after people instead. Helpfulwikieditoryay then partly reverted my edit, re-adding Category:Operas by Richard Wagner and Category:German-language operas, and freshly adding Category:Libretti by Richard Wagner; omitting "Wikipedia categories named after people". Those opera-related categories apply to 2 members of that category, and place 9 other entries in utterly wrong parts of the category tree. (Neuschwanstein Castle and Ludwig II of Bavaria are now operas and libretti?) I suggest that Helpfulwikieditoryay needs some tutoring in how categories work on Wikipedia. Further, the rationale of Category:Lohengrin might be worth discussing, too. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:48, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
WP:OCEPON refers to the guidance at WP:SEPARATE: Keep people categories separate: categories with a title indicating that the contents are people should normally only contain biographical articles and lists of people, and perhaps a non-biographical main article}. This would seem to be a good reason to not include an eponymous cat like Category:Celine Dion under a "people category" like Category:Canadian singers, since it contains e.g. Category:Celine Dion songs, and songs aren't people.
The more generic guidance about eponymous category parentage at WP:EPONYMOUS is a little hand-wavey: eponymous category should have only the categories of its article that are relevant to the category's content.
So I'm pretty confused. We seem to uniformly follow one practice for musician eponymous cats, and another for eponymous cats for presidents and Nobel laureates. The WP:SEPARATE guideline seems to favour the former practice, but it's not entirely clear.
I'm wondering if maybe this is just a pragmatic choice related to the size of these categories and navigation? e.g. there's a small, finite number of US presidents, so adding their eponymous categories under Category:Presidents of the United States doesn't render the subcategory list too intractable. But we have 500 eponymous categories for American musicians, so dumping them all directly into Category:American musicians would make navigation hard, with all the non-eponymous categories like Category:American session musicians getting lost in the fray? But that's just a guess.
It is my view that a list category should never contain a topic subcategory (theorem: a subcategory of a list category is a list category; this is basic logic). And an eponymous category is a topic category. As Colin M observes above, a song is not a person. For some reason WP:EPON states that Category:New York City should be a subcat of Category:Cities in New York (state), which places all manner of non-cities into the set category Category:Cities (screwing up petscan, which expects Category:Cities and Category:People to have an empty intersection). Oculi (talk) 22:08, 3 August 2021 (UTC)
I agree with you, though I understand the argument against (i.e. that including Category:Barack Obama in Category:Presidents of the United States improves navigation, since readers browsing the latter category might be interested in exploring articles related to particular presidents, rather than just articles about the presidents themselves). I've sometimes wondered whether we could get the best of both worlds via a software tweak. What if every time Barack Obama appeared in a category listing, beside the article link there was a little icon linking to his eponymous category? It would open up navigation without having to pollute the semantic purity of set categories. Colin M (talk) 23:49, 3 August 2021 (UTC)
I always thought that eponymous categories should only have parents that apply to all, or at least to the overwhelming majority, of the members of such a category. Making a person's personal categories parents to their category will produce weird intersections, e.g. that a Zebra Puzzle or all Albert Einstein Medal recipients are categorized as Nobel laureates in Physics, and some duplication (Einstein appears twice in the latter category). So my answer is no: eponymous categories do not need any parents that apply only to the subject. This becomes obvious for DoB, PoB categories, and I see no reason to pick some personal categories as parents. Neither do I accept the argument of discoverability because the subject is already categorized properly. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:51, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
The ninth bullet point under general naming conventions states: When an article topic requires disambiguation, any category eponymously named for that topic should include the same form of disambiguation, even if no other articles are likely to have an eponymous category. This seems to result in unnecessarily clunky category titles that incorporate redundancies. If there are several articles that could be titled Schplug, such that there are various Schplug articles with brackets indicating which entity is meant, then is it really necessary that, if one of these is Schplug (band), the categories for that band's recordings be Category:Schplug (band) albums and Category:Schplug (band) songs, and for its musicians Category:Schplug (band) members (hopefully no-one will insist on Category:Schplug (band) band members). If the other putative Schplugs are white goods, breeds of cattle or traditional Swiss footwear, (they are not: I made the word up) then none of them are going to be releasing singles or albums, or have an evolving personnel, and the disambiguation is redundant and unsightly.
I would suggest rewriting that ninth bullet point as When an article topic requires disambiguation, any category eponymously named for that topic need only include disambiguation if there is a danger of confusion. Thus the assumption is that there need not be the parenthetical addition, but that it can be required by anyone claiming reasonable danger of confusion. Kevin McE (talk) 13:42, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
Oppose - the whole point of C2C is to use the eponymous category name throughout the subtree rather than agonising individually over the name of every subcategory. Cream is ambiguous. Is Cream albums ambiguous? Is Cream members ambiguous? Is Cream songs ambiguous? Who cares: just use Cream (band) throughout Category:Cream (band). (This has been discussed thousands of times.) Oculi (talk) 17:34, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
I put 'disambiguation' into the search engine of the talk archive before making the proposal, and nothing similar came up. I have no idea where I am expected to make myself aware of the "thousands" of previous discussions of the matter. Perhaps you could be kind enough to direct me to one percent of them. Kevin McE (talk) 20:45, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
Where do think WP:C2D (follow the name of the article unless ambiguous) and WP:C2C (follow the name of the parent category) came from? Consensus in dozens of cfds long ago. These are speedy criteria, not rules I have invented. A recent discussion is here. Oculi (talk) 15:44, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
Thank you for your eventual reply. I was previously unfamiliar with c2c, so your reference to it meant nothing to me, and as I say, I had looked to see if the matter had been previously discussed. I have never said that anything was a rule you had invented: I made a proposal, you opposed it (the !vote count is therefore 1-1 so far), and I asked you to substantiate claims you made in your response. I find an aggressive tone in your response: apologies if this is not your intention, but I am simply suggesting that what seems clunky and redundant could be dropped. I note the number of previous discussions has dropped from thousands to dozens, although I'm not sure that I would consider the one linked as really being the same thing.
This query is triggered by the recent placing of Thomas Aikenhead (hanged for blaspheming against Christianity) into a Criminals from Edinburgh category. It returns to a topic which I recall attempting to raise before, without response, I think in a WikiProject that no longer exists, after Richard Carlile (jailed many times while campaigning for freedom of the press in the UK) was placed into a criminal category. Many figures in history either suffered penalties as criminals or would have so suffered had they fallen into the hands of their adversaries. Obvious examples range from philosophers and historians to the founders of religious schisms or political secessions. I can also think of playwrights, actors and mathematicians convicted because of their sexuality. For all of these, I would regard use of the "criminal" categorisation as unhelpful (whereas something like Category:People prosecuted under anti-homosexuality laws provides a categorised view without carrying that negativity). Looking in the archives I see Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Archive_17#Criminal_categories touched briefly on this question, but I would like to explore consensus on when a "criminal" categorisation is appropriate. My view (expanding on the exchange in the edit comments in the Carlile article) is that it should be limited to individuals or organised groups who sought financial gain and/or exercised violence against others, though I appreciate that may also be woolly as a definition. AllyD (talk) 09:07, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
People who are convicted of crimes can be categorised as criminals, even if what they did would not be regarded as a crime now. What counts as a crime is, and always has been, a political question. Just as we categorise people as nationals of the country they lived in at the time, not by what it is called now. If they were convicted that has implications, even if we might disapprove of the conviction. And there are a lot more crimes than those involving violence or financial gain. But categorisation has to relate to notability. For most people a traffic conviction wouldnt be very notable. Rathfelder (talk) 22:55, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
The changing perception over time is one reason why I prefer neutral fact-based categories to the imprecise negativity of the "Criminal..." categorisation. Some examples were it be applied consistently to those convicted in a process (and, no, I do not intend to make any such WP:POINTy additions):
Examples ranging from Socrates to Martin Luther King
Socrates has People executed by ancient Athens, People executed by poison - could also carry Criminals from Athens?
Sima Qian has Prisoners sentenced to death by China, Han dynasty eunuchs - could also carry Criminals from Hancheng?
Jesus has People executed by the Roman Empire, People executed by cruxifixion - could also carry Criminals from Bethlehem?
William Wallace has People executed under the Plantagenets by hanging, drawing and quartering - could also carry Criminals from Renfrewshire?
William Tyndale has People executed for heresy, Deaths by strangulation - could also carry Criminals from Gloucestershire?
Giordano Bruno has People executed for heresy, People executed by the Papal States by burning - could also carry Criminals from Nola?
John Maclean (Scottish socialist) has British anti–World War I activists, Scottish prisoners and detainees - could also carry Criminals from Glasgow?
Mahatma Gandhi has Prisoners and detainees of British India - could also carry Criminals from Porpandar?
Sophie Scholl has People condemned by Nazi courts, People executed by Nazi Germany by guillotine - could also carry Criminals from Forchtenberg?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has Soviet prisoners and detainees, Gulag detainees - could also carry Criminals from Kislovodsk?
Martin Luther King Jr. has Prisoners and detainees of <several US states> - could also carry Criminals from Atlanta?
So each of these biographical articles already carries neutrally-worded categories concerning who imposed what penalty upon them, which seem sufficient, whereas a "Criminals..." categorisation would be a loaded epithet, as with Aikenhead and Carlile. Appending "criminal" categories to figures with followers would probably be reverted as offensive. There can also be WP:BLP considerations. The summary for Category:British politicians convicted of crimes (itself under British criminals) does stipulate that it should be limited to "serious crimes". However, while it includes, for example, those MPs convicted in the United Kingdom parliamentary expenses scandal and those whose careers were halted by fallout from traffic offences, the summary in Peter_Hain#Anti-apartheid_activism seems insufficient for his appearance there alongside them. Again, "criminal" categorisations seem contrary to everyday usage: returning to one of my pseudo-examples, anyone exploring the "Criminals from Glasgow" category would expect to see gangland figures, not socialist schoolteachers. I feel the use of "criminal" categorisations should align to that common usage - especially for living people - and requires tighter guidance as to when they are and are not appropriate. AllyD (talk) 15:35, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
A hypothetical solution to the problem is to replace all "criminal" categories by something with "convicted" in the category name but then we will miss criminals who have never been caught. By the way, I would regard criminals by city or town categories a trivial intersection eligible for deletion. Marcocapelle (talk) 10:49, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
The recent discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 December 5#Category:Alumni by educational institution, which proposed to do away with the entire category structure of alumni affiliations, appears to demonstrate a point of WP:DEFCAT and WP:NONDEF requiring clarification. The proposition of the deletion proposal was that people are not "known for" what institutions they have attended. The same concern likely applies to year of birth and year of death categories, as people are not "known for" being born or having died in a particular year. I propose some revision to the standard (if appropriate language does not exist elsewhere) indicating that fundamental biographical details such as year of birth and being an alumni of an academic institution (at least at the collegiate level or higher) are appropriate for categorization, even if they are not what the subject is "known for" in the most pedantic sense of that phrase. BD2412T05:03, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Yes, a list of standard biographical factoids. Secondary school alumni categories have been kept (not always unanimously) at cfd many times (any 'rename' cfd discussion can become 'delete' if such a consensus develops). I get the impression that more store is set by secondary school in the UK than elsewhere: Who's Who entries will usually include secondary school. 'People from' is a trickier one, and 'descent' even more so. (I don't think I have ever seen a 'delete' proposal or even such an opinion at cfd for university alumni categories, going back to 2006 or so.) Oculi (talk) 10:17, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
I also agree that certain categories that will apply to a person perpetually (I call these "for the rest of time" categories: year and place born, alumni status, year died, profession) are appropriate to have in certain (most?) biographical articles. They are FAR superior to categories that only apply temporarily (team played on, place of residence, etc.) That said, I think it is important to enforce reliable sourcing of all categories, and so one or more "for the rest of time" categories should be removed from many thousands of articles for this reason: if we can't find a reliable source that puts the person in a category, it is probably WP:NOTDEFINING and needs to go: it is not Wikipedia's job to be an alumni directory. The CfD nominator made two key errors in my opinion: first, in my experience, any proposal that would affect many thousands of pages, as this one would have, is much better to be started at a broad forum like the village pump, not at XfD. Second, if many thousands of pages seem to stand in contradiction to the wording of some Wikipedia "rule" {WP:NOTDEFINING, in this case), it is the rule's wording that does not reflect consensus, not the pages. That is one of the meanings of ignore all rules. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:00, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Probably 99% of categories are not what the subject is "known for" in the strictest sense of the words. Lloyd George should, on that strict test, only be in Category:The Man Who Won the War, Category:Welshmen, and perhaps Category:Goats, but the categories he in fact is in are all biographical facts of significance, and of value as such to people who actually take their reading seriously. They improve the encyclopaedia. DuncanHill (talk) 14:09, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
BD2412 and Oculi, thanks for removing all the tags. All the categories so far have been for institutions in Britain or Ireland: was that an accident? Mathsci (talk) 14:11, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
I tagged around 2000 categories in the UK tree, recursive 3 levels or so (and BD2412 weighed in). Fortunately the cfd was closed before worldwide tagging needed to be considered (which I was not going to do). Oculi (talk) 15:29, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Does anyone have a thought on specific language to add here? Perhaps adapting from language above, e.g.: Certain categories reflecting standard biographical facts will apply to a person perpetually, and are generally appropriate to include in biographical articles, including year and place of birth, collegiate or post-collegiate alumni status, year of death, and profession. To the extent that reliable sources are available identifying such facts, these categories should be included in an article even if the subject is not specifically known for this fact. 18:12, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
There has been a consensus against place of birth since 2005 or so. 'People from' is regrettably vague but is not based on place of birth. I would omit the 'even if' bit as this is not an argument often seen at cfd (except recently). Oculi (talk) 18:27, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
So: Certain categories reflecting standard biographical facts will apply to a person perpetually, and are generally appropriate to include in biographical articles, including year of birth, collegiate or post-collegiate alumni status, year of death, and profession. To the extent that reliable sources are available identifying such facts, these categories should be included in an article.BD2412T18:30, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
I believe we have a clear (and, indeed, unanimous) consensus, then. I will give this another 48 hours to make sure that there are no additional comments or concerns that might usurp this outcome, and will add the sentence. BD2412T05:24, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
Sorry for being late to the discussion. I am fine with some clarifying text, it would be helpful, and talking about year of birth, year of death, and profession. I do not support "collegiate or post-collegiate alumni status". I am glad to exclude school alumni status, but I don't think even collegiate/post-collegiate alumni status should be included. They frequently fail DEFCAT and I see no reason to override DEFCAT. Bondegezou (talk) 15:30, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
I disagree and think the proposed text is fine. We can discuss what is defining until the cows come home and will still come up with several different answers. What is obviously defining to one editor is completely non-defining to another, as CfD discussions show. Personally, I would add both place of birth and place of upbringing (I consider that "people from" covers both, but not just where they live, although I know other editors disagree on the latter). Contrary to what has been claimed, I don't think we have any consensus against these at all. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:53, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
The whole point is to include collegiate/post-collegiate alumni status, to reflect actual consensus at cfd over the last 15 years. There has never been any issue at cfd with year of birth, year of death, or profession (or with collegiate/post-collegiate alumni status until last week). There was a massive renaming of secondary school categories such as Category:Old Etonians over several months, such as 2012 February 22#Obscure or ambiguous Old Fooians, where no-one suggested deletion (which is an option at any cfd). Oculi (talk) 15:58, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
I have consistently said for years in various Talk pages that categories by education frequently fail DEFCAT for some articles. RandomCanadian would appear to agree.
I see deletion of education categories as rarely being appropriate because an education category may be defining for certain individuals, so the lack of support for deleting categories is not proof that these categories are being appropriately used in all cases, nor is it proof that there is a consensus that we should have override text as proposed.
We appear to have consensus for text for certain categories. Great; let's move forward with text for those categories. Anything else, we can go through resolution processes, ensuring the discussion is widely seen. (I echo the comments above about the value of village pump.) Bondegezou (talk) 17:33, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
It's hard to discuss this in a systematic way. Categories can be added without proper sourcing or as an after-thought. For example it would only take you a second or so to see that one of the categories for the sub-stub George Gilbert Ramsay was bogus. Mathsci (talk) 18:50, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
I unambiguously agree with Bondegezou that these frequently fail DEFCAT, and I would oppose the proposed change to policy based on that and the reasons I gave at the CfD (plus, BD2412's rush to say "we have a clear and unanimous consensus", within just 24 hours of the discussion starting, [the ping failed to get through, I'm just lucky that somebody else pinged me] is disheartening). Like with wikilinks (MOS:OVERLINK), the famous idiom, "less is more", applies to categories as well. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 17:58, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
I also agree with Bondegezou on this. Among the properties listed in the proposed text, "collegiate or post-collegiate alumni status" really strikes me as being the odd one out, in that it falls far short of passing the "Caravaggio test" described in WP:CATDEF. I understand that alumni categories are, in practice, widely added to biographical articles, but I think that we should have a thoughtful discussion before enshrining that practice in policy, since there are some strong arguments that it runs counter to the overarching principles behind how we do categorization. Colin M (talk) 18:56, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
So, where are we? BD2412's hope for a consensus was premature. The role of educational alumni categories remains fraught: clearly many editors are keen on their use, but some are concerned that their use on many (not all) articles fails WP:CATDEF.
There is, I suggest, a common view (e.g. from UnitedStatesian, RandomCanadian and Colin M) that any big decisions about educational alumni categorisation and DEFCAT need a broad and slow discussion somewhere high profile. I don't think anyone should be trying to do an end run around the needed debate.
No-one has actually objected to the rest of BD2412's text. Would it be useful to add something like: Certain categories reflecting standard biographical facts will apply to a person perpetually, and are generally appropriate to include in biographical articles, including year of birth, year of death, and profession. To the extent that reliable sources are available identifying such facts, these categories should be included in an article.? Or do we abandon the idea given that it was primarily designed to settle the educational alumni issue, so it seems odd to use it without that issue? Bondegezou (talk) 15:32, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
That leaves us in an awkward position. We clearly have consensus in this discussion for adding some clarifying language, and we clearly have consensus in numerous other discussions across the encyclopedia against removing alumni categories where they have been created/added, so we might continue to have a policy that in writing fails to reflect practice. This is a recipe for perpetual dispute. BD2412T18:45, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
Or a practice which in reality clearly and frequently fails to abide by the usual standards, and yet which is too much of a time sink to actually bother changing. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 19:11, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
A practice towards which hundreds, possibly thousands of Wikipedians have made hundreds of thousands of edits. BD2412T19:46, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
Just throwing out a thought that I have no idea how to work with: it seems that from this we have categories that are great from an information science POV but have little encyclopedia value to a reader, and then categories that are of value (eg what someone may be notable for). The alumni categories seem to be of the first. We also have Wikidata, and I wonder if it is possible to offload the former types of categories to a Wikidata purpose. I have no idea if this is even possible. --Masem (t) 20:24, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
I frequently work in academic biographies. The alumni categories are clearly and obviously defining in those cases, because where an academic was educated sets the path for the rest of their career. I suspect the same is true for professional athletes who competed as students, at least. So I am a little surprised to see people here arguing that they are not defining when in so many cases they clearly are. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:42, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
The meaning of "defining" which is useful in categorisation is closer to "distinguish, characterise" (see M-W). In addition, "defining" is clearly used here in the sense of something that is an essential characteristics of a subject, not something that is an essential characteristic to its subject; and further, that categories should be something that can help in constructing sets of pages on topics that are defined by those characteristics, not "sets of pages on topics that share one random characteristic".
That sentence I've just written has two separate ideas. Addressing the first one, while one's education might be defining for oneself, I would be hard pressed to believe (and indeed, I can't find any rational reason other than stubborn belief) the argument that these are "essential characteristics" of most people who are encyclopedically notable. It doesn't apply to Albert Einstein (whose "essential characteristics", those that readers looking for a topic would think of, are clearly not his having attended some place in Zürich [the first paragraph of the lead seems to set them out nicely: relativity, E=mc2; Nobel in physics... I've made a more complete analysis elsewhere, but that's not relevant here]). It doesn't apply to even obscure-but-notable figures in my discipline (music generally/early music more specifically): Ton Koopman is [indeed] primarily known for being the founder and director of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir., not for having studied at the Amsterdam conservatory (although being faculty [as opposed to alumnus] at the University of Leiden might be a more compelling categorisation. Händel is known for quite a lot of things, a fair few of which might be looked up by readers (and be interesting and valid categories), but not for having studied law at the University of Halle (although that is an undeniable fact). John Eliot Gardiner is known for his conducting and his recordings, but I most certainly can't think of anyone that would search for him as an "alumni of King's College London" or as being amongst the "people educated at Bryanston School" (although those are both, again, undeniable facts).
