Category talk:Supercentenarians by nationality

Incomplete set

@BrownHairedGirl, Davidgoodheart, Legacypac, Newshunter12, Oculi, Reyk, Rzvas, SMcCandlish, and The Blade of the Northern Lights: I just finished upmerging 8 national-level subcategories per Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 December 7, but something occurred to me: it does not make sense to have a by nationality container category with an incomplete set of nationalities. We would not, for example, delete subcategories of Category:Chemists by nationality due to low membership, would we? So, I think either we need to upmerge this category to Category:Supercentenarians, or we need to restore the categories we just deleted. Please tell me if (and why) I am wrong. Thank you, -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 20:26, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Hmm. I lean toward seeing this as a trivial intersection. If you're a notable Albanian novelist or Zimbabwean surgeon, those are defining intersections of facts/labels, from an encyclopedic perspective. Being both old and Filipino doesn't form a defining pair of characteristics. That said, if Category:Supercentenarians would be unwieldy without subcategories, we have to divide it up somehow – doing so by century, continent, nationality, or whatever. At any rate, I don't think it's true at all that we would not have a "by nationality" category structure if some nations are missing; some are missing from most if not all of them that we do have. Sports categories, for example, are devoid of by-nationality categories for numerous small countries, and larger ones in which the sport in particular is not popular. See, e.g., all the subcats of Category:Cue sports people by nationality. You won't find "Category:Argentine snooker players" because snooker is almost unknown there. Nor will you find "Category:Snooker players from Saint Lucia"; while snooker is known there (former British colony), the small place has not generated notable players, so we have no need of a category for them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:47, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

If there are no notable people (i.e. no articles) of a particular nationality, then it makes sense of course for that nationality to be missing. However, the situation here is that Category:Supercentenarians was fully diffused by nationality and sex, yet now some notable people will only be in a sex subcategory and not a nationality subcategory. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 17:51, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Maybe that diffusion was a poor idea? I'm not really sure what the ideal outcome here is (or if there is one, since different people have different goals and ideas with regard to how to categorize and how to structure our categorization).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:29, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Fair enough. I'm not sure either, to be honest. I suspect all of the upmerged categories will be recreated at some point, either when there are more articles or by editors who assume, like I do, that a by-nationality container category implies full diffusion. Time will tell, I suppose. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 23:01, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

@Black Falcon, your premise seems to be that if we have any Category:Fooers by nationality, then all "Foos" must be diffused by nationality. That is not my understanding.

AFAICS, we have in most cases a sort of "tipping point principle", whereby once the set of by-nationality subcats is broad enough and mostly well-populated, we regard it as and established series and fully diffused it ... but below that undefined threshold, we diffuse only into better-populated subcats.

This case seems to me to be of the below-the-threshold type, and thus fine as it is.

I strongly disagree with @SMcCandlish's thought of upmerging the remaining by-nationality cats. As a point of organising articles, I agree with SMcCandlish's later recognition that we need some way of subcategorising this large set ... but not with his earlier dismissal of the definingness of the intersection between longevity and nationality. It seems to me that the intersection of longevity and nationality is v much defining; it groups them by geography, culture and many other social and environmental factors which are highly relevant to longevity. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:09, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

I agree with the "tipping point principle" when we are dealing with Category:Xers and direct Category:Fooian Xers subcats, where anyone who is not in a subcat remains in the parent category—see, for example, Category:Histologists. However, a by-nationality container category implies diffusion of all Xers by nationality (and ultimately drives it), and as a reader I would not expect a portion of articles to be outside of Category:Xers by nationality, and especially not when Category:Xers is a fully diffused category. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 17:51, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

I could buy that, modulo what I implied above: assuming the premise that the full diffusion was a good idea in the first place is begging the question. I don't have a strong opinion on whether it was. If we decided to keep it that way, I agree with BF's consistency reasoning. For one thing, nationality-based parent categories become less useful when there are gaps due to avoidance of creating certain nation–topic intersection categories that would have 1+ articles in them just because the category in question will have only one or a few entries. I.e., having a nationality category structure be complete and consistent (for any case for which 1+ articles actually qualify) is a strong argument for a SMALLCAT exception.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:36, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, but I don't buy this notion that a by-nationality container category implies diffusion of all Xers by nationality. I see a by-nationality container category as a way of grouping by-nationality categories, not as a decision to categorise everything by nationality. If that principle was applied more widely, we would have many more sets of mostly smallcats, which I don't think would be helpful.

I can see that there is a reasoned argument to be made for the proposition ... but if that is to be pursued, it should be done as a broad proposal to amend WP:CAT, rather than applied only in this case. Maybe an RFC?

I think that the discussion so far is missing some crucial context, viz. the very unusual background to these mergers.

In most cases, a WikiProject is a collaboration to improve coverage of a topic area. However, this topic area was plagued with obsessive editors who completely ignored most en.wp policies, including notability, and created a walled garden of trivia. They were clustered around the Gerontology Research Group and its lead researcher Robert Young and his "World's Oldest People" Yahoo Group, which functioned as an army of meatpuppets. They clustered on wiki in WP:WikiProject World's Oldest People. In 2010 the whole thing ended up at WP:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Longevity, as a result of which discretionary sanction apply.

In subsequent years, a lot of good work has been done to clean up articles and delete the non-notables.

Last year, a new project was formed, WP:WikiProject Longevity. Unfortunately, it is in some ways the polar opposite of the old WOP project. It has in may ways become a campaign against any coverage of longevity, with many undesirable traits displayed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Longevity, including: tendentious use of guidelines such as WP:BIO1E, tag-teaming, flooding AFD with ill-researched nominations, etc. See e.g. AFD:William Coates (longevity claimant), AFD:Charlotte Hughes (supercentenarian) and AFD:Benito Martínez.

In my attempts to discuss these matters on that talk page, I was met with much of the same sort of partisanship that I encountered a decade ago in reverse with the old WOP brigade: their POV on the topic takes priority over basic policies.

So what we saw at the CFDs in this area was a tag-teaming exercise to override basic categorisation principles. Queues of editors from WP:LONGEVITY pitched up to insist that they were very happy to remove all the articles concerned from all longevity categories because all longevity was cruft. I have never before seen at CFD such orchestrated hostility to a topic and such determination to disrupt categorisation as is evident in these CFDs, e.g. at WP:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 December 7, and it was my shock at that which prompted me to take a wider look at what was going on, when I saw the AFDs etc.

I think that a review of the categorisation in this area is needed ... but I also think that any such review is futile while the topic area continues to have such vocal participation from tendentiously partisan editors such as Legacypac, Newshunter12 and The Blade of the Northern Lights riding roughshod over basic policies and guidelines. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:12, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

That's interesting context. If you think the current state of affairs, after the recent CfDs, is acceptable (or at least an improvement over before), I suppose that's good enough for now. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 23:01, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

@Black Falcon: yes, I think that after all the CFD drama, we got to an OK place. I wouldn't object to a re-creation of at least some of the deleted nationality categories, but I am also not sure that I would support it. And in the current climate around longevity, I'd prefer to avoid another drama-trigger. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:56, 28 January 2019 (UTC)