Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories/Archive 4

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Creating actor in genre categories

Just seeking some advice, as I'm not too familiar with category policies. Is it appropriate to create categories such as Category:Western (genre) films starring John Wayne, which, in his case, would include 100-odd articles, but in some actor's cases less? I don't see why it would be an issue, given there are categories like Category:Films directed by John Ford, but I just want to be sure that creating such categories would not be against any guidelines and lead to controversial issues or deletion for whatever reason? Thanks. Ma®©usBritish{chat} 16:53, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

  • This information is already handled by filmographies in the actors' biographies. Too many films would have multiple actor categories, and as past experience proved, it's impossible to create a meaningful threshold of which actors to not have such categories for or which actors aren't significant enough in a particular film. Contrast with directors, of which nearly all films only have one, and who have an unequivocally defining role for a film. Also, intersecting it with genre (for whatever reason you want to do that) would just proliferate the categories even more, as many films may fit into multiple genres. Many John Wayne westerns were also war films, for example. postdlf (talk) 17:07, 17 August 2012 (UTC)
Okay, fair enough - thanks. Ma®©usBritish{chat} 06:52, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

Category:Products

I have created Category:Products, Category:Products by type and a few others. They may need a few more additions that I did not find, esp Category:Products by type . -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:45, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Category:Grandes écoles

Hi, User:Euroflux has been creating some categories and subcategories (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Euroflux) with, I feel, inappropriate names. They have also added a very unusual sortkey (an exclamation mark: !) to many articles/categories. There's too much mess for me to clean up, because this editor has also been doing a lot of inappropriate page moves. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:27, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Pages added to categories

How do I see what pages have been added to all of the categories that are on my watchlist? Is there a tool or template or what? Thank you! Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 22:03, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Watch a category?. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:55, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Opinion needed

An editor thinks the article WOT Services (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) about a company should belong in some software categories and I don't think it should. Can I get a third opinion on it? Ta. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 00:28, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Circular categorization

Here is a record of my editing of articles in Category:Pakistan.

Along the way, I found some examples of circular categorization. Expanding a circularly categorized category is like viewing a fractal. Also, a parent category to another category can be a child category to that same other category. (I'm My Own Grandpa Lyrics - YouTube, 2:13)

Most of these examples, if not all of them, are in Category:Geography of Pakistan. I could have repeated the first item at the bottom of each series, to make the circularity more explicit, but I decided to omit repeating it, to make the number of generations more explicit. As an n-sided polygon has n angles, so too a circular categorization of n categories has n generations (per cycle). (See "Fencepost error".)

Probably the editors who are members of this WikiProject are in the best position to make the necessary corrections to those categories, and to make any comments about them to the members of Wikipedia:WikiProject Pakistan.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:31, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand the problem. Categories are not and never have been a strict hierarchy, nor do I see any compelling reason why they should be. The primary function of categories is to facilitate browsing between related articles and topics, so obviously we shouldn't hinder that by trying to streamline these connections in one neat direction. postdlf (talk) 18:23, 29 September 2012 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Categorization#Subcategorization (WP:SUBCAT) (version of 20:32, 20 September 2012) says: "Category chains formed by parent-child relationships should never form closed loops."
—Wavelength (talk) 20:59, 29 September 2012 (UTC)
Ok, I think I see at least part of the problem: some of the categories you've listed have simply been categorized incorrectly, regardless of whether loops have been formed. "Populated places in Jhelum District" should clearly not be a subcategory of Jhelum, which is itself a populated place in Jhelum District. That looks to me like a basic content issue, not some kind of abstract concern with the integrity of the category structure and its proper form. Overly long posts can be difficult to parse. postdlf (talk) 21:33, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Category templates up for deletion

See:

See Category:Philosophical literature to see how they look.

There is also the related Template:Category-Logic/header (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) which I have tried to get deleted.

See Category:Logic for an example of usage. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:41, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Please review edits from a topic banned editor

I have been topic banned from "category related See the WP:AN discussion here. Please review some of my recent edits here to ensure that they are suitable. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 10:12, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Categories and their ionic forms

There was almost certainly discussion of this elsewhere that I missed, but: the +/-/±/®/™/÷/¿ symbols that now appear along with the categories are very messy and distracting.