@RandomCanadian: You are not even addressing my comment, and can be summarized as "I don't believe you", an argument from bad faith rather than evidence. They are defining. I speak from experience within academia. If you have three sentences to introduce a speaker to other academics, in a formal context like an introduction to a talk, very likely one of those three is going to mention where they were educated. It is considered that essential. Also, given that I specifically talked about modern academics and athletes, what is even the point of bringing up past-century musicians? It's completely off-topic. Those are a different class of people for whom these categories may well not be defining. So don't use them when they're not, but that doesn't mean you need to tear them down for everyone else for whom they actually are defining. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:21, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
I agree, David Eppstein. I don't think we should "tear down" educational alumni categories where they are relevant (i.e. meet WP:DEFCAT), but nor should we force them on to articles where they are not relevant (i.e. fail WP:DEFCAT). The original proposal that started this section was enforcing them on all articles and I am glad we have stepped back from that.
So, where do we go from here? I try to remove categories that fail WP:DEFCAT from articles, but some editors object to the removal of educational alumni categories even when they very obviously fail WP:DEFCAT. I think experienced editors could do more to remind less experienced editors of WP:CATDEF. Bondegezou (talk) 15:29, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
An example, as examples can be easy... here's Konnie Huq, who is known for presenting children's TV in the UK and subsequent media work. Her categories are: 1975 births; Living people; People from Ealing; People from Hammersmith; People educated at Notting Hill & Ealing High School; Alumni of Robinson College, Cambridge; English people of Bangladeshi descent; Television personalities from London; Writers from London; British Asian writers; English television writers; Women television writers; BBC Asian Network presenters; Blue Peter presenters; Red Cross ambassadors; Labour Party (UK) people; Women radio presenters. I look at that list and I can't see how "People educated at Notting Hill & Ealing High School", "Alumni of Robinson College, Cambridge" and "Red Cross ambassadors" belong. She's not an academic or a professional athlete. What would people here do? Bondegezou (talk) 15:49, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
In contrast to universities, I think high school alumni categories are rarely defining. Also I don't think that the article supports putting her in Labour Party (UK) people; that should be for people who actually work at some level in the party, not merely supporters of the party or people who have a close relative in the party. As for the rest of the mess: too much of it is caused by intersections of categories, categories that try to describe two or more unrelated qualities of the subject. What does being a television personality have to do with being from London, for instance? —David Eppstein (talk) 17:16, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
Asking for evidence instead of opinion is not bad faith (it is more aptly "lack of blind faith"), it is basic rational argumentation. As to the rest, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an academic conference, and Gardiner and Koopman are very much 20th/21st-century figures (plus, I guess they would likely be introduced by their achievements so far, and maybe the place where they currently work). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:54, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
David Eppstein has had a lot of experience creating bio articles and I agree with most of what he's written. Category:Leipzig University alumni is reasonably exhaustive (J.A. Birnbaum is omitted), so that there is a veritable treasure trove of musicians, writers, humanists, scientists, poets and philosophers: Leibniz, Goethe, Nietsche, etc. That represents sparkling and dazzling creativity, not overbearing walls of text. Mathsci (talk) 03:48, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
A category being used and "reasonably exhaustive" is not a sign that it is either an appropriate category or that it should be exhaustive (the same way various other categories are not exhaustive, ex. Category:People by religion certainly isn't, because there are many, many people whose religion is entirely non-defining to their encyclopedic notability [although it might very much have been defining to their personal lives]). It's merely a sign that the category is apparently popular. Your argument resumes to, basically, an appeal to tradition ("Keep doing this because it is currently being done") combined with an ad populum ("do this because it's done everywhere"). You don't need a PhD to see the many fundamental flaws of such arguments. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:54, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
@Mathsci: Thanks, Sherlock, for yet another article where the category is clearly non-defining. You telling me that these categories are, apparently, used and misused on quite a few articles is something which I already know, as I assume you've already guessed. I can't even say it does not address my argument: it doesn't even acknowledge it. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 17:02, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
@Mathsci: Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I have gone ahead and removed it (since you seem to agree that it is not a particularly pertinent category), along with a few others. Cheers, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 20:02, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
Napoleon became President of the Academy of Sciences in 1801, following the scientific achievements during the Egyptian Campaign (e.g. Egyptology and Bouchard's discovery of the Rosetta Stone). The category is thus highly relevant given this well documented history. Mathsci (talk) 00:17, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
I think there are two directions we can go with this, one being to say that there are certain categorizations which some editors argue are non-defining, which should be including even if they are non-defining (I would think "year of birth" would be a pardigmatic example of such a category, since virtually no one is "known for" having been born in a particular year; the other is to just declare these categories to be defining despite such objections. Either way, I think we are header towards an RfC. BD2412T05:01, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
Is this really necessary - Wikipedians dancing on the point of a needle! The above is MTLDR, but has anyone actually proposed dropping "year of birth" categories? My own, not unique, definition of defining information is anything that should not be omitted from a bio say 400 words long. Much of this will be suitable for categorization, though not all. Johnbod (talk) 05:07, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
Johnbod speaks sense (as always! - hi John). Most of the categories in BD2412's suggested text aren't causing any problem, so, as per Colin M and WP:CREEP, why do we need to do anything? The one point of contention remains educational alumni categories and there's no consensus for a change on that. It was a good-faith suggestion, but maybe we just leave the text as is?
As for educational alumni categories, I've made my position clear. We should have them, but we should use them more sparingly. I do not see "lots of people have added them" is a good reason to make them a special exception to WP:DEFCAT. There are many cases where higher Wikipedia principles have seen vast amounts of editing work wiped out. It's not pretty; it's sometimes right.
@Bondegezou: I bring up year-of-birth categories not because they have caused a problem, but because they are a paridigmatic example of something virtually no one is "known for" (therefore, according to some arguments, clearly "not defining"), but are included in virtually every biographical article. There has to be some rule explaining why it is permissible to include these even if they are not defining by the proposed definition of a defining characteristic. BD2412T02:38, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
Thanks, BD2412, for that clarification. I still feel that you are trying to make a point about WP:DEFCAT here where I am not seeing a problem. WP:CATDEF does not talk about someone being "known for" something. It says, "A defining characteristic is one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having". While WP:NONDEF says, "if the characteristic would not be appropriate to mention in the lead portion of an article, it is probably not defining". Well, year of birth is the sort of thing that reliable sources commonly give (less so when people are alive perhaps, but they'll often given an age instead) and year of birth is clearly the sort of thing that would go in the lead portion of an article. So, year of birth meets the current guidance, it is not producing editing disputes, looks to me like everything is working as should.
We are having problems with other sorts of categories, including educational alumni categories. Do you agree that educational alumni categories are sometimes not defining? If you do, do you wish to invent an override whereby they are used regardless? Bondegezou (talk) 21:28, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
We literally just came off of a CfD in which the nominator proposed to delete the entire category tree of alumni by institution, at every level. Despite the swift and unanimous "strong keep" outcome, the nominator in that case continues to believe that the outcome of the CfD was decided wrongly, that the !votes in that discussion were unsupported by policy, and that the very existence of these categories continues to be against policy. Something needs to be said to make it clear that these categories can exist. BD2412T23:38, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
Your argument at that CfD was "Keep per longstanding common practice", which is, quite exactly, a shining example of a !vote unsupported by policy (the alphabet-soup way of saying this would be WP:LONGTIME). Some of these categories might have a valid, policy-based reason to exist. But your position seems to be "they should, without doubt, exist, and since they exist, we should fill them to the brim". Which is pretty much the other extreme. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:25, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
It was 'keep by longstanding consensus achieved over hundreds of cfds'. Consensus is something of a pillar of wikipedia. Oculi (talk) 01:35, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
I gave the literal quote of what BD wrote. WP:Consensus can change, and merely saying "keep because of longstanding consensus" is still an appeal to tradition and even circular reasoning (this should be kept, because the consensus is that this should be kept). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:39, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
O BD2412, RandomCanadian is allowed to believe the CfD was wrongly decided, just as you are allowed to believe that WP:DEFCAT should be abolished. I hope you both accept that the current WP:CONSENSUS is that alumni categories can exist and that WP:DEFCAT should be applied, and I hope you both edit in a manner that respects that consensus (while you can, of course, continue to argue that consensus should change). I don't think we need anything more than the CfD decision itself to make it clear that alumni categories can exist. We do not need to re-write this page because one editor has a minority view. Bondegezou (talk) 16:24, 14 December 2021 (UTC)
If this is the place to bring up pet-peeve categories, mine is "Country occupation" categories. Some editors use them to mean that the person pursued that occupation within that country, some use them to mean that the person is or was once a citizen of that country and at some other place or time pursued that occupation, and in the cases where it is intended to mean citizenship rather than place of flourishing, very rarely is that citizenship properly sourced. Given that we're arguing about whether categories are defining, I think in many cases that particular type of intersection of categories is not defining. I'd be happier with separate "Citizen of Country" and non-nationalistic occupation categories. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:28, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
Many of these would just be too big. With academics, especially in the sciences, it may not matter too much where someone comes from, or worked, but with other occupations it does. Johnbod (talk) 15:37, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
Arbitrary break 3
I have come across this issue in other “membership in group X” categories (example: Cat:Freemasons). The problem is that such categories can be very defining for one subject, but not defining at all for another subject.
The hard part is determining whether the particular group membership is defining (or not) in relation to that particular subject. We simply can not say that membership in a group (such as belonging to a club, or attending a school) is defining for every person on the group… nor can we say that it is never defining. It has to be determined on an article by article / subject by subject basis. Blueboar (talk) 15:53, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
Editors are clearly thinking two different things when they hear the word "defining"; some seem to think it means what the subject is "known for", in the sense of what would come to mind when you think of the subject. Others seem to think it means categories of information that would routinely be included in an obituary or a summary entry on the subject's life. I lean towards the latter. BD2412T18:56, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
WP:NONDEF ("if the characteristic would not be appropriate to mention in the lead portion of an article, it is probably not defining;") and WP:DEFCAT ("A defining characteristic is one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define[1] the subject as having—such as nationality or notable profession (in the case of people), type of location or region (in the case of places), etc.") seem to, separately and when combined, strongly suggest the first meaning ("what would come to mind when you think of the subject"). In how many articles would alumni status be appropriate to mention in the lead (disregarding short articles which do not have a proper lead/body distinction)? I think the answer is "very few" (the only obvious cases would be someone like Ruby Bridges or Vivian Malone Jones, or similar cases with other "firsts" like the London Nine; although few of these would pass muster due to WP:SMALLCAT) RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 20:18, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
I disagree, and agree with BD2412 that DEFCAT's "one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having" much more clearly means what you would include in a short biography (say a stub version of the article), rather than only the things the subject is famous for. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:34, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
"A short biography" [or concise summary of the "essential characteristics" of the subject], say a stub version of the article like the article's lead, maybe? Why would you want to base the issue of categorisation on a hypothetical low-quality stub version of an article? That would seem to me like reinventing the square wheel when there is already a ready made solution, one which is explicitly mentioned in policy (the quote from NONDEF). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 20:42, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
Leads are the wrong thing to consider here because leads of longer articles often fail to summarize stuff from the later article that is universally included in published biographies, the kind that the phrase "reliable sources commonly and consistently define" refers to. Stuff like the subject's alma mater, in fact. A three line "who's who" entry would always include this information; a three-line lead of a five-paragraph start-class article would often omit it, even though the article itself would always include it. Leads focus on what distinguishes the subject from other people. That is a different focus than on what defines the subject, and that different focus is leading you into bad categorization policy opinions. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:03, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
A "Who's Who" entry will often mention someone's alma mater, but perhaps that says more about "Who's Who" entries and how they reflect a particular mid-20th century social structure that was more obsessed with where you went to university and even school? Plenty of biographical articles don't go on about alma maters when talking about musicians, TV personalities, pre-modern historical figures, notable criminals, and so on and so on. So I'm a bit wary of the "Who's Who" perspective...
But, look, let's not get bogged down in details. As far as I can see, you, me, others in this discussion and even RandomCanadian agree that educational alumni categories are sometimes defining and sometimes not. Ergo, it would be wrong to delete all such categories, and it would be wrong to introduce text enforcing their use everywhere. If we can get consensus on that, we've made progress, I suggest. Bondegezou (talk) 21:20, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
(edit conflict) "A three line "who's who" entry would always include this information". I don't think so, certainly not for well known figures who have significant claims to fame (if you had to write a three line entry on, I don't know, Francis Crick, you might mention his "crucial role in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule", or maybe his 1962 Nobel Prize for the same thing. If [hypothetically speaking, as Crick died nearly 20 years ago] it was for a conference, you would likely include his current occupation. His alma mater? Probably rather low in the pecking order.RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 21:23, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
There is a bigger historical picture that I think is broadly being overlooked here. The phenomenon of people receiving a college degree at all is a relatively recent thing in human history. Up until the 20th century, most people entering a trade (even as a lawyer or a surgeon or an architect) did so by apprenticeship. College education becoming a more typical experience is largely a post-World War II phenomenon, and (in the U.S., at least) women and black people receiving such an education was restricted until even more recently. Once college became the norm, it became an intense shaper of people and their ideas. People are shaped by their institutions (even putative anti-insititutionalists often adopt that viewpoint due to the influence of those institutions). Obtaining a degree from a four-year college is an enormous chunk of a person's formative stages, and one that represents an intentional choice on the part of the attendee. With many careers in the sciences, law, medicine, and academia requiring advanced degrees, we are often looking at people who have chosen to spend seven to ten years being shaped by these institutions. On the other side of the coin, there is a question of completeness. If a category purports to contain alumni of a college, it should be complete in containing alumni of that college who have a Wikipedia article. BD2412T00:09, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
I would disagree with a lot of what BD says about how formative the undergraduate experience is. OK, sure, I understand that it can be formative for some people… but it is definitely not formative for others (it certainly was not formative for me, as I ended up working in a field completely divorced from my major). Blueboar (talk) 01:13, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
I don't think anything in existing category policies or guidelines suggests the idea that categories should be complete, except where this is a natural consequence of the thing being categorised, i.e. every subject in them is clearly, and without exception (not the case here) defined by this characteristic, for ex. Category:Presidents of the United States. There is the explicit example of sportspersons who might be adherents of X religion, but where this is not a defining characteristic (i.e. most people don't know about it, and religion has little to do with their claim to fame, i.e. their sporting success) and is hence omitted. "It should be complete", if applied consistently to other categories, would lead to a blatant WP:OVERCAT problem. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:22, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
People do more in college than study for their major. They are inserted into a social millieu distinct to the specific institution, and we are generally not categorizing people by academic major within their college, which I concede would be a much less convincing scheme of categorization. BD2412T02:05, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
You do not address the fact there are many articles where the whole of what can be said as to someone's education is 'they attended x and y, ultimately receiving a degree in z', and where you could replace x and y with any other and it would not change much to the content. Again, something being verifiably true does not mean it is a defining characteristic in the sense hinted at by policy, even if a category exists and even if it "defines" that person's personal life. Few people could tell you that Claude Debussy was, apparently, somewhat pantheist, even though that is a verifiable fact, and few would disagree with the statement that personal beliefs are also "defining". Does not mean that he needs to be put into Category:Pantheists (and please, don't anyone think about going to put it there just to spite me). Few people could tell you that Carl Sagan (known as an astronomer...) got his PhD at the University of Chicago (spent most of his career at Cornell, too, so there's that), even though that is also a verifiable fact; or, apparently, that Albert Einstein was amongst the "Honorary Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences". I don't see what justifies the apparent double standard that you seem to think is implicit for those categories. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:44, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
It is also a mistake to focus on individuals who are in the top tenth of a percent by notability to determine policy for a general purpose encyclopedia. There are undoubtedly points of biographical information about an Einstein or a Sagan or a Debussy which the average person does not know, but in fact most people have never heard of most of the biographical subjects of the encyclopedia. Without looking it up, can you say what Harvey McGehee is known for? If I told you that he was in Category:University of Mississippi School of Law alumni, that would probably get you more than halfway to guessing. If I put out a name like Clark M. Blatteis or Luke Syson or Stephen Leatherman, the average reader has no clue about who they are or what they are "known for" absent reading the article. At least by categorizing them, that offers another route through which they can be found by interested readers (not to mention opening up the utility of cross-categorization searches). BD2412T03:17, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
How fitting, that the three "average encyclopedic subjects" you provide literally have content about this which can indeed be summarised at best as "they attended [place], ultimately receiving a degree in [subject]": Syson received a Bachelor of Arts from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London and would continue studying there for 3 years in the PhD program [...]; Leatherman earned his Ph.D. in environmental (coastal) sciences [i.e. subject] from the University of Virginia [place] in 1976 and a B.S. degree in geosciences [subject] from North Carolina State University [place] in 1970.; Blatteis continued his education, earning a BA from Rutgers University [place] in 1954, and an MS and a PhD in physiology [subject] under the mentorship of Dr. Steven M. Horvath in 1955 and 1957, respectively, from the University of Iowa. [place].
Should we also add Category:United States Army Corps of Engineers personnel to Leatherman (that is a verifiable fact! and the category exists!); Category:People associated with the Fitzwilliam Museum to Syson; or Category:National Institutes of Health people to Blatteis? I mean, these are all undeniable facts that they were associated with these organisations. They don't get more or less coverage than the universities the people attended, and yet somehow the universities get automatic categorisation but places were people worked at (and where they might also have had a "defining" impact on their career) don't? This seems like an unjustifiable double standard.
Do you think we shouldn't add the current director of the Fitzwilliam Museum to Category:People associated with the Fitzwilliam Museum? As for Blatteis, the 'NIH people' category should be better defined, as it appears to primarily include people holding positions with the agency, and likely is not intended to include postdoctoral fellows if that is merely a funding relationship. As for Leatherman's military service, we generally do include that, and have entire category trees for people who served in various militaries in various wars, even if their only military association was the duration of that war. BD2412T05:45, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
We shouldn't include it if it is not a defining characteristic. As far as I see, it currently is just one among many positions he held, and there is no overarching reason why DEFCAT suddenly doesn't apply. Leatherman serving in the military is biographical trivia, which appears to have little to do with his encyclopedic notability, unlike, say, people who are truly "defined" by their military service like Bernard Montgomery; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Erwin Rommel; or even lower-ranking people like Manfred von Richtoffen or Eric Anderson (VC). Do you agree or disagree that "the mere existence of a category and the verifiable membership of the article subject to it does not mean it is a defining category for that subject"? RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 06:36, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
As a general principal, I would say yes, if a category exists, and a reliable source reports that the subject of an article belongs in that category, then the subject of the article should be so categorized. Frankly, it is an easier rule to apply, and if we have, for example, categories for military service, and an article says that an article subject served in a particular branch in a particular conflict, then as a practical matter we are going to have editors coming by and adding the relevant category to that article. If you want to limit such categorization to generals or war heroes, get a consensus to delete the more general categories. BD2412T06:47, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
So, you want to drop WP:DEFCAT. That would be a major change in Wikipedia's approach to categorisation, possibly the biggest ever change since the early years. I think that would be a mistake. We'd see a massive increase in the number of categories per article (two-fold, three-fold, four-fold?). Categories would be flooded with people for whom the category is of little importance: Donald Trump would be in "Category:American golfers" etc. But if that's what you want, you can propose it. Bondegezou (talk) 10:50, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
"Golfer" implies the profession. I have only heretofore seen WP:DEFCAT applied to whether categories should exist, not where they should be implemented. Are you proposing that we eliminate Category:American golfers because some Americans gold but are not "golfers"? BD2412T16:16, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
I have never seen such a limited interpretation. The guidelines as written make clear that DEFCAT also applies to implementation. Why else would the given example be in "Caravaggio, an Italian artist of the Baroque movement", Italian, artist, and Baroque may all be considered to be defining characteristics of the subject Caravaggio.. Guidelines as written make clear that Categorization by non-defining characteristics should be avoided. It is sometimes difficult to know whether or not a particular characteristic is "defining" for any given topic. As to the quip about eliminating American golfers, that is yet another strawman, and it's not particularly enlightening for you to keep trying such cheap tricks just to "win" the debate. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 19:46, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Given your very recent attempt to delete the entire alumni category tree, I think that a focus on the existence of categories rather than on their application to individual cases is a reasonable conclusion to draw. As to trying to prevent all the gnomes from making gnomy edits adding correct but not distinctive categories to individual articles, in cases where those categories are clearly defining in other cases and where the judgement of whether they are defining in the particular article depends on your idiosyncratic interpretation that this can only be true for information that is truly distinctive and not merely classificatory: I think you have a hopeless clause, and that your bludgeoning the discussion here in support of that hopeless cause is increasingly unproductive. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:37, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
The only thing that is increasingly unproductive is the unfounded ad hominem as regards my motivations; and the persistent attempts to paint me as some form of lunatic who hasn't a clue (either by making persistent strawmen (the golfer stuff/the year cats); by going off-topic in an attempt to distract from the meat and bones of the issue; or now by directly contradicting what is otherwise well established policy, which I certainly didn't make up [the benefit of Wikipedia being a free and open-source encyclopedia means you can go look this up without me having to be patronising about, hence I'll abstain from just that and let you figure it out on your own]). Having a heated discussion between multiple participants is not bludgeoning. Cheers, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 21:45, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Re "Telling me that McGehee was in Category:Justices of the Mississippi Supreme Court and Category:Mississippi state senators would have gotten me all the information I needed": this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what categories are for. They are not for people who have already found the article and want to understand more about the subject. That's what the article text is for, or maybe the infobox if you're a lazy reader. They are for collecting together groups of articles that are similar under some defining characteristic. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:57, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Yes, and what jobs they held or the fact McGehee was also a politician seem far more interesting and defining groupings that what schools they might have gone to: this should be obvious from the fact of all the people to go to a university, even those who might attend the same program in the same years, they all usually go onto a wide range of varying jobs (some not even in the field they studied in), showing how really the grouping by university they attended is just an interesting, but not defining, characteristic, unlike, say, grouping by what they are principally known for (i.e. being state supreme court justices, or politicians, or, I don't know, museum curators). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 06:36, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Is there an RfC here?
