Category talk:Former populated places in Europe

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Cities

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Should geographical region subcategories be used?

This category is basically a mess.

Some articles are linked directly under the parent category of Former settlements of Europe. Example: Burhou

Some articles are linked to subcategories of countries that are directly under the parent category of Former settlements of Europe. Example: Former settlements in Hungary

Some articles are linked to subcategories of countries that are under geographical region subcategories within the parent category of Former settlements of Europe. Example: Former settlements in Eastern Europe

So, what should be done to clean this up? The guidelines (Wikipedia:Categorization#Subcategorization) are a bit vague about this, other than to suggest that if a category becomes too large that it should be broken down into subcategories. Since some of the subcategories already existing in this category have quite a few articles linked to them, I would say that we need to go ahead and add the tag {{catdiffuse}} here to indicate that it should be fully broken down into subcategories. As such, I'm also going to go ahead and include the {{verylarge}} tag in the category, to hopefully inspire a discussion about this which will lead to a resolution of cleaning up this messy category.

One of the challenges about this will be: what form should these subcategories take? Should we create subcategories based on geographical regions? Or should we create subcategories based just on individual countries? Any input is appreciated. --Saukkomies ^talk 17:09, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]