(Completely coincidentally, the first time I saw them was at the bottom a technical/math article, and I actually thought that the article belonged to some obscure symbolic category, but quickly discovered they were a new feature.)

My take is that the vast majority of Wikipedia users are readers, rather than editors, and the vast majority of Wikipedia editors are not daily categorizers, so having additional symbols and buttons visible at all times next to every category name (and the "category" header itself) is serious overkill, clutter, and opportunity for confusion to new and even existing readers, at the service of a very small number of Wikipedia users, during a relatively small portion of their time visiting the site.

May I suggest that these additional controls be hidden by default, with instead one small "edit" button being the only visible control? This would match the "edit" button present by every section title, so it would be a natural extension of the existing control interface.

Pressing the "edit" button would then make the additional controls visible.--NapoliRoma (talk) 19:26, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

It's WP:HOTCAT, and there are only three additional symbols ( + − ± ). There was discussion about this a few weeks ago at WP:VPT, also at Wikipedia talk:HotCat#Village Pump proposal for enabling this by default for most editors and threads linked from there. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:49, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
I have complete agreement with NapoliRoma that WP is for readers. NapoliRoma, where do the ®/™/÷/¿ symbols show up? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:44, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
The additional symbols were hyperbole on my part, sorry. It's really just +/-/±, of course.
I hope my feeble attempt at humor doesn't detract from my point, which is that those symbols contribute significant visual noise to the categories footer, when relatively few people will ever use those controls, compared to the number of people who will be seeing them. I appreciate the idea behind them, but think it would better if they were hidden unless explicitly summoned.
Having a single visible button that says "[Edit]" would also make the intent clearer than several buttons with cryptic symbols.--NapoliRoma (talk) 21:07, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
Humour is good. I completely agree with you sentiment to avoid clutter but in this instance I welcome the extra buttons since they are vey useful tool for editors. I do a lot of categorisation and HotCat makes it sooo much easier.
This sort of software functionality is what we should see a lot more of in WP: tools made available to logged on editors but completely invisible to The Reader. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 21:20, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
I'm all in favor of the functionality, and I too think the extra buttons can be useful; I just don't think they should be visible all the time—even when logged on. I'm always logged on when I visit WP, but I rarely—almost never—need the buttons.
That's why I'm suggesting that there be only one button visible by default, which when clicked would enable the HotCat facility.--NapoliRoma (talk) 23:24, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
You can turn it off and on in your user preferences. You not turn it off untill you want to use it? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 00:55, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Categorisation issues that need sorting out

I am topic banned so I cannot carry out the following edits:

Thanks. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 07:28, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

User:TheBestv2/test needs its categories removed. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 07:53, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Done. DexDor (talk) 08:31, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Category:Pig farming has one image in it. It is of a sow crate, a form of containment that is abhorrent to animal rights supporters. I am quite sure it is in the category because an editor is being overly enthusiastic about animal rights. I also support animal rights but to have the image in question in Category:Pig farming is actually creating bias. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:50, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

How so? It's an item of equipment used in the farming of pigs. The categorisation is valid, since the only subcategory is Category:Pig breeds, which is inapplicable because the equipment is not specific to one breed of pig. Whether it's good or bad is beside the point. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:30, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
But why have just one image? It is a poor representation of the topic and of what is available. Why not link to commons:Category:Pigs where there are a better range of images? And I am arguing that it is "bad" because The Reader is not being served as well as they could. To say "[w]hether it's good or bad is beside the point" is, with all due respect, a poor attitude. Are we not here to create something good? Please note that I realise that "good" is a subjective term. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 23:53, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
If there is only one image related to pig farming on English Wikipedia, then all well and good; if there are more, they should be in this category too (unless they are images of particular breeds, in which case Category:Pig breeds is better). If it is a poor representation of the topic, take it to WP:FFD. There is nothing to prevent there being a suitable {{commonscat}} on the category page; but in Media related to Pigs at Wikimedia Commons I don't see a direct equivalent. My comment about "good or bad" refers to the animal rights matter: WP:IDONTLIKEIT is not a reason to decategorise an image - WP:NOTCENSORED applies here. The image exists: it should be categorised, per Wikipedia:Categories#Files/images and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images#Image description pages. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:16, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
It is not that WP:IDONTLIKEIT and I know WP:NOTCENSORED but WP:BALANCE is the issue at stake - the presence of the image creates a POV. The NPOV policy is aimed at articles but we should have it apply to category pages as well. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 00:47, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
While we are at it can I get you to add {{Commons category|Pigs}} to Category:Pigs along with {{Commons category|Suidae}}? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 00:47, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
I agree with the last request. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:47, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