We could go around in circles repeating the same arguments, but it is incumbent upon us to try to move towards WP:CONSENSUS. An RfC has been suggested, but what would the RfC be on? I'm not certain we need any change to the text at WP:CAT or WP:OVERCAT, but maybe we do and sometimes a clarifying RfC can still have value even if no text is changed.
I would like to see (a) agreement that WP:DEFCAT is still a guiding principle; (b) agreement that educational alumni categories are defining (meet DEFCAT) for some articles, but not other articles; (c) tertiary-level education is more like to be defining than secondary, and primary is generally unlikely to do so. I hope we could get agreement on those. The trickier thing is to decide the details of (b), but maybe we start with the things we can agree on. Just a suggestion -- ignore if unhelpful! Bondegezou (talk) 21:52, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
A potential clarification in light of b) would be adding The mere factual accuracy of a category does not mean it is a defining characteristic for every subject where such a category could be added.RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:34, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
If that vague language is aimed at removing institutional affiliations, it is only going to serve as a recipe for thousands of disputes. Let me ask you this directly: should we include a year of birth and year of death category in every biographical article for which such information can be determined? Why, or why not? BD2412T05:57, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Stop attacking a strawman. Nobody objected to year of birth or year of death categories. The above is not aimed specifically at institutional affiliations, or at any one problematic kind of category in particular. There are many instances where subject X is verifiably member of category Y but that is clearly not defining, especially if it is but a short footnote in the article; the prime example being X = sportsperson and Y = religion (at least, for most X, there might of course be exceptions). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 06:41, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
BD2412, WP:RS, WP:UNDUE and WP:NPOV lead to "thousands of disputes", but we persist with them because they make for a better encyclopaedia. I'd rather think about how we can resolve category disputes more quickly and easily than your approach of just giving up and abandoning WP:DEFCAT! Bondegezou (talk) 10:57, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Birth and death categories are not strawmen, they are the absolute paradigm of a thing no one is "known for", but by which everyone is categorized. They are clearly non-defining by that standard, so I would like to know what in the policy justifies their existence. BD2412T20:33, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Nobody has objected to birth and death cats, so yes, turning the debate in that direction is at the very least an unhelpful deflection (by intentionally attacking a weaker thesis than the one which is being actually put forward). Birth and death cats at least have the benefit of, usually, being "commonly and consistently" present in sources of all levels of depth, especially for historical figures (less so nowadays with BLPs, due to privacy/identity theft concerns). The whole essence of this debate (it's "defining characteristic", if you will), is not about that, and trying to make this long discussion even longer by pushing it off-topic does not help anyone. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 21:53, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Are you saying, then, that information that is "commonly and consistently" present in sources can be considered defining? I'm not sure where the "all levels of depth" language comes from. That is not our policy. BD2412T22:53, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Just because I've been thinking on this more, I really think we should think about the purpose of categories in light of the existence of Wikidata, and particularly with non-defining cats, but which may be useful for "category intersection"-type searches. Wikidata has a full featured query (not user friendly) but many of these non-defining cats are things that could be populated through Wikidata (eg this long link gives all humans born in NYC.) But that seems like we'd need WMF to provide functionality to populate a cat from a Wikidata query or create something akin to categories that are based on Wikidata info. Given that neither are likely to happen, the other aspect we could do is tag clearly non-defining cats but that are still useful in areas like category intersection or other infosci looks up as hidden categories on an article page. Eg we'd still have alumni category in the articles but they would not appear to the reader, because as being argued those are non-defining, but good if a user wants to category interaction alumni from a school with their profession, for example. But I'm just brainstorming here, I think the idea if there is a clean line beteween non-def and defining cats can be made. --Masem (t) 06:10, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Some people want categories to be a full ontology. WP:CATDEF rejects that and I support that. I agree Wikidata may offer an alternative for people who do want a full ontology, although there are other problems with Wikidata! But I know nothing about the technical issues here. Bondegezou (talk) 10:57, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
The vast majority of our categories are a full ontology, for the collection of things meeting the definition of the category. Category:New York Jets coaches contains every article-worthy person who has been a coach of the New York Jets. Category:21st-century Eastern Orthodox bishops contains every article-worthy person who has been an Eastern Orthodox bishop in the 21st century. Category:Burials at Hollywood Forever Cemetery contains every article-worthy person who has been buried at that particular cemetery. Category:Butterflies of Europe, comprehensively contains every species of butterfly found in Europe, even if it is not restricted to Europe. Category:Animated films about bears contains every article-worthy that could be said to be about a bear, even where the bear is a secondary character, as in The Tale of the Fox, or the Jungle Book movies. BD2412T23:03, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
There are some categories where every article-worthy member of the category is in the category, there are some where that is not true. Not every person who has written something is in Category:Writers. Not every person who golfs is in Category:Golfers. Not every person who is a member of the Republican Party is in Category:Republicans (United States). Not everyone who is a Christian is in Category:Christians. Not every one who has sung a song is in Category:Singers. If Category:Burials at Hollywood Forever Cemetery contains every article-worthy person who has been buried at that particular cemetery, then that may be a failure to apply WP:DEFCAT and I would encourage editors to follow the current guidelines (even if they feel those guidelines should be changed).
My apologies. Some of your comments above, as when you said, As a general principal, I would say yes, if a category exists, and a reliable source reports that the subject of an article belongs in that category, then the subject of the article should be so categorized., are not clarifyingWP:CATDEF. That would be abandoning WP:CATDEF. I don't see support for that position. You have also suggested some more minor changes that would tinker with WP:CATDEF. Bondegezou (talk) 10:05, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
A different angle: NONDEF and CfDs
The discussion is rather going around in circles, so I was thinking if there's some different approach we could take. One thing I noticed in this recent affair is the role of categories for discussion. RandomCanadian started with a proposal at CfD, and BD2412 was motivated by concern about that CfD proposal. Past CfD decisions have been used in the discussion above to justify the widespread use of certain categories. WP:NONDEF explicitly says, "In disputed cases, the categories for discussion process may be used to determine whether a particular characteristic is defining or not."
However, most of us agree that a category (including, I think, educational alumni categories) can be defining for some articles, but not others. That is a necessary consequence of WP:DEFCAT. (Shout out if you disagree.) That makes CfD a poor route to settle some disputed cases. I would say that the application of WP:CATDEF is often something that should be tackled on an article's Talk page.
Maybe we should make that clear on WP:NONDEF? What about: The categories for discussion process may be used to determine whether a particular characteristic is ever defining or not. Disputes about whether a category is defining for a particular article should be discussed on the article's Talk page. Would that help stop unnecessary CfDs and push discussion to where it should be? Bondegezou (talk) 10:19, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing that out. That should help allay BD2412's concerns that educational alumni categories are under threat...? I still think WP:NONDEF may be misleading people by pointing them to WP:CFD, as if that is the answer to all categorisation problems. Bondegezou (talk) 13:10, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
I would note that this particular dispute originated with Albert Einstein, where the editor who sought to eliminate the category tree initially sought to remove categories including educational affiliations. That was challenged, and consensus in the talk page discussion was not in favor of the removal of those categories. I am concerned that if this is relegated to individual talk page discussions, we will end up with inconsistent results from one article to the next.
I can see a situation where there is a question of whether a subject was really "an alumni" of an institution (if, for example, they attended a few classes but didn't complete a semester, or completed one semester but did not attend further). However, I think there should be a presumption that if reliable sources identify a subject as an alumni of an insitution, that categorization should be included.
It is also a very different thing from being a Republican, or being a golfer. Certainly people who run for office or hold a party position should be categorized by political party, but it quickly becomes hazy outside of those areas. Someone who is passionate enough about golf as their hobby to receive coverage of this in sources may merit inclusion in a category specifically contoured for this purpose (we have some hobbyist categories that are distinct from professional categories in other fields). Being an alumni of a college or university is not so hazy. For the vast majority of people, either they are or they aren't. BD2412T19:34, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
The discussion at Einstein did not/has not reached a consensus (more "it reached a natural death without positive consensus"), so its not particularly helpful to any decision here.
think there should be a presumption - no. Alumni categories are bound by WP:DEFCAT just as everything else. They don't or shouldn't get an automatic pass just because they're alumni cats and they might have had an important impact on a person's private life. The same way that religion [which can be defining for some subjects, but not others] categories don't get an automatic pass (in some cases even if there's some coverage of that in a few sources). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 20:02, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
BD2412, the application of RS, NPOV, BALANCE, MOS and everything else gets discussed on individual Talk pages and we manage.
I get that you want to exempt educational alumni categories from WP:DEFCAT. You proposed that. We did not arrive at a consensus to support that.
I don't see why being an alum is a very different thing from being a Republican. If someone is a member of the party, then they are a member of the party -- no haziness. But we don't put people in that category, even when such information is reliably sourced, if it's not defining, when it's just some incidental fact about a reality TV star or the like. Likewise, it may be very clear that this reality TV star went to Wayne State College, but that information may also not be defining, it's just some incidental fact. Bondegezou (talk) 20:48, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
Two or three editors strenuously opposing a proposal do not outweigh a half dozen or more supporting it, no matter how long the walls of text in opposition. As for the reality star example, if a given reality star attended and graduated from Wayne State College, and also happened to be registered as a Republican (but without being politically active), which of those points are likely to end up in their obituary? For ease of use, I have created a shortcut for the cited guideline on categorization by association at WP:ALUMCAT. BD2412T22:13, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
Over the past fifteen years, I have written literally thousands of Wikipedia biographies, which required reading thousands of obituaries (sometimes multiple obituaries of the same person). Granted, most of those are state and federal judges or other legal figures, so academics may be somewhat more important to their personal history, but in my experience their collegiate and law school affiliations are almost always noted. BD2412T23:18, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
Is "this gets mentioned in the obituary" really a sufficient criterion for WP:DEFCAT? I mean, you can verifiably find the schooling of plenty of people without it being a defining characteristic at all. Yes, there may be instances where schooling is a defining characteristic (although stuff like elementary schools should almost certainly go - who'd have guessed that this guy born in Sheffield, Yorkshire attended a school in [surprise] Sheffield? entirely unrelated and not "defining" under any encyclopedic meaning of the term, as one sees), but your argument still seems closer to implying automatic "this is defining no matter what" status than to acknowledging there might be cases where it is not. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 04:21, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
"Mentioned in an obituary" is not given anywhere in WP:DEFCAT as the key criterion. I can see that alumni categories are much more likely to be defining for judges and other legal figures than they are for reality TV figures, so I suggest that your experience may be misleading you here, BD2412. I think we need a policy that works for judges and reality TV stars, and I think we have that in WP:DEFCAT. Bondegezou (talk) 12:37, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
If you want to start a formal RfC on your initial suggestion, you are free to do so. Make sure, as per prior discussion, it is widely advertised. Bondegezou (talk) 12:39, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
Perhaps I was unclear. WP:DEFCAT states that "A defining characteristic is one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having". The obituaries that I have researched are the referenced reliable sources. Of course, they are not the only reliable sources. I also frequently reference newspaper articles covering the appointment of judges, and their retirement, which also consistently provide their educational details. Outside of the legal field, here is the example of a journal article profiling the life of a research physiologist. I would direct your attention to the first paragraph. Here is another, with that information in the second paragraph. BD2412T23:44, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
Great. Those are good examples of alumni categories being defining. I've said throughout that alumni categories are sometimes defining, which is why I don't support CfD'ing them, which is why I made the suggestion at the top of this subsection. That alumni categories tend to be defining in the legal field and for academic researchers doesn't mean they are defining for reality TV stars, or criminals, or for people with the world record for the longest fingernails. Bondegezou (talk) 10:15, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
That would be a good example of where the alumni cat would definitively not be defining: it has zero bearing on that subject's encyclopedic notability or his claim to notoriety. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:35, 18 December 2021 (UTC)
You didn't even read the article, did you? His Berkeley category is faculty, not alumni. And "failed faculty career" is definitely a significant milestone in his life. We don't have a category for that but we do have a category for the career he dropped out of, which is this one. Categories do not have to be and should not have to be about the one thing a person is famous for. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:49, 18 December 2021 (UTC)
I oppose the proposed (general) change on WP:NONDEF to address a specific (alumni) problem, perceived only by a tiny minority. I particularly dislike the idea of every alumni category being disputed at tedious length over every article, a recipe for idiosyncratic bludgeoning ad infinitum. Oculi (talk) 10:13, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
Not just every alumni category, but every category. It would just be a recipe for endless pointless arguments on article talkpages. Is category X defining for this person? Is it not? Just ridiculous. Leave well alone. It's the categories that are notable. If they're notable then any appropriate article should be added to them. If they're not then they're deleted. Simple. What we basically have here is a tiny number of editors trying to get categories they don't like removed from most articles if they can't get them removed completely and demanding the wording is changed to facilitate this. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:16, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
What you write there is in contradiction to WP:CATDEF, which is an existing guideline we should all be following (until such time as a new consensus changes it). I am not seeking to remove any categories completely; I cannot speak for others in this discussion. I am concerned that some editors are trying to undo WP:CATDEF by stealth. Bondegezou (talk) 16:07, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
Saying that "any appropriate article should be added to them" seems like it is perhaps begging the question. But if we treat "appropriate" as "verifiably correct", this leads to some perverse results. For example, Adolf Hitler is not (and probably should not be) categorized in Category:German painters, even though he was verifiably a German who painted. That's sort of a borderline case, since his painting is a somewhat well-known aspect of his story, even if a peripheral one. Maybe an even clearer one would be that he definitely does not belong in a "singers" category, even though the article mentions that he sang in his church's choir. Colin M (talk) 16:29, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
I'd like to find what the sort order is of pre-alphanumeric charaters (those that sort before 0–9A–Z). I sometimes use them in maintenance categories. In Wikipedia:Categorization § Sort keys, I've only been able to order some. Can we expand that list
Are expatriate and emigrant categories defining categories?
I had a discussion with Johnpacklambert on his talk page about emigrant and expatriate categories. Many of his recent edits have added or changed these categories. I do not see these categories as "defining categories" (as laid out in WP:Defining). I think the emigrant and expatriate categories are useful if they relate to a person's notability. As an example from that talk page discussion, if a basketball player spends a single season playing in a foreign country, Johnpacklambert would add them to some expatriate category. I would not, based on my belief that it is not a defining characteristic of that player. I am not disputing that biographies of the player will likely mention the simple fact that they played in a foreign country, but it would be unusual for them to comment on their status as an expatriate. If they did, the category would certainly apply. If they did not, is the category applicable (and desirable)? Frangible Round (talk) 22:20, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
I'd like to digress for a moment to ask what distinction is understood behind the existence of categories with both "emigrant" and "expatriate" in their names. Though perhaps that should be its own section. Largoplazo (talk) 22:41, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
I also had a run-in with JPL on this issue a month ago, concerning someone who was born in Japanese-occupied Seoul as a child of an originally-Australian emigrant-to-US missionary father (citizenship unclear; mother's citizenship also unclear but from a time when that was considered not to matter), and then spent the rest of their life after age 6 in the US. JPL kept trying different permutations of categories like Category:Korean emigrants to the United States (inappropriate: no evidence that subject ever had or claimed Korean citizenship), Category:American expatriates in Korea (inappropriate: no evidence that the subject was identified as American while in Korea) Category:Australian expatriates in Korea (inappropriate: never lived in Australia and no evidence that subject ever had or claimed Australian citizenship). I think insisting that everyone who moves from one country to another must be given one of these categories is a mistake. We should only categorize what we can properly document. And in any case in this particular instance, while it is plausible that Category:People from Seoul is defining, I don't think the emigrant/expat categories are. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:45, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
This sounds like another of those categories that can be considered defining for some article subjects, but is not defining at all for others. To apply it, you need some evidence that it is defining for the specific subject. Blueboar (talk) 02:17, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
Both are overused. Emigration should be fairly permanent and being an expatriate should be something more than a few months. Rathfelder (talk) 13:54, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
Our current guidance doesn't appear to address this directly, and to the extent it does, it's a little inconsistent: WP:SORTKEY advises Spell out abbreviations and characters used in place of words so that they can be found easily in categories. For example, the sort key for Mr. Bean should be {{DEFAULTSORT:Mister Bean}} and Dungeons & Dragons should be sorted {{DEFAULTSORT:Dungeons And Dragons}}. but at WP:PEOPLECAT de Klerk is used as an example on an unrelated point with {{DEFAULTSORT:De Klerk, F. W.}}.
We should discuss to reach a consensus here on the best approach and then update our guidance accordingly. Personally, I think spelling out is preferable, as it can resolve instances where people have the same initialization, fits better with our broader approach, and eliminates tricky questions of whether an initialism is common enough to be used in sorting or not. Thoughts? {{u|Sdkb}}talk20:26, 30 December 2021 (UTC)
following up on Sdkb's post: Would it cause confusion to the reader/searcher if the initial(s) is/are spelled out? Using R. Nelson Smith as an example; the full name is Robert Nelson Smith, but in this case the article title is R. Nelson Smith. Readers may expect the sort key and the article title to match. I'm ok with spelling the name out if there is consensus, but wanted to point out the possible confusion. Also it would change how things are sorted in large categories like Living people or WikiProject:Biography articles. I hope this explanation is clear. Thank you for your consideration.--FeanorStar7 (talk) 20:36, 30 December 2021 (UTC)
Sort them where people most likely expect to find them, which ought to parallel the considerations that went into choosing the article's title under WP:COMMONNAME. If it's deemed that people are most likely to know De Klerk as "F. W. DeKlerk", then it's a cinch for us to expect that people will most likely to look for him sorted as "De Klerk, F W" (so as to put him after F. A. De Klerk but before Fatima De Klerk). Largoplazo (talk) 23:34, 30 December 2021 (UTC)
"Mister" is a prefix, not a name. However, in terms of how it actually shows up in any given category containing the character, the distinction is miniscule, and I wouldn't bother typign the extra letters to spell it out. BD2412T23:47, 30 December 2021 (UTC)
H.R. Pufnstuf (right) and Jimmy from the 1969 U.S. children's television programMr. Bean should be sorted as "Mr Bean". It's the name of a television series the people would expect to find at its title without deconstructing it. Likewise, H.M.S. Pinafore should not be sorted as "Her Majesty's Ship Pinafore", nor, for the love of all that is sacred, should A.I. Artificial Intelligence be sorted as "Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence" (though what blessed genius thought "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" was a sensible title in the first place?). Hmm, I wonder what the "H.R." stands for in H.R. Pufnstuf. Whatever it is, it's a sure bet that no one would expect it to be sorted by that! 😀 Largoplazo (talk) 00:08, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
I did something along these lines to generate the list article List of gay novels prior to the Stonewall riots. The code might be adaptable to other types of list for someone familiar with Python, though it currently is a bit messy with some hacks and special cases. To summarize how it works, it grabs all articles from a category (in this case, Category:Novels with gay themes), then fetches the corresponding wikidata items to populate fields such as author and year of publication, then munges that into a wikitext table. (In this particular case, it also applies a filtering step, to exclude books with a publication date before 1969). I was thinking of writing a little blog post about it sometime, but never got around to it.Of course, there are many reasons the process can't be fully automated. There might be some miscategorized articles (or cases where the scope of the category doesn't exactly match the intended scope of the list article), and there will be plenty of cases where a piece of information you seek isn't encoded in Wikidata (even though it's available in the article). And GPT-3 probably isn't good enough to write you a good prose introduction. :) Colin M (talk) 17:10, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
Phabricator task to have software prevent draftspace pages from being placed in article categories
Help in naming category to group 'Death of X' articles
I'm looking to create a category, disaggregated by year, for articles that are specifically about an individual's death (frequently notable event, not notable person). Category:2021 deaths is for people, not events (this has always been inconsistently enforced, leading to my desire for clarity, and has been the source of plenty of edit wars), so perhaps a subcategory would be appropriate? These articles go by a range of names, including 'Death of X', 'Killing of X', 'Assassination of X', 'Execution of X', 'Murder of X', 'Shooting of X' (sometimes fatal), 'Disappearance of X' (sometimes fatal), 'Suicide of X', 'Beheading of X', 'Crucifixion of X', 'Stoning of X', and perhaps others. There are somewhere around 30 articles like this per year (currently; there are relatively few prior to the 1950s), so grouping them by type and year seems like overcategorization. Some fit cleanly in 'Category:2021 suicides' or 'Category:Murder in 2021', but most do not. Would 'Category:2021 fatal events' be the solution, also encapsulating massacres, bombings, plane crashes, Death and funeral of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, etc.? Or is something else appropriate? Star Garnet (talk) 20:30, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
Help?
Hi. I am trying to created Category:SafeSport. But as an IP, cannot. I tried Article Wizard, but it just send me in a circle.
Articles that might be considered for it include SafeSport for starters, and some of the articles that link to SafeSport.
A parent category might be Category:Child sexual abuse in the United States. Also Category:Sexual assaults in the United States and Category:United States at the Olympics.
I agree that for many that opposition is just a part of their wider belief system, so people like George Bush wouldn't belong. But for some, a defining characteristic of their notability is indeed derived from their current or former opposition to gay marriage, including those linked above; that seems to meet the distinction between holding an opinion and being an activist, the latter of which may be a defining characteristic in WP:OPINIONCAT. WhinyTheYounger (WtY)(talk, contribs) 20:44, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
You would need a different name of the category such as "activists against same-sex marriage". Otherwise it would be promiscuously added by well-meaning editors to any American who went on the record about their opposition to same-sex marriage. (t · c) buidhe21:16, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
What you've proposed sounds reasonable to me. I'm not especially familiar with the topic, but looking at the article on Anita Bryant, it doesn't seem like it would be correct to place her in a "anti same-sex marriage activists" category. I can find no mentions of gay marriage in her article (which makes sense, since during the period when she was active, gay marriage wasn't a politically realistic prospect). That makes me think it might actually be appropriate to have a category that's narrowly about gay marriage activism and a broader parent category about activists against gay rights more generally. Colin M (talk) 00:22, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
Yeah, I was thinking about that today re: Anita Bryant, she just sort of popped into my head. Bad example (and a good example of how I'd have to be careful populating the category). Most of the American anti-gay marriage activists were active sometime between 2000 to 2020. Matthew Daniels is a good example. I have been updating his article lately and it's the reason I figured a category might be useful, because his notability is very much based on his activism, which primarily revolved around the Federal Marriage Amendment and similar efforts. WhinyTheYounger (WtY)(talk, contribs) 01:15, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
Minimum number of articles to justify creation of a category?
I may have missed it, but is there a rule governing the minimum number of articles to justify creation of a category? The whole purpose of categories is to find other related articles, so a category with one entry (see Talk:Donald Trump#Arbitrary break) makes no sense (other than promotion). I suggest at least three articles. -- Valjean (talk) 02:39, 14 March 2022 (UTC)
A very rough and unofficial rule is that if there arent, and are not likely to be, 5 articles in a category then its existence is likely to be questioned unless it is clearly part of a larger scheme of categories. Rathfelder (talk) 23:07, 14 March 2022 (UTC)
We do not have an article on this person (and so there is nothing to categorize). Feel free to create a draft (see: WP:AFC). Note that you will need reliable sources to support what you write and to indicate notability. Blueboar (talk) 11:58, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
Ian Wolfe
User:FieldMarine has removed Category:United States Army personnel of World War I because of WP:CATDEFINING. See Talk:Ian Wolfe#World War I service, where I have easily found people in that category who have their service less sourced (or unsourced) than him (Los Angeles Times obituary and other sources). I have also brought up categories that are not defining by any stretch of the imagination. FieldMarine refuses to budge, so here I am to solicit others' comments. (Frankly, it may be time to reconsider whether CATDEFINING should even exist. Vast numbers of categories, much less entries in those categories, don't qualify.) Clarityfiend (talk) 08:59, 29 May 2022 (UTC)
Removal of category failed
Hi all, I removed Category:Asian anthems from Bharoto Bhagyo Bidhata using HotCat. But neither the article not the category shows any change. Meanwhile, the other category I removed later, did get removed from the article. Why is this happening? I already tried purging and null edit. Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})06:47, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
Better still, remove the category declaration, the includeonly tags, and everything else between them from Template:Anthems of Asia per WP:TEMPLATECAT. Either way, if there are any other pages in the navbox that do in fact belong in the category and are then removed from it by removing the transclusion, then they will need to be added back manually (normal categorization process). --DB1729 (talk) 11:42, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, those navboxes were actually inappropriate on this article. Don't know how it missed my eyes, perhaps because they were collapsed. I now removed them accordingly. Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})12:04, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
Hyphens, apostrophes and periods/full stops are the only punctuation marks that should be kept in sort values. The only exception is the apostrophe in names beginning with O', which should be removed. For example, Eugene O'Neill is sorted {{DEFAULTSORT:Oneill, Eugene}}. All other punctuation marks should be removed.
I don't think they're in conflict but it's slightly confusing because of the Irish Complication. Perhaps this would be clearer:
Hyphens, apostrophes (except the apostrophe in Irish names beginning with O') and periods/full stops are the only punctuation marks that should be kept in sort values. All other punctuation marks should be removed.
This could be supplemented with several examples:
Eugene O'Neill is sorted {{DEFAULTSORT:Oneill, Eugene}}.
Interestingly, while looking for examples for a couple of these situations, I discovered a bunch where, for example, leading "The" was simply omitted rather than moved to the end, or where the rule we're discussing here wasn't followed correctly. Also, note the missing space in "E.B.", and I'm not sure whether the dollar sign in the last example counts as a punctuation mark that should have been removed, or whether it should have been kept. Largoplazo (talk) 02:44, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
I posted these questions first at the teahouse (see here), but was told to go here. So, I'm copy/pasting from there.
As explained in more depth here and here, Dutch names that have prepositions, do not have the preposition capitalised. They are also not sorted by preposition. Both these things happen regularly on EN:WP and I find myself fixing that equally regularly when I come across it. Both of these do happen correctly when such Dutch people (and their descendants) immigrate. Example:Martin Van Buren. I came across Mark Van Drumpt in Category:Sportspeople from Arnhem and fixed his name to Mark van Drumpt. However, this man is only notable for things he did in Ireland and so I was wondering if What I did was correct. 2nd Q.) He is defaultsorted by Van Drumpt. Do I leave this as is? Change it to Drumpt? Or, do I use the |pipe and do it different for Irish and Dutch categories?
Then there are the different Flemish rules or conventions.... In all cases, we have to try & find what WP:RS do, with a preference for those in English and/or based where the person is active. I'd say the style & sort should be the same in all en:wp categories. With van Drumpt the bigger Irish media seem to use "van", but his own family's death notice has "The death has occurred of Mark Van Drumpt", hmmmm. Johnbod (talk) 15:36, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
We shouldn't be sorting names based on the nationality of the people they belong to. That kills consistency and defeats the purpose of sorting, which is to make things as easy to find as possible. We should not have some Van Burens (or van Burens) sorted under V and some under B. We should have them sorted where English-speaking readers who don't know the collation conventions of other languages or countries are mostly likely to look for them. Largoplazo (talk) 16:03, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
We should be sorting names on a WP:COMMONNAME basis, which will involve some different sorts for different people with the "same" name. That is the way to make them easiest to find. If you are suggesting overall rules for all such cases, that would be a mistake. Johnbod (talk) 16:38, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
@Largoplazo "We should have them sorted where English-speaking readers who don't know the collation conventions of other languages or countries are mostly likely to look for them" An argument can be made that many if not most English-speakers who find their way into this sort of categorisation are familiar with Dutch conventions. Dutchy45 (talk) 23:31, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
Hallo, I noticed that @Fuddle: has changed the DEFAULTSORT of St Chad's Church, Far Headingley from "Far Headingley, Saint Chad's Church" to "Saint Chad's Church, Far Headingley". Digging into the page history I find that you established the "Far Headingley..." sortkey in 2018. Fuddle has changed many such sortkeys today. Is there a guideline, policy, discussion, anywhere about this which establishes our practice for DEFAULTSORT for (UK?) churches one way or the other? I've asked Fuddle to stop making these changes while I look into this. I was going to ask at Wikipedia:WikiProject UK geography and Wikipedia:WikiProject Architecture, then managed to track you down as the editor who'd set this sortkey, so thought I'd start here.
My own view is that while the placename may be appropriate for categories comprising churches only, and can of course be added within those categories in the article, it might be better to leave the DEFAULTSORT at the article title (but with "St(.)" expanded to "Saint"), so that in general categories the article files in an unsurprising place, but I'd be interested to know where it's been discussed in the past. Practice seems pretty inconsistent: see Category:Grade II* listed churches in West Yorkshire and Category:Anglican Diocese of Leeds (though some of those may, like St Chad's, have been changed today). Thanks. PamD08:01, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
Hi PamD; this is a practice that I have picked up from editing RAF Stations. When you view the category (whatever that might be), there is a potential that they all end up under the same letter. IE; the Category, Category:Royal Air Force stations in Yorkshire, without the DEFAULTSORT key, all end up under the letter 'R', as they begin with an R in the RAF. I just did the same with churches, as the official name of each church is Church of FOO, so they would all end up under 'C'. To avoid this, I have separated them by geography, following a tradition in other Category pages. As far as I am aware, there has been no discussion, just to me it's common sense. Happy to have a discussion, and to fall in line with a consensus. But to me, the geographical place takes precedent over name, otherwise we will have a massive list under 'C' and 'S' in the church category, given how many churches are named after a saint or other. Regards. The joy of all things (talk) 08:40, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for involving me. It's a long time since I wrote a church article, and when I did, there seemed to be no policy on this matter. Some used Saint... or St...., some used the name of the dedicatee, others used the location. I thought that the last option was the most sensible, as in the example given by PamD. The other options seemed to have little point, or to cause a muddle. --Peter I. Vardy (talk) 14:03, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
Hello, all. I was being bold and here is my rationale:
There's nothing in the documention for DEFAULTSORT that discusses sorting by place. What is there is spelling out abbreviations.
If churches need to be sorted by place, then we may need subcategories.
Don't worry about how many articles are in a given section of a category. Think of a book's index that has no such anchors. People understand alphabetical order.
Conversely, there is nothing in the DEFAULTSORT guidance saying not to use a geographical separation. So if we are not separating by location, why do we even need a defaultsort? The template says that we don't need it if we have no need tp sort it differently from its article name. Template:DEFAULTSORT. The joy of all things (talk) 15:48, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
To remove initial articles and to spell out abbreviations. Otherwise, a given article doesn't need one.
I suspect that the policy of sorting churches by place was started in the early days of wikipedia when many users didn't fully understand categories and wanted to provide some organization. It is well-intentioned but counterproductive. Users shouldn't need ESP to know that a given category is alphabetized a certain way. Alphabetization and categorization are different things.
I also recently removed several like {{DEFAULTSORT:Whale, Blue}}.
Well, on the blue whale sort I completely agree. On the others, meh. My reasoning is cosmetic, as in it looks nicer, so I won't get upset about it. The joy of all things (talk) 19:00, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
This issue has been debated on Commons several times, the current consensus is to use location dedication but this is controversial. Crouch, Swale (talk) 21:14, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
I feel that if this is going to go the distance, it should be moved away from my talk page, and into the appropriate forum for discussing this. Hosting it on my talk page limits others getting involved, and if we ping them all, then it risks the page getting seriously long. Thanks. The joy of all things (talk) 21:34, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for those links, @Crouch, Swale:, but those discussions are all about sorting files in Commons, which is a very different situation from sorting articles in Wikipedia - though it's interesting to note the 2018 statement "However, we seems to have inherited a system from en:WP of default sorting churches and pubs by location first, then name. So "St Bernard's church, Sometown" is defsorted so that it appears under "S" rather than "B" (obviously sorting under "St" is unhelpful because most would then sort under "S", which would be overwhelmed and thus useless).". PamD08:57, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
@PamD: The discussions on Commons are mainly for categories since Commons has a category for most churches in England though categorization of files would be the same. Many of the similar principals apply to the WP articles as the Commons category as they are more or less equivalences. The proposer Rodhullandemu has repeatedly complained that Commons decisions shouldn't be based on the English Wikipedia as they say its not a master project, I'd point out that Commons and WP should work together and try to be consistent and since churches matter more on Commons since as noted Commons has a category on most while WP doesn't have an article on most, we should probably defer to Commons.
I thought that the well-established consensus was to sort by the name of the church rather than location. See previous discussions here and here. There may be more recent discussions. RAF stations are not a close parallel - unlike names of churches, names of RAF stations have a standard format, perhaps more akin to a ship (SS), and sorting follows the guidance in WP:SORTKEY ("In some categories, sort keys are used to exclude prefixes that are common to all or many of the entries"). If churches are sorted by location, why not schools or hospitals?
But where a church article has the title Church of St X, rather than St X's Church, I would sort by Saint X's Church.--Mhockey (talk) 03:30, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, @Mhockey: for those two links to archived discussions. There seems to have been very little support for the DEFAULTSORT to be by location, even though this practice has been used by some editors for many years. There does seem to be agreement that "St" or "St." should be replaced by "Saint" in the DEFAULTSORT. There seems to be no one place where the use of DEFAULTSORT is comprehensively set out in policies or guidelines, though there is a lot of useful stuff at Wikipedia:Categorization#Sort_keys. I've boldly linked to that section, from the "see also" note in Template:DEFAULTSORT/doc.
There are some unusual DEFAULTSORT conventions for particular types of article, thus UK road A65 road has {{DEFAULTSORT:6-0065}}, resulting in category sorting like Category:Roads in Cumbria (though a couple of B road articles seem to have been created by editors who didn't know the system!) and Category:Transport in West Yorkshire, but I suggest that road articles are on the whole a more specialised area, while a greater range of editors write about, or care about, articles on churches, either from an architectural or a religious aspect. It's difficult to see where a convention for sort keys for church articles, even within church-specific categories, could usefully be discussed and a non-standard sort key, such as by location, could find a consensus.
As for our readers: I'd think that anyone looking for a church in a particular place, and not sure of its name, would probably start with the article on the place and look there for a mention of the church and perhaps a link. We also have a set of very useful dab pages which list all the churches with a particular dedication, whether they are "Church of St Xxx" or "Saint Xxx episcopalian church" or whatever, such as St. Martin's Church, which has incoming redirects from Church of St Martin and umpteen other variants.
Having started this discussion because I was concerned about Fuddle's overturning of a long-established set of DEFAULTSORTs (ie moving churches away from location-first DEFAULTSORTs), I think I'm now happy enough with their ongoing project of doing so. What do other editors think? PamD16:46, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
I was a participant in some of the Commons discussions, and a firm advocate that location (then dedication) is much the most sensible sort order. The main exponent of sorting by dedication (which has never made much sense to me) was a single very determined user who was later banned. In most counties the majority of churches are parish churches, and the village (or town, subsorted by dedication where there is more than one church) seems the obvious order. The only time I would sort by dedication would be in a category such as "Grade II listed churches in Cambridge" (fictional example) where it would be daft to have every church listed under "C". In a more typical category (e.g. Grade II listed churches in <county>, 19th-century churches in <county>, etc.) the village/town seems much the most sensible order. Dave.Dunford (talk) 17:13, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
I'd also add note that Methodist churches are rarely (if ever?) dedicated, being generally referred to as "Foohampton Methodist Church". So if we use the name as the sort field in a category that contains both Methodist and Anglican churches (such as frequently occurs in the listed building categories that are my main interest), Foohampton Methodist Church will be listed under F and St Anne's Church, Foohampton, will be listed under A. Is that sensible? As for the ease or otherwise of finding a specific church on a category page, I would confidently assert that (assuming a particular church in mind) more people will know the name of the village than know the dedication. If I want to check whether Foohampton parish church is included, and I don't know its dedication, I'll have to use the browser search for the village name within the page just to find it (or visually scan the whole list). Dave.Dunford (talk) 17:39, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
A further thought. Sorting by "name" as @Mhockey: advocates means we end up with the majority of churches listed under S for Saint, apart from those dedicated to All Saints, Holy Trinity, Christ the King and a few others. Again, is this sensible? Dave.Dunford (talk) 18:10, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
@Dave.Dunford: But within that "S" they would be in normal A-Z order, "Saint Andrew's church", "St Anne's Littletown", "Saint Audrey's cathedral...", no problem surely? PamD18:45, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
(b) How should churches be sorted in more general categories such as Category:Kirkby Lonsdale? and
(c) What should the default sortkey for a church be?
and perhaps (d) How do we disseminate / where do we document any agreement reached, so that future editors can find it?
It would be possible to have churches with DEFAULTSORT the article title, expanding "St" to "Saint" etc, and with a location sortkey specified for church-specific categories - or to have a location-specific DEFAULTSORT and then specify the natural title for general categories. An argument for the DEFAULTSORT being the natural article title (give or take St/Saint), is that articles appear in various other listings (maintenance categories etc) for editors, who may be surprised/baffled if the order is by location. But the main needs seem to be firstly that we should have consistent sorting within any one category, and secondly that we avoid edit wars by reaching a consensus. At present an editor is systematically changing location-based defaultsorts to natural-title-based defaultsorts, and there seems to be no policy or guideline to say whether or not this is a good thing to do. PamD18:45, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
Good analysis, and it's a fair point about maintenance categories, which I hadn't considered. I wouldn't object to the DEFAULTSORT being "Saint Mary's Church, Kirkby Lonsdale", with "Kirkby Lonsdale, Saint Mary's Church" as an override for the various church categories (though in practice these tend to outnumber the rest of the categories, so we end up with the DEFAULTSORT being overridden in the majority of cases, which might seem counter-intuitive). In Category:Kirkby Lonsdale, I would (obviously?) expect to see St Mary's Church, Kirkby Lonsdale listed under S – sorting it under "Mary" (as was advocated on Wikimedia Commons by User:Rodhullandemu, now banned) seems illogical even there (or worse, under C for "church" as I've sometimes seen it). TBH, I'd prefer anything to the current inconsistent mess, even if the chosen outcome differs from my personal preference. To answer your three cases, I'd say (a) "Kirby Lonsdale, Saint Mary's Church" (b) "Saint Mary's Church" and (c) "Saint Mary's Church, Kirkby Lonsdale". Dave.Dunford (talk) 19:03, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
Yes, that would be a church category (and I agree, it's a mess, and anything's better than a chaotic mixture where "St Mary's Church, Anytown" can variously appear under A for Anytown, C for Church, M for Mary or S for Saint). But why is sorting by location "bonkers"? It seems the least worst solution to me. It allows people who know where a church is but not its dedication to find it where they'd expect without having to do a browser search (and the opposite never applies – no-one would ever go looking for "St Mary's Church" without caring about the place), it puts multiple churches in the same place next to each other (including "Anytown Methodist Church", "Church of St David, Anytown", "Holy Trinity Church, Anytown" and "St Mary's Church, Anytown"), it doesn't rely on someone remembering to add a DEFAULTSORT to sort "Church of..." under S, it's relatively easy to understand, and it spreads the entries across the alphabet (rather than overloading "S"). Dave.Dunford (talk) 20:16, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
Where "Churches in Anytown" categories exist (and there are some, though not many), the dedication is the obvious sort – no argument there. But does an analogy help? I see the dedication as the equivalent of a person's first name, and the location as the surname. We don't expect to find "Anne Smith" listed under "Anne", except in a category of people called "Smith". Dave.Dunford (talk) 20:28, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
I was the creator of Category:Kirkby Lonsdale back in 2019 and as you can see I sorted it under "St Mary's Church". Today although I don't change defaultsorts on Wikipedia I do make sure when I add the location's category I sort by dedication if it has a location defaultsort. I don't have much of an opinion on what the correct sort is for location categories so if people thing "Saint" or "Church" is more appropriate I'd be fine with that but again I do think we should try to do the same as Commons. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:28, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Taking a concrete example, consider two churches in Frindsbury.
Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringders (which lists all bell towers with three or more bells) lists the Anglican church as "Frindsbury, All Saints".
The church website calls it "All Saints, Frindsbury".
Rochester Diocese calls it "Frindsbury: All Saints".
It's sometimes "All Saints", and sometimes "All Saints'"
Now considering some chapels:
The website calls it "Frindsbury Baptist Church", there is no dedication.
Some websites call it "Frindsbury Baptist Chapel", just to add to the confusion.
Nearby is "Strood New Testament Church of God", also called "New Testament Church of God, Strood".
Just across the river is "The Redeemed Christian Church of God Victorious Family Parish Chatham".
Many nonconformist churches do not have a dedication and just take their name from the street or settlement they are in. If we are wanting to establish some sort of convention for all churches and chapels (and sensibly this can be extended to other places of worship) then I would suggest that the only common factor is the place name and this should be the basis of the default sort. The default, after all, has to apply to all the categories it could be in. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 20:58, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
I'm certain that I contributed to a very similar discussion two years or more back (it was certainly before COVID-19 forced me to change many habits), but I can't find it. In that thread there was a widespread misunderstanding of (a) what the present situation was and (b) what should be done about it. One such misunderstanding that I recall was the idea that one-size-fits-all sorting was mandatory - that is, assuming that because a particular sort order is correct for category:Foo means that it is necessarily also correct for category:Bar.