User:Peekarica/Lange Jan Lange Lies has content cats. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 00:15, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Knowledge Integration Map has content cats. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 01:17, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Category:Legal aid is swamped with US-related articles. Need to create a Category:Legal aid by country and a Category:Legal aid in the United States. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 09:23, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Category:Bats needs a cleanup. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 19:57, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Shamrock Organic Products Mulch Fire is in content cats. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:03, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia essays needs a clean out and {{Cat main|Wikipedia:Wikipedia essays}} should be added. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:56, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

There is a WikiProject in Category:Vancouver. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 23:42, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Category:United States waste law should be a subcat of Category:Environmental law in the United States. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 23:20, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/London School of Marketing - another one. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 19:50, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Category:Scouting and Guiding by country, Category:Scouting and Guiding in the United Kingdom - rm templates per convention. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia categories named after events - project cat in content cat. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:34, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Category:Security forces of Nepal needs a clean up. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 05:36, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Template:Afd see also documentation should be added to Category:Articles for deletion templates (with the state = collapsed option). -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 01:38, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Category:Cartoon Network templates is in a content cat. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 02:43, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Category:Government and pension funds should be in Category:Pension -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 21:27, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Is a dutch antillean athlete a dutch athlete?

If so The Netherlands could field six athletes in the 100 meter race at the Olympics, not three. --Kasper2006 (talk) 23:20, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, by nationality. Dutch Antilleans were Dutch nationals. But no, by sport team. The Netherlands and the Dutch Antilles fielded separate athletics teams. Good Ol’factory (talk) 23:35, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Absolutely not «The Netherlands Antilles was an autonomous Caribbean country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.», but Antillean citizens do not have the Dutch nationality. Please someone else is expressed about. --Kasper2006 (talk) 23:57, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Dutch Antillean people held Dutch nationality; their passports were those of the Netherlands. There was no "Dutch Antillean" passport. The Netherlands Antilles was a country, but not a sovereign state at international law. Kind of like Scotland. There is no Scottish nationality at international law—they are UK nationals and they carry UK passports. But there is a Scottish nationality culturally and socially. Scottish people can be said to be Scottish, but they can also be said to be British. You are just confusing legal nationality with cultural or social nationality. A person can have both, and they need not be the same. Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:10, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
Scottish people can be said to be Scottish BUT they have "British nationality" , Dutch Antillean people can be said to be Dutch Antillean AND they have "Dutch Antillean nationality". In any case, a Scotish CAN NOT compete for Scotland at the Olympics and must compete for the Great Britain, on the contrary, a Dutch Aìntillean CAN NOT compete for The Netherland but MUST compete at the The Neterlands Antilles. --Kasper2006 (talk) 05:59, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
Scottish people compete for Scotland at the Commonwealth Games. There is no Great Britain team at the Commonwealth Games. The world of athletics competitions does not contain a monolithic, uniform system. Regardless of who they compete for, their underlying nationality or nationalities in the real world remain the same, and Dutch Antillean nationals were always Dutch nationals in the real world. Good Ol’factory (talk) 07:11, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
Until someone else involved in the discussion, we could go on to infinity. ;-) --Kasper2006 (talk) 07:27, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Category:Religious abstentions

It seem that Category:Religious abstentions should be prose in the Abstention article rather than a category structure. Thoughts? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 05:57, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Template category or content category

Take a look at Category:Family trees. It is a mixture of content and templates. It needs splitting. I cannot do anything about it because of my topic ban. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 03:37, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Changing the category link

I want to change the link for the word "Category" (on the left hand side of the categories). See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Category_link_is_of_no_use. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 02:59, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Finding redlink categories

Is there a tool that can easily locate articles with redlinked categories? I seem to see that a lot lately. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 03:38, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Duplicate thread also exists at WP:VPT#Redlink categories. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:42, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Category:Metalogic

Category:Metalogic is a bit "cluttered" compared to most other categories. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 09:22, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