Anyway, PamD's second post of 18:45, 8 June 2022 (UTC) - that's the one beginning There seem to me to be perhaps three issues - covers pretty much everything, but at the risk of duplication:
The value fed into {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} should be the name of the page, adjusted in line with WP:SORTKEY. So an article titled "St Foo's Church, Barton" would get {{DEFAULTSORT:Saint Foos Church Barton}}
Each individual category that the page is placed in is allowed to have differing rules which may mean that the default sort key may be overridden when necessary:
[[Category:Churches in Barton|Foo, Saint]][[Category:Churches dedicated to St Foo|Barton]][[Category:16th century architecture]]
It should be clear that sorting the page as "Foo" in each and every one of these would be the wrong approach. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:22, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
I don't think anyone has suggested sorting under "Foo" except in the discussions on Commons, nor under "Church" unless it is the first word of the article title. I think the only options being considered are sorting by the article title, and sorting by the location. Of course "location" is not as simple as it might be: some urban churches are named by street, or suburb, rather than town; what about placenames which are ambiguous?; some churches have a parish name which is not their physical location; etc. PamD22:57, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
Just to add to Martin's list: the NHLE refers to the Frindsbury church as "Parish Church of All Saints", gives its statutory address as "Parish Church of All Saints, Church Green", shows it as being in Medway authority and no civil parish, and only mentions Frindsbury in the first line of "Details", with the rather confusing text "STROOD CHURCH GREEN, TQ 7469 NW FRINDSBURY Parish Church of All 4/267 Saints 24.10.50 II* Parish church." (What on earth is that 4/267 between "All" and "Saints"?)
Choosing the title of the article for a church is a separate issue, though of course affecting our decisions on sort keys. Perhaps we should keep this discussion to questions of "How do we sort articles on churches, given the range of formats of title they have?", rather than diverting into "How do we decide which title to give an article?" Just, please, remember always to create redirects or dab page entries from all plausible forms of the church name, to help our readers to find the church article (I think they are much more likely to use a different title than to go looking at categories, which they won't even see if they're on a mobile phone), and also to reduce the chance of a duplicate entry being created. PamD22:57, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
(edit conflict)A very good addition. Bear in mind though that the "Details" section, from which you quote, is a machine copy of a legacy database. The "4/267" looks like an artifact from this. "TQ 7469 NW" is the OS map on which it is found (I strongly suspect the old 2½" series) and 24.10.50 is the listing date. Generally I find that the formatted part of the entry (top matter and Location) are more up to date, in this instance showing the district as Medway (Unitary Authority) which didn't exist in 1950. Courtesy link: 1107886Martin of Sheffield (talk) 08:12, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
Having thought it through (and this conversation has improved my thinking), I conclude that my preferences are exactly the same as Redrose64, though for completeness I'd also add:
[[Category:Churches in Bartonshire|Barton, Saint Foos Church]]
(which would also apply to "19th-century churches in Bartonshire", "Grade II listed churches in Bartonshire", "Churches designed by Sir Bartholomew Foo-bar" – i.e. any category that includes only churches, but with multiple dedications and places). To answer @PamD: The NHLE list (with which I'm all too familiar) appears to have been sourced from OCRed paper documents – I've found numerous transcription errors of the type you'd expect (lower-case L for the digit 1, etc.). Thus I've always assumed the "4/267" code is probably some (right-aligned?) internal reference number that has been inadvertently OCRed into the general flow of text. Whenever I submit a correction to NHLE, they generally tidy up the "Details" section of the record while they're at it (example). Dave.Dunford (talk) 09:06, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
In terms of the arguments I'd point out that unlike things like school and tourist attractions that the name if often well known but the location may not be I'd point out that parish churches generally come with the location and the location is generally well understood and usually the only thing most readers will know. Look at Suffolk Churches for example, if you look at St Mary, Woolpit most readers are only going to know the location and most churches are usually referred to as "Location Church" such as "Woolpit Church" not "St Mary's Church" so while the location may not be part of the name its usually the only thing readers will know so there is a reasonable argument for using location so it could be argued {{DEFAULTSORT:Woolpit, Mary}} is better that the current consensus of {{DEFAULTSORT:Mary, Woolpit}}. With other types of buildings I'd agree with what Mhockey said on Commons in that how it it defined especially since its often not known and things like schools and tourist attractions often say they are in a larger settlement even though they aren't even in the administrative division never mind settlement such as Hill Hall being in Theydon Mount parish but often said to be "in" Epping or Royal Hospital School being in Holbrook parish even though its often described as being "in" Ipswich. So if we did sort other places this way it would require the reader to know/guess the "location" which would not generally be helpful and as noted people who know the location would probably look in the location category/article. Crouch, Swale (talk) 08:06, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
@Crouch, Swale: No, I don't think there is a "current consensus of {{DEFAULTSORT:Mary, Woolpit}}". I haven't seen anyone on en.wiki (as opposed to Commons) suggesting it, and I haven't seen it in use in any categories I've looked at. Churches have been sorted either by the title of their article (with "Saint" spelled out), or by location. Commons has different challenges, different situations - as you say, they are sorting categories - and what they do over there is not really relevant to what is appropriate for the readers of en.wiki. PamD08:21, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
@PamD: That's the current consensus on Commons per the 2018 discussion, I'm not sure what's different about Commons categories to WP articles, a WP article is broadly equivalent to a Commons category so while this may not be consensus on WP it does seem reasonable to follow it absence of any consensus here. Crouch, Swale (talk) 08:28, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
Do "Most readers" use categories at all? If so, why are they not offered on the mobile interface, which is what most readers probably use. PamD08:21, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
No they probably don't since they appear at the bottom of a page but those that do are affected by this and I suspect more use Commons categories since that's where we generally point them. Crouch, Swale (talk) 08:28, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
Not all users or editors are from the UK or are familiar with church nomenclature. Making a special rule here is a complicated solution to a problem that doesn't exist. No one is confused by the order of Category:Churches in Dorset. Fuddle (talk) 13:55, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
@Fuddle: Not confused, but noticing an inconsistency - look at the St Aldhelm's Chapel and Church entries - one has the apostrophe in the DEFAULTSORT (correct I believe) and the other not, so they file wrongly. Just shows the pitfalls. PamD16:59, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
Not confusing (and better than a mixture, as I've said elsewhere), but it's not particularly logical either. Fleet Old Church is listed under F and Holy Trinity Church, Fleet, is listed under H. Churches in Dorchester are listed under A, C, H and S. Upwey's two churches are listed under S and U. Unrelated churches that share nothing but their dedication are, however, next to each other. Someone looking for the church in (say) Abbotsbury but who doesn't know the dedication will either have to use their browser search facility or scan the whole list. Dave.Dunford (talk) 18:35, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
But that could be true of any article in any category. Those are the names they have.
Those are the names they have. Point taken. But I'd refer you back to my surname/first name analogy. I see categories as analogous to the index of a book. And in the index of a (hypothetical) book about churches, I would expect to find the churches listed by place, which I personally would find much more usable than your solution. In reality, hardly anyone would look up a church by its dedication. Dave.Dunford (talk) 09:34, 10 June 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps that is how you search. Certainly not how I would think to search a category, unless there was something to clearly indicate the organization is by location rather than name. older ≠ wiser09:43, 10 June 2022 (UTC)
@Mhockey, Motacilla, and RexxS: I would say with the likes of Commons:Category:English Farm, Nuffield I'd agree with Mhockey's point about readers having to guess the location and unlike churches the names of farms are generally known by the name, would many people really expect "English Farm" to be indexed as "Nuffield"? I can't think why I'd expect to find it under "N" rather than "E" especially since its not even in the village of Nuffield. I can't think why people would even call it "Nuffield Farm" often. I certainly can see the logic in sorting Commons:Category:Church of St Mary the Virgin, Stone as that's how parish churches are often known namely "Stone Church". Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:44, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
Has this discussion reached a consensus? 100+ church articles have just been re-sorted according to their name 4 days after this conversation. If I can add 2 more cents: According to WP:SORTKEY: "In some categories, sort keys are used to exclude prefixes that are common to all or many of the entries." As most categories for English churches are their counties or countries, then those churches are sorted based on their location. Church names are very problematic, they can be called the "Church of ...", "Saint .... Church" or "Town Denomination Church". For example, look at "Category:Gothic Revival church buildings in London", where All Saints Church, West Dulwich is the first one just because it has the word "church" in its title. The exception would be when the category is the home town of the church, e.g. "Category:Buildings and structures in Weston-super-Mare" where an article's name is its sortkey for that category. Sacred Heart Church, Liverpool was a good example, before its re-sorting today. Where are we all with this? Is it closed? Cardofk (talk) 15:12, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
Having started this discussion when I noticed Fuddle's editing project on my watch list, I'm at a loss as to how we should go forward. There is not unanimity. There is inconsistent past practice which Fuddle is working to change in their preferred direction. This touches on the interestes of several Wikiprojects: Categories, Christianity, Architecture, UK, UK geography, and of course all the "child" projects thereof - different denominations, different counties etc. Of course there are churches elsewhere too, but Category:Churches on the National Register of Historic Places in Massachusetts shows no sign of sorting by location, though the "change St. to Saint for the sort key" rule has been applied in most but not all cases, and nor do Category:Churches in Corsica and Category:Churches in County Kilkenny, and I think we could reasonably restrict the discussion to churches in the UK.
I began by asking "Is there a guideline, policy, discussion, anywhere about this which establishes our practice for DEFAULTSORT for (UK?) churches one way or the other?". The answer seems to be "No guideline or policy, several previous inconclusive discussions". Would an RfC be useful at this stage: an RfC which actually closes with a consensus? With the consensus arrived at then recorded in some appropriate place or places so that we don't go round the loop again? Or, otherwise, how do we get to have consistently-sorted categories? PamD20:09, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
For info: The previous en.wiki discussions people have found and mentioned above are:
I too would support (and obey) an official opinion – though even if I disagreed with it I wouldn't refer to it as "rogue". Dave.Dunford (talk) 12:24, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
1. I agree with Dave.Dunford's wise comment earlier that people are more likely to know a church by the name of its location than by its dedication, if it has one. Further, some Anglican churches currently have no dedication. They may have had one centuries ago, but it is long lost. And cathedrals all have dedications, but relatively few people know them and even fewer use them in normal conversation, with a few exceptions such as "St Paul's" in London and "St Peter's Basilica" in Rome. Normal usage is to say "Chichester Cathedral" or "Durham Cathedral", without having a clue what patron saint or saints it may have. Where the same place has more than one cathedral, common practice is to distinguish them by denomination, not dedication. People say "Liverpool Anglican Cathedral" or "Liverpool Catholic Cathedral".
2. In places that have more than one church of the same denomination, such as cities or large towns, people are more likely to know the dedications of churches in order to tell them apart. For example, I would expect people in Henley-on-Thames to refer to "St Mary's" or "Holy Trinity", to tell the two parishes apart. But in a large town, practice may be mixed. For Example, in Worthing one would refer to "St Paul's" or "Christ Church" in the town centre, but further out one would say "Broadwater Church" or "Tarring Church".
3. Some previous comments have referred to the discussion of this topic on Wikimedia Commons. Some users had been alphasorting churches on Commons by place rather than dedication, before I even joined the project, more than a decade ago. I saw the practice, saw the good sense in it and copied it. But one user, who lives in a large city (see point 2. above), launched a long, aggressive and intimidating cyber-bullying campaign against me to stop me from following established practice. Only after a year or two did he seek, and get, a community consensus. That consensus was reached on strength of numbers, not strength of argument. And in the discussion, it was asserted that Commons should do its own thing, regardless of what English Wikipedia does.
4. The same church will appear in several categories. In, for example, a list of "Grade II listed churches", or "19th-century churches", or "Gothic Revival churches", "Anytown Baptist Church", "Anytown Methodist Church" and "Anytown URC Church" will all be consecutive. Do you want Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in the same town to be consecutive with them, or scattered elsewhere in the list?
5. On Commons this controversy cost me a mental health crisis and thousands of pounds worth of private mental health care. Since then I have all but given up donating photos of churches (or pubs, for that matter) to Commons, let alone sorting them. I look forward to the matter being resolved more respectfully and to a higher standard here on Wikipedia. Motacilla (talk) 07:58, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
Rather than start an RfC and then find there are further points to discuss, I've drafted one at User:PamD/rfc draft. Please comment on its talk page if you think it should be amended - this is the first time I've started an RfC, but as the initiator of this lengthy discussion I think it's probably my job to do so now, in the hopes that we can come to a consensus and move forward together to improve the encyclopedia. All being well I'd expect to launch the RfC tomorrow, and will notify the five main relevant WikiProjects to whose editors it may be of interest (Christianity, Architecture, UK, UK geography, Categories) I hope we can calmly reach a closure of the RfC which will enable us to move towards consistent sorting in categories, and to avoid future to-and-fro good-faith editing of DEFAULTSORTs Thanks. PamD10:01, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
Minimum membership
I've come across a few categories which contain only one member article (e.g. Category:Montreal Royales players). I can't seem to find whether there is anything requiring that a category contain a certain number of articles in order to justify its existence. If that criterion exists somewhere, I would appreciate being directed to it. Thanks. Dennis C. Abrams (talk) 13:04, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
Yes, there's no fixed number, but 5 is normally thought enough. The one you link to presumably has "potential for further expansion" though. Or perhaps not, given they only played 9 games, in 2003. A deletion nom would probably succeed. Johnbod (talk) 17:42, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
Is there a way to sort something so it appears in a category under a name that is not the article name?
So the page Canada Soccer National Development Centres is a soccer/football program that has teams competing in different leagues under various names based on the province they're in (NDC Ontario, PEF Quebec, Vancouver Whitecaps Girls Elite). I have their various leagues in the category, but when you go to the category it shows the main article name. For example, in Category:League1 British Columbia clubs, is there any way to make it appear as Vancouver Whitecaps Girls Elite instead of Canada Soccer National Development Centres? RedPatch (talk) 01:01, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
If you put the category on a redirect rather than on the article itself, it will appear within the category under the redirected title. See Wikipedia:Categorizing redirects for how to do this and under what circumstances you should or shouldn't do it. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:40, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
If a set category has enough articles to merit a category (such as people from a place or songs by a band etc) its likely the category would have enough scope for expansion, for example a place that is large enough to have a people from category probably would have enough articles about it or could be written about it that it wouldn't likely be deleted per WP:SMALLCAT.
It otherwise makes no sense to deleted the topic category but retain the set category.
Arguments for deleting the topic category like too small, overlap or subjective etc would likely apply to the sub category.
It may instead make more sense to merge the set category to the parent category instead.
I agree with the points made by Marcocapelle: there is no requirement at all for a set category to have a topic category parent. The general rule of thumb for musicians established over many cfds was that topic categories with fewer than 4 set subcategories (eg songs, albums, members, tours) were at risk of deletion. It makes a great of sense to delete topic categories with few set subcats: serving no purpose would be the reason. Category:Langley Park, County Durham should be rearranged with a buildings and structures set subcat and articles which allude to Langley Park trivially such as an album (From Langley Park to Memphis - not categorised under Memphis, I note) should be removed. Merging a set category to a topic category is a step in quite the wrong direction. Oculi (talk) 17:21, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
@Oculi: Can you provide an example of one of these CFDs please? If a musician has set subcategories for songs, albums, members, tours etc and there are not a lot of entries the best thing would surely be to merge all or some of the subcategories to the topic category. With settlements and similar if you have a place that only has a few articles you don't need buildings or landforms etc subcategories, all articles for a particular place should be put in the topic category with the exception of people who normally are put in a "People from" category. Per WP:DIFFUSE and WP:OCMISC its often not desirable to have such set categories. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:46, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
I have hunted down a bunch of these former country emigrant categories. A few are very poorly named, such as most of the sub-contents of Category:German emigrants to the United States. I am not sure there is an easy way to organize that category. I am thinking that we need to distinguish pre- and post- 1870 emigration, not use the by sub-unit categorizes after 1870, and make the meaning of some of these categories more clear. I think using Emigrants from x to y will make things much clearer, and I think the clarity is worth the added length.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:07, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
I would do it myself, but a large number of those who came to Britain from India before 1947 fall under topics that I am not currently allowed to edit.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:52, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
How to categorize an organization with fraudulent claims
Hi, I could use some help with International Magicians Society. It appears to be a real organization, with a lot of grandiose claims on its website about having tens of thousands of members, being written up in Guinness World Records, etc. Where I'm having trouble with a category though is that the "real" founding date is probably 1994, but the society is claiming it goes back to 1968. Or maybe 1964. So which year should I put in the category? Or should I just remove them for now, and sort things out later? --Elonka01:55, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
I recommend categorizing based on content added to the article that is backed by reliable sources. If it is unclear, then summarize how it was categorized in a section on the article's talk page. I suspect there is the founding date based on when the group decided to start, perhaps as an idea, and then when it was officially formed with bylaws and became a registered entity, which may be much later. Semper Fi! FieldMarine (talk) 12:31, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
Change 'countries' to 'sovereign states'
I recommend that we change all categories with "Countries" in them, to "Sovereign states". That way, we won't have any disputes about whether England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, should be included or not. GoodDay (talk) 05:54, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
I think an RM would be the best way to go on this. There's other non-sovereign states that are categorised as countries, too. It's time to clarify this area. GoodDay (talk) 06:16, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
Seems like overall it would cause more problems than it solves. Plus, the more streamlined name of "countries" seems preferable. Recommend adding language into the description if there's issue about what the category includes. Semper fi! FieldMarine (talk) 13:05, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
For Clarification, can you please link the category in question to this discussion, and if many cats involved, the top level parent cat? Thanks. Semper Fi! FieldMarine (talk) 14:36, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
Removal of Northern Ireland etc. has solved this problem and now Scotland and Wales do not need to be added. I am considering creating a seperate category of non-sovereigngn countries of Europe. Titus Gold (talk) 14:24, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
I oppose in general. Countries is a much simpler, shorter and more common term than sovereign states. Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England are mainly called countries within the UK itself. They should usually be omitted from international country categories, especially when United Kingdom is already in the category. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:50, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
Are we at least in agreement, that England, Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland should be excluded from these categories? GoodDay (talk) 20:51, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
Not a great change imo. Although "country" can be ambiguous, "sovereign state" is not much better and could be worse in some cases, i.e. Taiwan and Kosovo can be described as countries, but whether they are sovereign states is the subject of a great deal of strife. The cats also have to cover historical eras, before the concept of sovereignty was developed. If exactness is required, UN member states is a better criterion (at least for recent decades). (t · c) buidhe01:35, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
In practice, "country" is far worse a word than "sovereign state". We've previously had to move entire articles to remove the word "country" simply because of continuing disruption similar to that which prompted this discussion. (And there is no escape from strife by describing Kosovo and Taiwan as countries sadly.) CMD (talk) 09:00, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
Probably not going to get a perfect word to use that captures all possibilities, so I would recommend a cat description, something like, "Counties including sovereign states". The exact wording can be refined as people have good ideas to capture what the category includes. Semper Fi! FieldMarine (talk) 15:41, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
I think some of this depends on how we want to categorize colonies and dependencies, and if we want a general category that includes the United Kingdom and British India in some joint category in 1880, and how that reflects in our categories overall.
In a similar manner, I think the issues on the lines between nationality and ethnicity are more blurred than we sometimes realize. Some of the mess there just gives me a headache thinking about it.John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:30, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
Request for Comment on sorting of UK churches in categories in English Wikipedia
How should UK churches be sorted in categories in en.wiki? For background, including links to previous inconclusive discussions, please see the section #DEFAULTSORT for churches above. Note that articles on UK churches have a wide variety of title formats. Consider St Chad's Church, Far Headingley, but also:
(It is of course possible that some of these should have other article titles).
The practice of expanding "St" or "St." to "Saint" is mandated by WP:SORTKEY and appears uncontroversial, so "Sort by article title" or similar, in this RfC, can be taken to mean "Sort by title with "St" expanded to "Saint" (and with a leading "The" removed in rare cases)".