(I should watch this page.) I believe you're right, and it's been fixed. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 14:38, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Category:WikiProject Categories articles

I think this category should be renamed Category:WikiProject Categories pages, as it should not include articles. I also think we should restrict its use to pages about categorization, and exclude actual article categories. we have a few article categories in it, but we either should include ALL article categories, exclude all, or only include categories which are being actively worked on. i prefer the first of the 3. I may shortly propose the renaming, but since there are other issues i have brought up, i thought mentioning it here would be good. i have been doing a lot of categorization work, and didnt know about this project until 5 minutes ago. forgive me if my ideas have already been discussed and resolved, or if i am too bold. I promise to continue to read most if not all the subpages of this project, as i seem to be smitten by the category organization bug.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 17:58, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Yep, good idea. See Mercurywoodrose's CfD at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2013_January_21#Category:WikiProject_Categories_articles. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 19:21, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Red-linked categories

Members of this project may be wish to review and comment on the bot request here. Regards, Illia Connell (talk) 22:54, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Category:Pets by country

There is a need for:

There is a Category:Cats by country. Category:Pets and Category:Dogs need country specific articles. There is other stuff that can be categorised in the proposed scheme (eg Category:Dog breeds by country of origin). -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 07:45, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

No, we really don't. I oppose the excess categorization of "animals by country" as a complete waste of time. Shall we list all nations of the world under domestic shorthair? I don't mean to sound snarky, but this is a classic example of over-categorization. For another thing, there are some breeds where multiple modern nations can claim "origin" and it creates a nightmare. At most, there is an argument for "breeds by continent" but beyond that, it's just edit war bait. Montanabw(talk) 20:33, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

All redirects with possibilities

(I considered discussing this at Category talk:Redirects with possibilities, but the editnotice advised me otherwise.)

Category:All redirects with possibilities does not appear to exist, nor is there any deletion log for it. Was there a previous discussion why such a category should (not) exist?

Having such a category would make it easier to add redirect-with-possibilities support to linkclassifier, for instance. --SoledadKabocha (talk) 20:53, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, Category:Redirects with possibilities contains all of them so why would we need another one? Vegaswikian (talk) 23:09, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
The reason is that not all the redirects are categorized directly under Category:Redirects with possibilities, so an API query asking whether a page is in that category (as linkclassifier does) won't find all kinds of redirects with possibilities. --SoledadKabocha (talk) 03:17, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Multi-intersection categories

At WP:AFC/R there has recently been a spate of category requests for categories on persons by multiple intersections, such as Category:American female country singer-songwriters, Category:Black British actresses or Category:African-American television actresses. Some of those have been created, others were declined as useless overcategorization, one is still pending. Is there some sort of consensus on whether such categories are helpful? Huon (talk) 02:28, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Helpful is subjective and fraught with problems. As a general rule, categories should represent an intersection of only two shared traits. I'm sure that others will chime in on this. Vegaswikian (talk) 02:56, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Overcategorization.—Wavelength (talk) 06:15, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality and WP:Category intersection. – Fayenatic London 15:08, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

"Category cleanup" templates documentation

We have five "Category Cleanup" templates, so-called in the documentation for one of them, {{Checkcategory}}. I suggest that each carry this two-column See also section, except that the illustration lists all five siblings where each template/doc should list only the other four.

See also

This change will greatly reduce two of the five sections, Template:Uncategorized#See also and Template:Check category#See also, slightly expand the other three, and make all five more useful, I hope. (This hour I rearranged the former in two columns and suggested at Template talk:Uncategorized#See also that we delete all templates from the right column. Then I discovered little-used {{Checkcat}}, tagged them all {WikiProject Categories} as needed, and came here to suggest uniform change.)