The only existing guidance on sortkeys appears to be that at WP:SORTKEY, which includes the option that "Systematic sort keys are also used in other categories where the logical sort order is not alphabetical (for example, individual month articles in year categories such as Category:2004 use sort keys like "*2004-04" for April). Again, such systems must be used consistently within a category.". There is no one Wikiproject dedicated to UK churches, though they come within the interests of many Wikiprojects: Christianity and its denominational subprojects; Architecture; United Kingdom; and UK geography and its country, county or regional subprojects. Categories is also relevant. There seems no obvious place to record the consensus with which this RfC will close, but an archived RfC lodged in the wiki-memory of a variety of editors will be useful. If agreement can be reached, we can (a) move towards consistent sorting within categories and (b) avoid conflict between editors and time wasted in changing DEFAULTSORTs. PamD06:46, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
Discussion
Please express your preference within each of the three groups of options below:
Not 1A, but choice of 1B/1C will depend upon whether the category name is for a specific dedication (in which case 1B), a particular location (in which case 1C) or neither (in which case other factors can be considered). Not 2C, but choice of 2A/2B will depend upon the nature of the category - if the cat is primarily about a location, and contains a variety of objects linked to that location, 2B would be inappropriate and I would go with 2A on that (but there may be circumstances where 2B is appropriate). 3A, definitely. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:17, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
1B is the obvious choice here. 2A would be choice for other categories that are not predominantly churches. 3B as that will cover the most categories in the article, the few left can be overridden. Keith D (talk) 13:05, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
Users expect articles in categories to be in alphabetical order. The single-letter anchors reinforce that. If churches need to be arranged by place, that can be accomplished by a list article like List of churches in London. 1A, 2A, 3AFuddle (talk) 13:21, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
1B, 2A, 3A. Sorting by article title (which means, effectively, by dedication) in church categories (option 1A) means that most churches can only be found if you already know the dedication (if you don't know the dedication of Foohampton Parish Church, you won't be able to find it except by searching the page for "Foohampton", or scanning the whole list). It also means that two churches in the same place (e.g. "Foohampton Methodist church" and "St Bartholomew's Church, Foohampton") do not appear together, whereas churches that share nothing but their dedication will, arbitrarily, appear adjacently. The argument that users expect articles in categories to be in alphabetical order has some merit, but it's effectively analogous to sorting people by their first names, and will have to be broken anyway for articles titled "Church of..." and "Parish church of...". Furthermore, under such a scheme, cathedrals (e.g. Durham Cathedral) and churches without dedications (e.g. Westgate Methodist Chapel) will be illogically and inconsistently ordered. It also means that most church categories will have lots of entries under "S" and very few elsewhere (though that is a secondary consideration). Dave.Dunford (talk) 14:07, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
1B, 2?, 3B. In the quoted example of Category:Headingley I will accept that location first may not be optimal but this is only the case for a strictly limited area. In all other cases the B option seems to be the best. Dedication is always problematic, many Free Church chapels do not have a dedication and may instead be known by the address: consider Stream Road Methodist Church, Kingswinford. Consideration should also be given to routinely including the denomination, for instance it might be relevant to point out that Cheadle, S Giles is actually RC, not CofE. I've checked Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers which list a large number of CofE churches in England, along with some RC and some outside England. Their style is "<location>, <dedication>", they've been doing it for 70 years and are considered a standard reference source for bell ringers. The CofE's "a church near you" website uses a mixture but predominantly "<location>, <dedication>", I do notice however that they list "Rochester Cathedral" rather than "Rochester: Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary"! Martin of Sheffield (talk) 16:53, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
Firstly, thank you PamD for putting in the effort to move this discussion towards a consensus and decision. At first, I could understand why sorting a church based on its name made sense, a name is a name after all, but then I saw Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer and St Thomas More, Chelsea, which is sorted to the word "Church", and how the sorting it according to place name would just be more logical. Therefore, I choose : 1B, 2A, 3B. Cardofk (talk) 21:27, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
1B, 2A, 3A/B makes sense to me provided that articles are named consistently and the sort key can be found in the title. I have encountered various articles over the years where the sort key has no relation to anything in the title, rendering the article impossible to locate in category listings, something like "St. Peter's Church, Factorytown" being sorted under "Manchester" because the former town of Factorytown was at some point absorbed by Manchester. Either the article should be renamed or it should be sorted under the locality in the title.-- choster (talk) 15:02, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
1B, 2C, 3B, 1 I'm not sure about but most people will probably only know the location, 2 definitely shouldn't be B 3 probably for the same reason as 1 most people only know the location of churches and that's almost always tied to them, the same cannot generally be said for other buildings like schools or places of interest where the location is often stated as a larger better known nearby place. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:20, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
1A, 2A, 3A, with the proviso that if the article title is "Church of.." the article should be sorted to ignore "Church of". These seem to be cogent arguments:
As a general principle articles should be sorted in the order that is least surprising to the user.
Sorting by location begs the question of which location to use. Far Headingley, Headingley or Leeds? Ecclesiastical parish or village? Sorting by location is only useful to a user who knows not just the actual location but the location name adopted by WP, leaving the user to guess.
Sorting by dedication does not work for churches which have no dedication - dedications are usual (but not universal) for Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, but not for other denominations.
Why should churches in the UK be sorted differently from churches in other countries?
Why should churches be sorted differently from other buildings strongly linked to or identified with a particular community, e.g. schools or hospitals? You may know that there is a school or hospital (or church) in a location, but not know the name of it. But that cannot be a reason for not sorting the article by its name.
Sorting by name would mean a large number of articles in the S section of a category, but why should that make it harder to find the right church? Within S churches are sorted by dedication, and within the same dedication, sorted by location.
The argument in favour of location seems to be that many users will not know the formal name or dedication of a church in a particular place, so the article should be sorted as if the article named St Chad's Church, Far Headingley was named Far Headingley Parish Church. But that is not the article name, and should not be unless "Far Headingley Parish Church" satisfies WP:COMMONAME. If the user does not know the name of the church, but only the location, he can find the article in the same way as any article for which he is unsure of the name, e.g. through location categories, list articles or the article on the location. --Mhockey (talk) 23:04, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
Churches are often referred to as "Location church" even though they may be called by the dedication in sources. IMO WP:SORTKEY can be more lax than WP:COMMONNAME about what the reader may know/expect since although the dedication is used by sources its often not known by most readers. I completely agree with other buildings that readers would have to guess the location of which they often wouldn't know but that's not normally a problem for churches where the location in normal speech is attached to the church. Crouch, Swale (talk) 09:14, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
If by the "location in normal speech is attached to the church" you mean that in normal speech a church is known as "Location church" or "Location parish church", surely if it is supported by evidence then that should be the article title, following WP:COMMONNAME. That is how articles on cathedrals are usually named, rather than by their dedication. But sorting as if the article had a different title seems to me to be a confusing half-way house, as though you wish it had a different title but cannot find the evidence to change the title. Mhockey (talk) 20:44, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
What readers refer to topics isn't necessarily the same as what reliable sources refer to a topics as (which COMMONNAME is mainly about). While I agree per the principal of least astonishment normally the sort key should be close to article title I don't think this is always needed, think about Isle of Bute or The Bahamas where we would not expect to find "Isle of Bute" under "I" except at Category:Buteshire. Crouch, Swale (talk) 21:32, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
Comment, leaning towards 1B, 2A, 3B but with caveats. I've been looking through subcats of Category:Grade I listed churches in Wales (i.e. the "UK church" type of category mentioned in the nom). One of the main issues that comes up is with article titles which don't have any disambiguation, either because the dedication is (presumably) unique or because that church is presumed to be the primary topic for the dedication or the name:
Then there's all the idiosyncratic names at Category:Grade I listed churches in the City of London, the vast majority without disambiguation (at least as Wikipedia thinks of it), and with 40 out of 45 beginning with "St". What to do there? Accept the anarchy of so many of them being sorted under S, and modify 1B to something like "by location, if the article title disambiguates by location with a comma"? Ham II (talk) 19:10, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
At least some of these oddities are because of page moves – e.g. it was you who moved St Hillary's Chapel [4] and left a sort key (Denbigh) that was no longer part of the page name.
In the City of London example, I would change the 3 inconsistent ones (St Helen's and 2X St Olave's) to sort by page name like all the rest. – FayenaticLondon15:49, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
While I'd agree the name of the settlement is common usage I don't think we need to disambiguate unambiguous ones but then yes that raises the issue of sorting by something which isn't even in the title which is not ideal. Crouch, Swale (talk) 16:14, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
RfC: should templates and template categories roll up into related content categories
The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
There is consensus among participants here that neither templates nor template categories should be featured in content categories. While those supporting the proposal make the argument that this would help editors find templates related to the topic they are navigating through (eg.: Southeastern Conference football templates within Southeastern Conference football), those against the change raised the points that content categories are focused on helping readers, not editors.
The general sentiment is that editors should be capable of navigating the template category tree and that connecting it to the content category tree would be a disservice to our readers. Some mentioned having at least the navigational boxes present within content categories could be helpful to readers, but that was countered by the fact that those are already transcluded to the related articles. (non-admin closure) Isabelle🏳🌈02:38, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
Support – Discovering a subject-related template if that template is not allowed to be in that subject's category is almost impossible. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:13, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
I always thought of cats as a tool / navigation aid mainly for users of the encyclopedia not content creators. It seems the addition of templates in cats would cause confusion for the everyday reader. Semper Fi! FieldMarine (talk) 02:44, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Even if such template category was erroneous found alphabetically in the content category... it would NOT make it harder to find the football team article want, because any given topic-- like college football-- always has many more has many more articles than it has templates, etc.
Furthermore, having access to related navigation templates right there would make it easier to find what you want, even if it is not in the best place, because the using the templates inside would be another option to help find the article you want.tahcchat19:50, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Support - templates are visible on pages which the reader can see, unlike maintenance categories (which are hidden by default). I don't see why anyone should be confused by the inclusion of templates (sorted together under 'tau') in article categories. Oculi (talk) 12:28, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Oppose: Articles are what Wikipedia creates. Everything else (templates, categories, files, policies & guidelines, drafts, etc) is only a tool to aid in such work, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, but always to some degree. It makes sense to keep the finished products and the tools organized in independent ways. Besides, the OP says that they "often" contain content and place an example, but that's an exception rather than the norm. The vast majority of navigation templates are just a visually nice and well-organized raw list of "see also" links. Cambalachero (talk) 17:22, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Support - Clearly templates including the template categories and templates in the topical so-called "article" categories. It is all beneficial and detrimental. Making templates hard to find makes as much sense as prohibiting the templates themselves. tahcchat19:27, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Oppose. Templates are for editors, not something to expose to users. If editors struggle to find templates, there are other solutions which should be improved instead. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 13:09, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
@Barnards.tar.gz: My sense is that categories are also utilized disproportionately by editors over read-only users. Does anyone have data on this? What other solutions do you have in mind? Jweiss11 (talk) 04:54, 14 September 2022 (UTC)
Category:Wikipedia_templates_by_topic is mentioned in this discussion and is what I was referring to by "other solutions". If that approach isn't adequate, I would prefer to discuss how to improve it, rather than compromise the reader experience. Fundamentally, templates are backstage. If you will forgive the analogy, Disney doesn't put its service tunnels on the guest map. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 09:11, 14 September 2022 (UTC)
I recall an inconsistency (if not full disagreement) between WP:CAT#T and WP:Tau (perhaps Help:Template#Categorization at some point?), but there appears to be a direct note today that says "don't put templates in content categories" there. As with many of the others opposing, I fully agree that templates should not appear directly in a content category and so oppose the main question, primarily per David Eppstein and DB1729. I am somewhat more ambivalent on placing template categories into content categories, but still I think at least a weak oppose in that scenario for similar reasons. --Izno (talk) 17:56, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
Support. I disagree that templates are only for editors; they're for readers too. The removal of navigation templates from the mobile view is unfortunate. Templates should be included in template categories within the corresponding content category; however they should not be directly within the content category. —Lights and freedom (talk ~ contribs) 04:50, 17 September 2022 (UTC)
Oppose - Template pages are editor-facing, not reader-facing. Even navigation boxes which appear verbatim in all articles which use them are nothing more than a means of transcluding their content on many pages. Animal lover|666|19:29, 17 September 2022 (UTC)
Oppose The vast majority of readers don't know what a template is and have no reason to want to see one. If a reader clicks a category link at the bottom of an article, it is likely that they're looking for articles on related topics, and that's all that would be useful to them. Further, if the article they're starting from is core to the category and there's a navigation template for that category, then they're already seeing the template embedded in the article and don't need to see its source. Largoplazo (talk) 10:52, 18 September 2022 (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.
@Redrose64: According to WP:CAT, stub categories (eg.: Argentina stubs) are administrative categories (see WP:PROJCATS), so this consensus would, in theory, not preclude the addition of template categories (eg.: Argentina stub templates) to them. Though, if the community feels that this particular case – and other similar ones (eg.: should administrative categories be found within content categories?) – should be addressed so as not to cause confusion, I think a new discussion should be started here. Isabelle Belato🏳🌈09:27, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
The "Articles" subsection says, in part, "Categorization of articles must be verifiable. It should be clear from verifiable information in the article why it was placed in each of its categories." I assumed that "in the article" refers to the text (or body) of the article, so I removed a category and an infobox parameter from Constance Talmadge. Another editor reverted the removal, commenting "please check 'EXTERNAL LINKS'" in the edit summary. Should external links be considered in deciding whether categories are supported? Eddie Blick (talk) 01:24, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
And since external links are not held to quite as high a standard as article sources, I believe, you can't assume the link is reliable enough to support article material, of which categorization is I would suppose. So I'd say you really have to vet the ref, and it really has to used as a ref for article text, proving it has been vetted, because otherwise the reader doesn't know if it's really true that a person belongs in Category:Poltroons from Antarctica or whatever. Herostratus (talk) 22:23, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
Hello! I have a question related to WP:CATV—that is, this quotation from the guideline:
Categorization of articles must be verifiable. It should be clear from verifiable information in the article why it was placed in each of its categories. Use the {{Unreferenced category}} template if you find an article in a category that is not shown by sources to be appropriate or if the article gives no clear indication for inclusion in a category.
Does WP:SYNTH apply to the use of categories? That is, does there need to be a reliable source directly describing an article's subject as being of the category type?
So, the question becomes "does 'the article give [a] clear indication for inclusion in [those] categor[ies]'?" On the one hand, there is obviously verifiable information indicating that there were "multiple victims of firearm-related violence". But I cannot seem to find many sources clearly calling the Goetz shooting a "mass shooting." So, if WP:SYNTH applies, then the inclusion isn't appropriate. OTOH, to some extent, Wikipedia users define and create their own categories, and, while I can't quite put my finger on it, something seems potentially off about saying that a reliable source must describe an article's subject as belonging to a category that Wikipedia users invented.--Jerome Frank Disciple (talk) 17:00, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
I'd no problem finding many articles explicitly describing the Bernard Goetz shooting as a "mass shooting", usually in a list of mass shootings, sometimes as the incident that set off a series of mass shootings. See also the text in People v. Goetz. Note that the Boston massacre involved 5 deaths. The only question is whether the lower limit to qualify as "mass" is 2, 3, or 4 dead or injured. That is a matter of counting, not synthesis. Goetz hit 4 people with 5 shots. So no question about "mass shooting". But not a massacre as they survived. William Allen Simpson (talk) 17:48, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure why my Google results aren't turning up anything—I'm trying "Bernhard Goetz" and "mass shooting" in quotes, no such luck. As the principle author of People v. Goetz, I have to admit I don't know if that's the best source—if I added it, I probably just copied and pasted that portion (providing a brief background of the shooting) from the 1984 article, and it's unsourced regardless. That said, I tend to think it's probably correct to include the page in the categories. (Note this is discussed between me and another user here.)--Jerome Frank Disciple (talk) 17:55, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
RFC Input Request
For anyone willing to provide input, there's an RFC related to this question here, and any input would be greatly appreciated. The question is: "Should this article, concerning firearm-related violence with multiple persons injured, be included in the mass-shooting category, even though no sources directly refer to it as a mass shooting?" The key debate concerns whether "mass shooting" is a special term that requires labelling by a reliable source. Thanks in advance!--Jerome Frank Disciple (talk) 17:05, 14 April 2023 (UTC)
I have noticed that stub templates are included within their relevant category, for example {{Music-stub}} is included within Category:Music stubs. This is done automatically by Template:Asbox. However, as Category:Music stubs is a subcategory of Category:Music, these templates then become part of the content category tree. Is this something that should be changed? As an aside, while the wording at WP:PROJCATS is not the clearest, it seems that stub categories, though classified as administrative, are acceptable to be subcats of content categories? Thanks, S.A. Julio (talk) 06:50, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
Individual people are sorted by lastname, firstname; but bands are not individual people, they are more akin to organisations. Consider Jethro Tull (band): this is a band named after a real person, but that person was never a band member, nor indeed a musician (as far as we know). The above examples should be sorted as follows:
Gladys Knight and the Pips
Alan Parsons Project, The
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
These exhibit two adjustments: (i) to expand the ampersand to the word that it represents; (ii) to move the leading article to the end. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:27, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
Hi, I'd like to know what the difference is between sortkeys | ]], |*]], and |+]]. WP:SORTKEY does not explain the function or usage of |+]].
Why is it, for example, Category:Monarchs in Asia sorted like this?:
People would use an asterisk or a space mainly just to get an article to the top. It was (mostly) a matter of preference, plus a bit of pragmatism. Trying to get things to group.
Typically, the main topic article (or list), usually gets a space.
If there are a bunch of categories that need grouping together, generally people use the asterisk.
If you need more, the plus sign is available, I guess, but really, we should start to question why some are not just part of the asterisk group, or the alpha sort, or even sometimes adding another category tier in the tree for what might really be sibling cats.
Anyway, to your specific question, I don't see a reason for the + in this case, I'd combine them with the asterisk. - jc3714:06, 16 May 2023 (UTC)
Thanks! I'll do it right away. The + sortkey currently has no official status anyway as far as I can tell, and "Child monarchs" and "Women monarchs" probably should in the same * grouping. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 14:21, 16 May 2023 (UTC)
In an article about a geographical location (ex. town), can we add a category related to an event that happened there (a battle, massacre, disaster, etc.) if that event is mentioned in the article but doesn't have a stand-alone subarticle yet? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here04:38, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
I would say "no" not just because this is disallowed by WP:INCOMPATIBLE, but also because a battle or massacre (unless very large scale or famous) is unlikely to be WP:DEFINING for a geographical location. If it is that famous a stand alone article likely already exists. WP:INCOMPATIBLE suggests categorizing the redirect in this situation. (t · c) buidhe04:58, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
Personally I am not sure that is a good category title because 1) it does not explain what the relationship between the place and the Holocaust is and 2) it is likely to accumulate non-defining entries. In this case for example pretty much any location in the part of Europe reached by the Axis powers with a significant prewar Jewish population could be classified as a "Holocaust location" by those editors (many/most) who are not familiar with how categorization is supposed to work. (t · c) buidhe14:03, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
Do you think we should delete this category? I see the issue with non-defining/too excessive categorization, but on the other hand, it makes sense to find articles with relevant sections/content. Categorizing redirects makes sense but it does not play well, from the technical perspective, with {{interlanguage link}} for example, as a redirect would create a false impression that we have an article and disable this template (which otherwise links the readers to relevant articles on other wikipedias). PS. Related category: Category:Execution sites which I randomly notice includes Prague's Old Town Square is probably a good example of the overcategorization problem. Sigh. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here14:30, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
I think the related category needs purging but I'm not sure it needs deletion. "Execution sites" does seem like a WP:DEFINING characteristic of some of those pages, such as Kommunarka shooting ground. Maybe the category description should be updated to make it clear that this is sites dedicated to performing executions, not just any place where an execution occurred. - car chasm (talk) 19:33, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
When something belongs in a category, and also its parent
Not sure what the guidelines have to say about this, but I think there are some cases where an article should maybe be in a category, as well as its parent. Take Liburna, a type of ancient ship extensively used by the ancient Romans. But, it's not in Category:Ancient Roman ships. Why not? Because, I conjecture, it is in its parent cat Category:Ancient ships. As pointed out in the lead of Liburna:
It was originally used by the Liburnians, a pirate tribe from Dalmatia, and later used by the Roman navy.
I think in a case like this, it should be in both. Its kind of shocking *not* to see it in "Ancient Roman ships". What do you think? What's the right way to do this? There are other ships the Romans used, that either the Phoenicians or somebody else invented and used first; what should happen in these cases? Mathglot (talk) 00:48, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
More generally speaking, all members of any category should "belong" in its parent categories - that's what a WP:SUBCAT is, i.e. since all Ancient Roman ships are Ancient ships, we only put them in "Ancient Roman ships" and their membership of "ancient ships" is presumed by the fact that the whole category has that category on it. - car chasm (talk) 01:13, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
The Cherokee Nation has gained official recognition over several counties in Oklahoma, though this appears to be mostly ceremonial, as many communities within its boundaries have little connection to it. There is a content dispute at Talk:Taylor Ferry, Oklahoma, regarding the addition of Category:Cherokee Nation, to hundreds of populated places within the Nation's huge boundaries--despite many communities not even mentioning Cherokee Nation in its text. Your input is welcome. --Magnolia677 (talk) 14:00, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
There has been a proliferation of categories for people by century, ethnicity, and profession which I believe are basically category clutter. In many cases, they are so massive as to be not useful. Many articles have 5-10 such categories, which impedes navigation. Examples: there are ten "by century" categories at Kamala Harris. Even relatively short articles have a plethora of such categories. Violet King Henry has 6. There are over 24,000 articles in Category:21st-century American women, 5,906 articles in Category:20th-century African-American sportspeople, and 8,761 in Category:20th-century African-American people. If articles were fully populated with all of those which apply, I believe some articles could have 20 or more such categories. Do you find this schema useful? What can we do to avoid category clutter here?--User:Namiba16:38, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
The articles categorized under Category:Hoaxers are a real motley bunch. We have the authors of literary hoaxes like H. L. Mencken and Mike McGrady, orchestrators of academic hoaxes like Alan Sokal, satirists and "punkers" like Sacha Baron Cohen, mixed with Jussie Smollett, who was was found criminally guilty of a fraudulent police report, and Sabrina Erdely who was found liable in civil court for a defamatory piece of journalism. Doesn't seem quote right that bio articles are united under this category by the broad concept of a "hoax". Thoughts? Jweiss11 (talk) 23:17, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
Seems like a bad category. It's rare that coming up with a hoax is defining for a person who is independently notable from the hoax. Also, it's not always verifiable if they believed the nonsense or not. (t · c) buidhe03:22, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
Do we want to only categorize people by the country or entity they were soldiers, diplomats and judges for, or do we also want nationality cats regardless of country served?
In the case of politicians, soldiers, diplomats, judges, government officials and a few related categories there is an assumption that we categorize people by the country they did such things for.
So for example, it is thought that Category:American diplomats is for people who were diplomats employed by the US, Fench diplomats were diplomats employed by France, Yugoslav diplomats were employed by Yugoslavia, Diplomats of the Russian Empire were employed by the Russian Empire, etc.
The issue is though some people were nationals of the US, France, Yugoslavia, the Russian Empire or another place, but diplomats not for those counties.
This leads to 3 solutions.
1-French diplomats are diplomats who were nationals of or subjects of France, regardless of what country they served.
2-French diplomats were diplomats who were agents of or employed by France regardless of if they were nationals of France.
3-French diplomats are anyone who is either 1 or 2.
For the most part though almost all employees or or agents of a country are in some sense nationals of that country. So 3 is almost identical as 1.
We have 4 which is create both diplomats of France and French diplomats, where French diplomats by nationality would be that and non-nationals who served in the interet of France would be seperate.
Or 5, we default put people in diplomats of France, except if they are French nationals representing some other entity as a diplomat than France.
It might be worth considering who a French diplomats not a Diplomat of France would be. The most obvious choice is a diplomat for the UN. The next most obvious choice is a diplomat gor another country, say Spain, who was at least at some point a French national.
I am thinking that it would make .our sense to say for diplomats the person must have been an agent of the country mentioned. If they were an agent of a non-national entity we put the in UN diplomats etc. If they were an agent of another country, we put them in a diplomat cat for that country.
A person born in France as a French national, who works gor France, but later switches to working as a diplomat gor Italy would go in French diplomats and Italian diplomats. However if they only were a diplomat for Italy and never for France thry only belong in Italian diplomats.
If they are a diplomat for France, then move yo Italy, become an Italian national, but only work as a painter, writer, wine merchant or any other non-diplomat profession the only diplomat cat they belong in is French di9lomats.
This also means that basically all cases Italian diplomats are the same as diplomats of Italy, French diplomats are the same as Diplomats of France, New Zealand diplomats as the same as diplomats of New Zealand, etc.
This is my solution for diplomats. I do not think it is 100% how categories currently work, but it is probably the closest yo how we currently use categories.John Pack Lambert (talk) 02:06, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
Overlapping categories
with writers we treat nationality as the main default category, so that French-language writers does not include French writers. I think we need to clearly apply this rule to ethnicity. So that people in the Albanians category, which is a nationality Category, are not also in the Ethnic Albanians category. The one exception might be if they are in a subcat of Ethnic Albanians like Albanians in the Ottoman Empire, but not for by occupation subcats.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:39, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
I doubt ethnicity is defining for many ethnic Albanians except a few diaspora activists and historical / Ottoman related categories. (t · c) buidhe04:00, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
Occupations links to government
Judges, politicians, spies, diplomats, and military personnel are normally categorized by the government that they worked for. I think the way we should do this is 1-agree that French military personnel, French judges, Albanian diplomats, etc are for people who operated as such for the relevant country, 2-where possible use clear names, 3-if there are enough people who were nationals 9f a,country who did a linked occupation not for that country, create a by nationality category, but exclude the people who were employed by that country. For example maybe we would have Category:Diplomats of the United States, and then have Category:American diplomats and in the lead say this is for Americans who were diplomats, but only those who were not employed by the US.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:48, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
Wording of nationality and connection to sub-national cats
I would say that in general it is best to have only actually recognized States use nationality names. Places that are not recognized as country entities we generally want to use people from X forms, like musicians from Michigan. I think we should avoid denonyms even when universally accepted. Thus we have people from Bavaria, not Bavarian people. However if a form is widely used, like Bavaria, we need to assume that any Category that says Bavarian would include Bavarians doing that. If, as in the case of emigration, we want to exclude current Bavarians who fall under the Gean category for this from it, we need wording that makes that clear.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:20, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
Demonyms
I would say we should limit demonyms to national entities. Sub-national entities we most often use X people from Y from. I think in cases where the national level entity lacks a clear and unambiguous demonym that is widely known, we should also use X people from Y.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:25, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
The one exception is where we categorize by national entity worked for or employed by, where of Works. So military personnel if we treat these as the set of people in a given military can use the of form. However writers, businesspeople, scientists and artists do not. I think we need a clear decision on diplomats. There are enough diplomats working for organizations like the UN and other non-national entities, that we have some set of people who clearly are say French di0lomats but who never worked for the French government, but in no way were ever nationals of another country.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:33, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
It's quite confusing and unhelpful to post essentially the same topic a three separate discussion threads, and then fill them with replies to yourself. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 08:21, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
People living in Colonies from the controlling country
This is a,place where I think our current naming conventions are poor. I think, based on having reviewed this, that there are two rules. We have agelreed since we have British Emigrants to the British Empire, that we recognize movement from the controlling country to a clearly distinct Colony as emigration. We have odd precedents here though French emigrants to French Polynesia was killed because ostensibly movement from France to an oversees collective is not defining, but for past Colonies it is? I have yet to see someone clearly explain why they think this distinction makes sense. It might be a theory of ease of movement increasing over time, but British emigrants to British Hong Kong were happening until the end of 1996 or so. We do however have lots of people I ple who were clearly nationals of the controlling country who lived in a Colony but went back to the controlling country. They are not really expatriates though. I think ad long as there are enough articles on such people to justify a catehory we should call the category X people in Y country. So British people in British India. French people in French Algeria, German people in German East Africa, Belgian people in the Brlgian Congo, Dutch people in the Dutch East Indies etc.John Pack Lambert (talk) 22:34, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
Use people
I think we have come to agree that our categories are French people, Spanish people, American people, People from the Ottoman Empire etc. We still have some gaps in actually appliances this. Especially with Booian fooers. So the best form would be Category:Greek people from the Ottoman Empire, etc. We do not universally do this. We still have I think Serbians from the Ottoman Empire. We also have some of these categories that use in. This is my guess where we want to go. A-People from X country by ethnicity should have as subcats things name Y people from X. I think that maybe should be universal. B- this is district from X people of Y descent. Whether we really want both is case by case. In the US we have American people of Greek descent. I do not think we need Greek people from the United States. On the other hand we have Greek people from the Ottoman Empire but I am not sure we want to have People from the Ottoman Empitlre of Greek descent. The thing is at present when we go to occupations we drop people. So we have French people, French artists, French scientists, French chefs, French artists, French writers, etc. However we have Frwnch people of Ranian descent. We may need to make sure all the places we do not currently use people it is acceptable yo not use it.John Pack Lambert (talk) 22:18, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
I was going to say these cats should match the parent articles. Sometimes this is messy. British India actually goes to Presidencies and provinces of British India but we also have British Raj but I think what we want is to have 1 cqtehory for any British person who was resident in India under either Company or direct British rule, but not for those who were in India under French, Dutch, or Portuguese rule, or those who were in the fully independent Mughal Empire, or any entity that was not a British dependent. In some cases we have clear articles like Colony of Jamaica. I am not sure we have clear enough guidance to say who was British people in the Colony of Jamaica and who were just Colony of Jamaica people to have 2 categories. These people are not expatriates enough to call them such, but thry function like expatriates so in is the nest word to describe their relationship to the country they are in.John Pack Lambert (talk) 22:44, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
Nationality and place categories
I have been thinking about nationality, ethnicity and related categories. I have a few thoughts. First we start by accepting that we categorize people by the nnation they are subjects or nationals of. That brings up some key questions.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:54, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
The first key question is what counts as a nation we categorize people as citizens, subjects or nationals of. This generally needs to be a functioning state, at least that is the assumption for the present. In the past there are some cases like Ancient Greece that we use what amounts to a cultural regional nationals of that place test. In general we need to use such cases sparingly.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:57, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
The next issue is what entities can be considered distinct. This is where we could benefit from more discussion. There seems yo be a clear concensus that Mandatory Palestine is distinctcfrom later states. The same is accepted for the Ottoman Empire. I think a few editors try to merge too many past rntities with modern ones. The Austrian Empire was a clearly distinct state from modern Austia for example.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:02, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
Once we decide a state exists and it has nationals, we need yo determine if people were subjects of it. This is where things get tricky. The default assumption is people are mationals of the state they reside in. The reality is some do not for large periods of time. A few things need to be considered. This is a,measure of where you are a national of not ethnicity. People who are ethnically Greek living in Istanbul in 1885 are not by nationality Greek but nationals of the Ottoman Empire.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:09, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
Some former and extant states legally recognize someone's nationality as separate from citizenship. For example the Soviet Union recognized different nationalities such as Russian, Armenian, Jewish, etc. and in Czechoslovakia before WWII legally recognized nationalities included German, Jewish, Polish, Silesian, and so forth. I agree that there can be an issue with assuming someone's legal citizenship; without a source that says so it should be considered original research (t · c) buidhe06:16, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
The primary thing we are categorizing is the nation of state thry are citizens of. I think for the purposes of categorizing "nationslity" is meant to mean citizenship. Even if a country calls something "nationality" if it is not the direct connection to a recognized national level entity, we would call that ethnicity. For example German scientists are scientists who are nationals or citizens of Germany. If we have people who are citizens of another country, who are in some sense German, they are a distinct group, and we would not want to merge then into the category set up to include nationals of Germany who are scientists. Art present we use short and maybe less clear forms on the assumption this is the common name. We do need to keep in mind that categories group by shared trait, not shared name. For example in 1885 people referred to those in Turkey as Turskish, and by Turkey they meant the Ottoman Empire. So an 1885 source might refer to a man working in Tirana that year as a Turkush writer. However more recent scholarship has come to use Turkush for those connected with the new nation of Turkey formed in 1923, so our Turkush people and Tirkush people by occupation connect to people and things after that date.John Pack Lambert (talk) 22:07, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
Hmm, I'm not sure about that. The encyclopedia is anglocentric enough as it is without taking that the way we do things in most English speaking countries and applying it to the rest of the world and all of history. (t · c) buidhe01:38, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
Should categories contain the topic articles of their subcategories?
Regarding WP:SUBCAT, something I see quite often is that a category like Category:Cities in France will have subcats for many (sometimes all) of the cities (eg, Category:Paris), but also the topic article of that subcat (Paris). So this means this article is not diffused. I assume this is against principle, but I see it soooo often that I wonder that maybe my presumption is wrong?
I imagine it would be very easy for a novice editor to see that Paris is not in Category:Cities in France, and want to correct that. Likewise, the guidance seems to require the opposite, so removing it would seem sensible to many people. Either way, it would probably be good to explicitly make clear what to do one way or another. — HTGS (talk)00:01, 20 October 2023 (UTC)
The use of prepositions in categories seems fairly messy. I am trying to see if my proposal below might help things.
1- for various reasons some groups do not have a demonym or some demonym forms are too ambiguous. The following would apply where we do not gave a common and unambiguous demonym, or where a demonym is not clear what the group means.
2- the primary way we divide people in Wikipedia, at least those who lived in places where there were organized governments resulting in something like a nation, country, Kingdom, state etc. Is by the polity that they were nationals or subjects of. How narrowly or broadly this polity is defined, and what to call it when it changes name, or if it remains the same polity after a name change, are issues that may need discussion. When we do not have a good demonym form I think we should use People from Foo. Such as People from Bihemia, and People from the Russian Empire. Etc. I think this is preferably to treating the entity name as a demonym, so Russian Empire people is not in my view a good form. There may be some cases by case discussion needed. I think especially when a demonym exists in the name the from form is best. So People from the Dutch East Indies is better than Dutch East Indies people. That becomes hard to parse, is it Dutch people from the East Indies, or is it People from the Dutch East Indies? It is best to be explicit.
3. For by descent categories the form is People from Foo of Bar descent. People from the Russian Empire of French descent.
4- For ethnicity, the ethnic group needs to be long established and clearly resident in the place, or one who is not connected with a country. So in the Russian Empire example even if someone's parents left France a year before they were born, spoke French, and in every way were ethnically French, but they were clearly nationals of the Russian Empire they still go in People from the Russian Empire of French descent. If they were a national of France born in the Russian Empire who was in defining ways still a national of France they could go in French expatriates in the Russian Empire. That is a separate issue. However for some ethnic groups, in the Russian Empire case Ukrainians, Tatars, and Armenians come to mind we would have the category names Armenian people from the Russian Empire, Ukrainian people from the Russian Empire, Tatar people from the Russian Empire etc. While almost all these people would have lived in the Russian Empire that is not actually needed. If the person is clearly a national of the Russian Empire even though never living there are clearly identified as part of an ethnic group thry fit. However the later falls under ERGS rules and so should be reliably sourced and not just assumed. So a child of a diplomat for the Russian Empire born in France, who lived all their life in France, but was never considered to be French, whose family was ethnically Tatar, woukf fit in Tatar people from the Russian Empire. As I said I doubt there are many such cases. Another case of acceptable ethnic group categorization is Romani people. So we have Romani peiple from the Russian Empire etc. I am not even sure if there is a good way to put two demonyms in a category title, but if someone can fi d it that is a seperare issue.
5-most occupations will fit as Xians from Boo. This Writers from Austria-Hungary, historians from the Russian Empire, etc. We already use this form even in some demonym cases where it is not clear, thus Linguists from France.
6-In should be used for a-expatriates from one place elsewhere, this French expatriates in Germany or Expatriates from the Russian Empire in Switzerland. For expatriates and emigration/immigration categories a could solution to small cat is just having one side. So Expatriates in the Russian Empire or Immigrants to Yugoslavia can have direct contents, and we do not need to create every subcat we have at least one article for.
6a. In the case of people from the main country in a colony, we can use the in form, but they are not truly expatriates. Thus I think we should have for example British people in British Kenya. I know there has been a lot of back and forth, but I think in this case expatriates is not the right term.
6b. The other place we use in is where the catehory includes people regardless of what their connection to the country is. The most obvious is deaths in. We categorize people mainly by place of death. We do not care if they lived their all their life or were there for 2 hours before it happened. For example Deaths by cancer in Mexico includes people if they were in Mexico when thry died, no matter anything else. There are a few occupations we categorize this way as well. The test is that we need yo be grouping all the people who did the occupation in a certain country.
7. I think we need to move away from ever using of to connect someone to a place they were a subject/national of. We already have exploers of foo, like Exploers of Australia, that means they explorered there without regard to where they were a national of, hostorians of foo, like historians of France, which means their study of history focused on France,be they French, Russian, American, Malian or any other nationality, and there are others. I think the only cases we should use of to connect a person to a place is when that is their title, this Grand Dukes of Hesse, Kings of France, Queens of Denmark, Presidents of the United States, Attorneys General of North Dakota, Prime Ministers of Israel etc. I think it would be best to avoid other uses of of because it can be ambiguous.
8. I think in so.e cases we do need to link people in a category not by what country they were nationals or subjects of, but by what country they did the activity on the behalf of. If the issue is just thry did it in that country than we can use in. However for a wide variety of cases mantmy people do the thing for country X on country Y, but what mattwrs is they are agents acting for country X, much more than thry are in country Y. Examples of this are military persilonnel, some of which are called soldiers, diplomats and spies. So I think we would benefot from naming categories Soldiers for Italy, diplomats from the Russian Empire, military personnel for Mali, spies for Germany, etc. We might want to in some cases have intersect caregories which would be x for foo in y, but in many of these cases the people moved to so many countries, or operated in areas where what country they were in was not clear, so there is ambiguity.John Pack Lambert (talk) 14:55, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
That's a whole lot of descriptive text about what is done. Can you extrapolate, for easier digestion, a statement of what you see the problem(s) to be and what solution(s) you are proposing? In reading the last bit you wrote, we only need categories like "Soldiers of X", "Diplomats of Y", etc., when there are sufficent articles to categorize in them to make the category viable as a navigational/sorting aid. And whether someone might be in a category of "Spies for Z" doesn't really have anything to do with whether they are also in a "People of X" (or subcategory thereof) based on nationality. Plenty of Americans joined the French Foreign Legion which made them soldiers (or at least mercenaries) of France, but it didn't magically make them no longer be Americans. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 03:02, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
1) Could caste-related category pages have text added to clarify when these categories can be added to biographical articles? For example, text could be added to emphasize reliable sources are required, and per WP:CASTEID, that these sources should indicate caste self-identification and impact on the subject's life, and/or per WP:CAAP#DEFINING, that these sources should commonly and consistently refer to the subject's self-identification.
As an example, at the Category:Dalit politicians page, the text currently states, "Features politicians from the Dalit community." Perhaps this could be expanded to help make it more clear about when this category is appropriate to add to a biography article. Similarly, Category:Dalit artists states, "Artists from the Dalit community who made significant contributions to various art forms like literature, poetry, music, painting, etc."
2) Should there be no caste-related categories added to biographical articles, regardless of whether reliable sources exist for self-identification, and regardless of whether these sources indicate caste is impactful or defining in a biography? In other words, is there currently a broad consensus against the use of all caste-related categories for biography subjects?
I plan to notify WikiProject Categories and WikiProject India of this discussion after posting this. I have posted here because it may be beneficial to expand the Sensitive categories or other sections of the WP:PEOPLECAT guideline with clarification. Thank you, Beccaynr (talk) 14:44, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Excessive categories
I am thinking we should end most categories that intersect nationality, gender, profession and century. Way to many people lived and worked in more than one century for this quadruple intersection scheme to make sense. Per ERGS rules all these people also need to be in a gender neurmtral parent, so by having 20th and 21st century Salvadoran women's writers categories we Mandate its contents brme in 4 categories if they overlap. It would only be 3 if we did not have the by gender categories, Salvadoran women writers, 20th-century Salvadoran writers and 21st-century women writers. At least we should say to create an intersection of profession, nationality, crnt6ry and occupation, we have to have more specific gender neutral sub-cats. So in the example above if there were 20th-century Salvadoran journalists, 21st-century Salvadoran novelists, etc, than the 21stcentury Salvador women writers could work, but not without those gender neutral subdivisions of the 21st-century writers category. John Pack Lambert (talk) 02:49, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
No argument from me. Categories are the indices of WP, having to know which index to seek your information is counter-intuitive. Richhoncho (talk) 11:39, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
Meaning of sort-key prefixes before the alphabetical list
WP:SORTKEY gives a good list of the meanings of Greek sort-key prefixes that sort items after the alphabet. Is there / should there be a similar list for prefixes that bring items to the beginning of the list? I'm looking at Category:Diseases and disorders, where three items are listed under [space], one under !, two under *, and one under +. I can't work out why they are under these separate keys. For some, I can't see why they aren't simply placed in normal alphabetical order. It looks to be a bit of a mess. So I wonder,
Is there a pattern that I don't see (in which case, should this be explicitly added to SORTKEY)?
Would there be an appetite for tidying this up at the guideline level, or should it be set separately for each category?
SORTKEY already says Use other sort keys beginning with a space (or an asterisk or a plus sign) for any "List of ..." and other pages that should appear after the key article and before the main alphabetical listings, including "Outline of" and "Index of" pages. The same technique is sometimes used to bring particular subcategories to the start of the list. -- are you suggesting this needs some more explicit explanation about when to use these and what they mean? older ≠ wiser13:37, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
I think he means, specify under what circumstances to use each. If one is just picked at random, then the articles that are pushed to the beginning of the list will end up in a somewhat random order.Naraht (talk) 14:19, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
Because there are many different possible iterations of this, we pretty much leave that up to editorial discernment. Though of course, alpha-sorting on each (*, +, etc) is good practice. - jc3714:47, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
Thank you. Yes, I meant exactly as Naraht says. In the example I mentioned above, I didn't want to disturb the order if it was deliberate, but if it's left on a case-by-case basis I'll happily try to make it a bit tidier. Mgp28 (talk) 15:12, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
I don't think there's a consistent way in how these specific sort keys are used, and I don't think there can be one. However I nearly always check that they are consistent within the same category. As a general observation and * seem to be used for main article(s), including lists, and + for diffusion based on gender or geography, depending of the cases. I find it counter-productive when a dozen different non-alphabetical sort keys, and tend to regroup them when I find such a situation. Actually, that's a reason why a single consistent rule for the meaning of each sort key can't be applied: there a so many different logics of diffusion that if we assign a different predefined sort key to each of them, you will get categories with too many different sort keys used that it won't be practical. Better aim for local consistency. Place Clichy (talk) 15:43, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
G'day, despite having been on here for a while, I've never really "got" diffusing subcategories, and wondered if someone could explain the following to me in layperson's terms. Why would you need to categorise an article like Olivia Savvas in both Category:Members of the South Australian House of Assembly AND Category:Women members of the South Australian House of Assembly? I assumed that the latter is a subcategory of the former, and therefore covers it? Would you also categorise that article in Category:Women members of the Parliament of South Australia? Thanks in anticipation. Cheers, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 10:40, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
As for why: to avoid ghettoizing the people in these subcategories, which could cause them to become less visible when people look at the main category containing all the non-ghettoized people. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:58, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
‘Immigration’ means an action by which a person establishes his or her usual residence in the territory of the country for a period that is, or is expected to be, of at least twelve months, having previously been usually resident in another country.
‘Immigrant’ means a person undertaking an immigration. It applies to all nationalities including nationals of the country of destination. In the current analysis it does not apply to persons already living in the country who migrated in the past.
They do not have a distinct definition for the word ‘expatriate’, which is elitist.
This goes against what we've been reading here to justify retaining the current tree, namely that "most of these people do take citizenship". Frenchl (talk) 07:33, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
I don't think it makes sense to take the categorization debate based on one data point. that said, I'm generally in favor of merging immigrant and expatriate categories because the distinction is often not verifiable. (t · c) buidhe14:45, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
I also dislike the expatriate categories. Personally, I would not categorise anyone who only lived in another country for a year or two, but only those who made their homes there either permanently or for a substantial chunk of their lives. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:51, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
It seems to me that we are long long past the point where we need a rebuilt category system that can provide intersections automatically to readers without having them listed explicitly in articles, rather than having explicit five-way intersection subcategories like Category:19th-century African-American women singers (intersection of: century, ethnicity, citizenship, gender, and occupation). It is very tiresome having to track down all the intersection categories a newly created article might belong to and then to make sure it's properly represented in the non-diffusing ancestors and not listed in the diffusing ancestors. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:47, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
Isn't that, ideally, what Wikidata is for? Subjects should be categorized there; add a query language, and we're set to go. Largoplazo (talk) 02:14, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
Wikidata does seem to be a better place to store data. It has a large range of characteristics that are already coded for, and more could be added. The question would be which categories beyond the defining categories for each topic are useful on Wikipedia. My impression is "not much", but I am open to logical persuasion. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood(talk): 16:30, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
Dabulamanzi kaMpande
Dabulamanzi kaMpande died in 1886. South Africa was not formed until 1910. Another editor us trying to force placement in a South Africa Category because "former countries are nested in current categories". This is a very bad plan. This treats boundaries as natural instead of what they really are, politically determined. It is a bad plan. It only makes sense to limit a deaths in a particular country Category to people who died in the country in question. We should not be retroactively applying countries onto the past. This is a very, very, very bad plan. It will cause way more drama in the long run.John Pack Lambert (talk) 01:12, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
I am thinking for most people the place of burial is not defining to the biography. I think unless we can show that it is, we should limit placement of biographical articles into burial categories to cemetery. I do not think that the group of people buried in Michigan, or Montana, or Argentina, or anywhere else is a defining group, I think the only defining groups are people buried in specific cemeteries, with each cemetery basically someone having to show how being buried there is considered a defining case, or a few other cases, such as British monarchs buried abroad, maybe people buried in a battlefield that was later declared a cemetery, and maybe some other specific cases that can be shown to be defining. However I do not think we should bog down biographical articles with a category for what place the person is buried in, if the place is something less specific than a specific cemetery. John Pack Lambert (talk) 01:17, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
Also agreed, but this is going to be difficult to "police". If an infobox category exists, people will use it, no matter that the documentation says it's only for specific cemeteries not for countries. Same with manual categorization and the category having introductory text saying the same thing. Nearly every single day I run into things like |location=UK or |location=California in citation templates, despite the parameter being strictly defined as only for a city. People do not read documentation (and will fairly often defy it even after they've read it). — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 00:13, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
Austria-Hungary categories
Category:People from Austria-Hungary and its subcategories have been placed as sub-cats of Category:Austrian people and Category:Hungarian people. I do not think this makes sense. This is a category for people from a specific country, Austria-Hungary. I think they should be directly placed under People by nationality, and sub-cats should be directly placed under Writers by nationality, scientists by nationality, etc. They are not a sub-cat of either Austrian or Hungarian people, but people who were nationals of a dual named country, that included many more ethnic groups and much more land than either of the modern countires, let alone the modern countries combined.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:47, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
I have been working through some categories and navboxes with the intention of checking that the listed articles are correctly categorised, and while I have found quite a lot of categories that seem obviously right or wrong, I have also found a lot that seem dubious. I apply the test: Is "topic" an instance of "category"? using the short description or scope definition of the article and the scope definition or a best guess at it for the category. I find that a large number of categories have no scope definition, and there are often a significant proportion of articles in categories where it is not clear why they have been put there. There are also a lot of cases where categories appear to have been chosen the wrong way round, as in a breathing gas being in the category oxygen, whereas it makes more sense for oxygen to be in the category breathing gases. All breathing gases must contain oxygen, but only oxygen is oxygen. Is there useful guidance on sorting this sort of thing out? There are other cases where it is less obvious which way it should go.
One of the problems is that an article may have a title that suggests one category as defining, but also contains content, which, on its own, would suggest a different category. For example an article on a medical condition is likely to contain content on treatment of the condition, so it also gets categorised as a medical treatment. Based on the title it is not a treatment, but there may be a redirect to the treatment section which if expanded into an article, would be categorised as a treatment not a condition. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood(talk): 16:52, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
@Jc37 @Pbsouthwood That reminds me of a thought I've often had: where it's appropriate to make more than one redirect for an identical topic (suppose the disease treatment in question above had several spellings to allow for UK/US variants, or a person being redirected to the notable book they've authored might have umpteen variations of full names, initials, married surname, etc), it would be helpful if there was a way to identify one and only one of those as a sort of "primary" or "master" redirect, the one to which it's appropriate to add categories (I tend to use the one at which an article on the topic would be most likely, but it's not always obvious which that would be). There doesn't seem to be a way to do this, so in some cases there could be several redirects in a category, all for the same person / company / thing, if a later editor helpfully added yet another redirect but didn't realise that an existing redirect had already been categorised. If there was some hidden category for "master redirect for this topic", it would be helpful.
@PamD: there isn't a way (that I know of) to identify a "master" redirect, but {{R avoided double redirect}} is a way to identify any redirects that are NOT the master. So if there is an author (with multiple name variations) redirecting to a book, any name variations that are not "the one at which an article on the topic would be most likely" should get {{R avoided double redirect}}. If an article is eventually created for the author (i.e. the master redirect stops being a redirect), the avoided double redirects will then show up in an error tracking category (they should be retargeted from the book article to the author article and the avoided double redirect template should then be removed).
@Pbsouthwood:, your treatment/condition example is what WP:INCOMPATIBLE is about. The treatment should be categorized as a treatment and the condition should be categorized as a condition regardless of which is an article and which is a redirect. Plantdrew (talk) 21:28, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
@Plantdrew That's just what I needed. I have now added "R avoided double redirect|Kendal High School for Girls" (I tried to include it with the curly brackets, within "nowiki", but that didn't work!) to the redirect Kendal High School which I created a few minutes ago: long and short names for one of the predecessor schools. Just what I needed. I will try to remember this one for the future, as I often create multiple redirects like this. Thanks very much. "Every day a school day", especially when it comes to Wikipedia editing: always something new and useful to learn. Now to get back to Draft:Olive Clarke, former pupil of the abovementioned school! PamD21:55, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
@PamD:, maybe Kendal High School should have {{R from short name}} rather than {{R from old name}}, with {{R from old name}} being reserved for Kendal High School for Girls? (I'm assuming "Kendal High School" was never a formal name and that the school went coeducational when it merged with Kendal Grammar School; if it went coeducational before the merger and dropped "for Girls" from the name when it went coeducational "Kendal High School" could be an old name rather than a short name). Plantdrew (talk) 22:26, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
Plantdrew, Somehow in 14.5 years of editing, and creating thousands of redirects and categorisations I have managed to not notice that part of that page. Thanks for the enlightenment. I have a lot to fix. · · · Peter Southwood(talk): 05:58, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
@Plantdrew@Pbsouthwood Yes, I've just worked through my 2023 contributions list (restricting to "newly created" and "in article space"), looking out for bunches of adjacent redirect creations. The vast majority are OK, just variant names for the article topic, but I've added this newly-discovered template to about 30 redirects. Some other time I might work back through previous years, but now I really ought to get on with some priority jobs in real life. PamD11:07, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
Death categorizing
I am thinking that we are overcategorizing people by death. I think we need to take a look and determine if all the articles in the cause of death tree are actually cases where the cause of death is notable.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:39, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
This is a confusing misuse of "notable". "Notable" on Wikipedia means "can have its own stand-alone article". I think what's intended here is something like "the cause of death was in some way related to the notability of the subject". But why would we have such a criterion for death categorization? If some particular physicist or actor, notable only for physics or acting, had a lung-cancer death, there is no reason I can think of to exclude them from that death category (as long as the fact of it is verifiable), and doing so would be misleading to readers. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 00:06, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
I think we were using "notable" in its general meaning of "worth mentioning". Categorising everyone that can be verified will cause some very large categories of very little apparent value, but that's one of the things you get with a large encyclopedia. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood(talk): 06:12, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
Well, we have lots of very large categories, but people find them of value for various kinds of things. If I were a middle-school student writing a paper on smoking and lung cancer I might well want to trawl through a large category of such deaths to pick particularly poignant cases, or ones that speak to current popular culture, or pertain to a particular ethnic or national or vocational group in which smoking is more prevalent, or whatever. How would I be served by a very small category of people for whom lung cancer was somehow "unusually noteworthy" or whatever is trying to be got at here? Who would even be in that category? The "Marlboro Man" model who ironically died of lung cancer, I guess, but who else? — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 13:06, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
It is often a complication of other illnesses, and the proximal cause of death where the underlying condition was pipped at the post, so to speak. A similar situation is common in underwater diving deaths, which are often reported as cause of death = drowning, when drowning was just the inevitable consequence of the incident occurring underwater. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood(talk): 06:22, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
Indeed death reporting and the relationship between conditions as to primary and related causes is not something that has been adequately explored at any length or detail in this project to date - I am aware of death certificates in the australian context where underlying conditions have been identified, but where pneumonia has been the specific identified illness that has been classified as the cause of death. JarrahTree06:35, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
While doing some stubsorting, I encountered a curious paradox. From WP:SUBCAT: If logical membership of one category implies logical membership of a second (an is-a relationship), then the first category should be made a subcategory (directly or indirectly) of the second. When making one category a subcategory of another, ensure that the members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions) to belong to the parent also. So autobiographers is a subcategory of biographers (they write biographies), and biographers is a subcategory of historians (which is logical, since they deal with a history of other people), then autobiographers is a subcategory of historians - and this is where it falls apart, since almost all autobiographers do not study history, they just write a biography about themselves.
If this were to be changed, then all categories like autobiographers by nationality, by century etc. needs to be recategorized, so it would be a major change across many categories which I don't want to do without discussing it first. And I don't feel like nominating them to CfD since I think it is for deleting, merging and all that stuff and here it is just about changing the parent category.
So, should autobiographers not be considered a subcategory of biographers? What do you think?
I would think that, from purely logical perspective, while autobiographies should be considered a subset of the biographies, autobiographers might not necessarily be a subset of biographers because all autobiographers need is a good memory of their life and biographers need to work with documents and other stuff to reconstruct the life of other people, and this is pretty much what historians do. On the other hand, it seems counterintuitive to just exclude autobiographers from biographers.
I can see a higher-level problem with this scheme. If an historian happens to write an autobiography and is categorized accordingly, then they will end up being removed from Category:Historians, because they are already in a subcategory of that category. That can't be right. BD2412T16:50, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
They are not removed from Category:Historians, they are in it via the subcategory, and could well also be in it via one or more other subcategories. That is how subcategories work. A similar effect would occur if someone was categorised in any other subcategory of Historians. A scientist who is a physicist and a chemist and a geologist would still be a scientist, via three subcategories. · · · Peter Southwood(talk): 17:40, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
However the process is described a historian who is also an autobiographer may well be removed from relevant supercategories and merely categorized with everyone else who is an autobiographer in that time and place. BD2412T17:48, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
Well, they would surely also be categorized by what kind of historian they are; most editors wouldn't even realize that autobiographers is a sub-sub-cat of historians in the first place. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 10:37, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
Biographers being a subcategory of Historians seems precarious. Some biographers might be, but all? The bar for being a biographer is very low, unlike the bar for being a historian, which usually comes with connotations of authority, scholarship and professionalism. Many popular biographies are informal affairs - autobiographies doubly so. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 17:41, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
Precisely, are there any professional organizations of biographers? I'm not aware of any and just about anyone can write something and call it a biography. older ≠ wiser17:49, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
Even if we accept that a biography necessarily contains history (arguable, IMHO), that’s a step removed from its author being a historian, particularly in a Wikipedia context where WP:CATDEF asks that subjects be commonly and consistently referred to as such. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 18:45, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
Yes, there's at least one such organization; search engines are your friends. :-) [13] Any topic with devoted professional writers is apt to have one, e.g. there's a professional organization of billiards/pool writers, for example, and a former one and now what amounts to a current one for writers about tartan and Highland dress (postnominals of FSTS in the former case, and most of the writers now using FSAScot or FSA(Scot), though the latter also includes some other Scottish history specialists). — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 10:49, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
Want to flag this issue and ping @Gonnym and @Mvcg66b3r. This category has seen two speedy renames in a week, and I'm not sure whether a full discussion is merited. The parent category is Category:Public Broadcasting Service, but the subcategories all use PBS. I suspect a CfD discussion is coming one way or the other, but first I think it's worth talking through where this one cat should be. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 22:39, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
Sub-categories should match the parent category. There is really no valid reason to deviate from it. If the consensus is to move the category to the primary name, then it should be moved, but having a mixed tree isn't helpful to anyone. Gonnym (talk) 12:11, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
Establishment categories
I have two questions, which are not really related:
Hello, I think categories like "Countries in Europe", should be renamed to "Sovereign states in Europe". At the very least, if not re-named, then limited to having only independent countries in them. The terminology "country", has multiple meanings & so may be confusing. GoodDay (talk) 08:26, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
An editor is actively getting around to remove Macau categories from parent categories for dependent territories or other similar categories and charging others for unconstructive editing.[14][15] I recognize that dependent territories are part of the scope of WikiProject Countries and there is a tree for dependent territories under that for countries. What people like them are doing is real unconstructive. Could anything be done to stop them? 113.52.112.27 (talk) 14:18, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
You are apparently referring to User:Smasongarrison. Whether you like it or not, Macau is no longer a dependent territory of Portugal, it has been incorporated in China for a long time now. Having a bit of autonomy does not make it a dependent territory, if that were the case many provinces of many countries in the world would all of a sudden become a dependent territory. Marcocapelle (talk) 06:53, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
I've been editing WP assiduously for over 20 years, in which time I have corrected literally thousands of Defsorts that have been incorrectly specified.
The main offender is personal names, where we typically need the article to be sorted by surname, not by given name. For ex, Mervyn Jones would be Defsorted as "Jones, Mervyn". Simple, right? Well, it seems many, many editors just don't get it. They Defsort it as "Mervyn Jones", not realising that that produces exactly the same result as if Defaultsort were not used at all. In other words, whatever order the words are in the article title, will dictate the sorting of the article in its categories. That's UNLESS we use a Defaultsort using a parameter that is something OTHER than an exact copy of the article title.
What I'm getting to is this: The default sorting will be the article title, yet to change it to something else, we must use a magic word that includes the word "Default". That has always, always, always seemed counterintuitive to me. If you had a choice to either Keep or Change something in any sort of app, and you wanted to change it, you'd click the Change button, not the Keep button. Right? Same with Defaultsort, which is used when you actually want something OTHER than the actual default, which is the article title.
I'm certain that this simple bit of infelicitous nomenclature is the root cause of so many editors getting so wrong what to experienced editors is the simplest concept imagineable.
Is there any prospect of changing the name to something more likely to produce better outcomes? One idea might be CHANGESORT. I'm sure there are many others. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]04:08, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
And yet I'm asking. Your response is no argument against such a change. An analogy might be: Sending 12-year-old boys down the mines has been around for hundreds of years, so it's a bit late to raise the minimum age now.
What I mean is that DEFAULTSORT is part of the MediaWiki software, it's not like a template that we might amend or rename with community consensus. The word DEFAULTSORT was chosen way back in December 2006 (see phab:T7908) and when it was incorporated into MediaWiki 1.9 (January 2007) it became set in stone. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:24, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
An article's title is the default default category sort key. The purpose of the DEFAULTSORT tag is to specify a different default. If you have an article about someone named Donna Farkle with no DEFAULTSORT tag and categories specified as
[[Category:Singers|Donna the Voice]]
[[Category:Wrestlers|Dynamite Donna]]
[[Category:Flight attendants]]
she'll be sorted on the three category pages, respectively, as "Donna the Voice", "Dynamite Donna", and, because it's the default default sort key, "Donna Farkle". If there's a {{DEFAULTSORT:Farkle, Donna}} tag, then she'll be sorted on the third category page as "Farkle, Donna", appearing under the Fs, because that's now the custom default category sort key for her. Largoplazo (talk) 22:07, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. I understand all that, perfectly. My concern is that we're using the word "default" to get to something that is NOT the default. Its very purpose is to IGNORE the default (article title) and sort it as if it were something else, something we specify. This use of a word to mean something other than its apparent meaning is what, I am convinced, confuses most newbies and even some more experienced editors, and why I spend far too much of my time fixing their very understandable errors. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]23:24, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
Your third sentence tells me that you didn't understand my comments perfectly. Its very purpose is to make the default key for this article's sorting in however many categories the article is associated with something other than what it would be. As I showed you, for categories where a specific sort key isn't given in the category tag itself, the default placement as specified by the DEFAULTSORT tag will be applied. Again, it specifies the default category sort key for that article. It isn't the default default that applies to article with no DEFAULTSORT tag, it's the default for that article. Largoplazo (talk) 23:52, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
JackofOz, I feel your pain! I mostly sort within list categories. I can't tell you how many time I've seen {{DEFAULTSORT:List of...}} in an article titled "List of...". Completely pointless. I see it so much, I usually don't even bother to fix it any more (as long as the cats are individually sorted correctly). It took me just a couple minutes to find an example at List of power stations in New South Wales:
{{DEFAULTSORT:List Of Power Stations In New South Wales}}
[[Category:Lists of power stations in Australia|New South Wales]]
[[Category:Power stations in New South Wales| ]]
[[Category:Lists of buildings and structures in New South Wales|Power stations]]
I also often see situations where there is a plausible DEFAULTSORT, but it's only really doing work on a single cat. The others have correct overrides — individually sorted with standard sorting keys — which is almost just as pointless use of DEFAULTSORT because the only cat without its own sort key, might as well have one and lose the DEFAULTSORT. Honestly I'm not a huge fan of DEFAULTSORT in general. I use it on occasion, for people's names, but other than that I usually just sort individually. Also note, when using HotCat you don't see the existing DEFAULTSORT code anyway, so there are times where I've added the sort key along with a new category, unaware if it's already defaultsorted the same way or not.
As for what it should be called, I see your point, but the name "DEFAULTSORT" does hint that it is overridden by the standard sort keys. With another name, that may be even less clear. DB1729talk00:56, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
I think DEFAULTSORT is clear enough: it's the way in which the article will be sorted, by default; a sortkey which can be over-ridden for any particular category. Yes, some editors get it wrong, but editors get a lot of things wrong. If they add an unnecessary DEFAULTSORT equalling the article title, no harm is done.
Someone said above that DEFAULTSORT mostly applies to personal names; the other huge category is titles which start with an article - names of books, newspapers, films, paintings, etc - where we need to sort on the words after the article: "Night Manager, The". PamD23:07, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
Yes, that was me. And I agree, titles starting with "The" or "A" (and their foreign language equivalents, "Le", "Les", "Il, "I", "Gli", "La", et al) are also a major issue for those who seem not to care where articles end up in their categories. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]23:33, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
Indeed. My comment above may have also implied that I only use it for names of people. I forgot that titles beginning with "The", "A", etc. is another case where DEFAULTSORT is quite handy and I do use it for that as well. DB1729talk03:07, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at User talk:SDZeroBot/Category cycles. —andrybak (talk) 18:07, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
Template:Cats2 has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. 65.92.246.142 (talk) 03:17, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
20:12, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
Comment: requested closure at WP:CR. —andrybak (talk) 23:12, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