My illustration lists the five by template name and notes two of their many redirects. --P64 (talk) 19:11, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

RfC: categories at John Calvin

FYI, an RfC is being held at Talk:John Calvin#RfC: Including Anglican sainthood / Lutheran commemoration regarding the inclusion of certain categories in the article. StAnselm (talk) 19:26, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Category:Australian_university_groups

Wikipedia:Australian_Wikipedians'_notice_board#Category:Australian_university_groups may be of interest to this WikiProject. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:51, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject category categorization

WikiProject category categorization is being discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council#WikProject category categorization (version of 00:40, 18 February 2013).
—Wavelength (talk) 01:35, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Individual birth/death dates

Hoops gza (talk · contribs) has started creating categories by individual birth/death dates like Category:May 24 births. If valid, this may result in a new layer of categories, which I believe are not needed. Opinions? Materialscientist (talk) 00:48, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

Does this help? Vegaswikian (talk) 06:04, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks! Materialscientist (talk) 06:29, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

WP:AFCH

Hi, at the moment I'm improving the WP:AFC helper tool. Should I add {{uncat}} as I did here or is catimprove better? mabdul (public) 10:18, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

I guess the simple answer is that if there are no categories use {{uncat}}. But if the article needs additional categories then use {{catimprove}}. Vegaswikian (talk) 19:19, 14 April 2013 (UTC)
So for the cate that template:L is added, add catimprove. OK. Thanks. mabdul 12:23, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

What to do if an article needs adding to lots of categories

I often come across cases where an article is only in one of potentially hundreds of categories. Some examples:

Another situation: Clematis vitalba (Old man's beard) is in Category:Invasive plant species in Oregon It could be in Category:Invasive plant species in New Zealand (and many other categories if they existed) but the Old man's beard in New Zealand article is in it.

There are two issues: WP is work in progress (not all possible categories exist) and we may need to limit the categorisation of articles (which is done anyway). Given that categories are poor cousins to articles and lists (in that they get less hits) there should be a stronger focus on lists.

Another point: in both Category:Invasive plant species in New Zealand and Category:Invasive plant species in the United States for example, there are screeds of species binomial names, which to most mortals are meaningless, that hide all the more interesting stuff (POV alert!!) In these cases List of invasive plant species in New Zealand and List of invasive plant species in the United States would be better than cluttered categories. This is the WP:CLT issue. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 06:52, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Biota found in most countries can be categorized in Category:Biota found in most countries (the exact name and the precise criteria to be decided). Then that category can be a subcategory of almost every country subcategory of Category:Biota by country. A similar procedure can be used for various types of biota: plants, animals, mammals, ferns, and so forth.
In regard to WP:CLT, there can be sortable wikitables coexisting with many categories, and vice versa. In working from a category to a list, one can look for a few informative aspects for each entry on the list, and make corresponding columns in a sortable wikitable. In working from a list to a category, one can add a corresponding category to each listed item that is not already in that category.
—Wavelength (talk) 21:04, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
However, this is a good example where a list(s) could be better than a category. I wonder if there is some way that wikidata could be of value in areas like this. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:42, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Mass media by topic and Mass media by interest

Hi, folks! What's the difference between Category:Mass media by topic and Category:Mass media by interest? I believe that these should be merged, don't you think? --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:57, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Gardens and landscapes by designer

We categorise buildings by architect and computer games by designer but I'm a bit surprised that we don't have categories for the works of garden designers and landscape architects. Before I go ahead and start creating some, I'd appreciate some views on:

  • whether there's a reason these don't exist (has it been discussed before)?
  • what the naming convention should be; although you could argue that landscape architecture and garden design are different disciplines (and should have distinct categories) often the same people carry out both occupations. Perhaps something simple like Category:Works of Lancelot "Capability" Brown, Category:Works of Gertrude Jekyll etc would make sense, or is that too generic? WaggersTALK 07:57, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
My view is that having categories for works by a particular individual is likely to be useful for readers, considering that people are often interested in the output of particular designers. PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 08:57, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
I agree that such categories are likely to be useful to readers, and I support their creation. About why they don't exist already, it's probably just because no one thought of it and there aren't that many notable garden designers. About the naming convention, I'd try to avoid having separate categories for works that are landscapes and for works that are gardens, because of the obvious ambiguity of where to place the boundary between them. Also, whether the naming would be "Works of...", or "Designs of..." or "Gardens of...", etc., would depend on what the parent category would be. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:17, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
@PaleCloudedWhite and Tryptofish: Thanks both, that's very useful, especially the point about the parent category. I think the way to go is "Gardens by Designer" within Category:Gardens, and subcategories "X Gardens" within that (since "X buildings" is the convention for buildings by architect, for example). I don't know at this stage if we'll need to disambiguate by the designer's nationality as well - we may not have enough of them to warrant that. I'll get started. WaggersTALK 07:48, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
If you look at Category:Works by creator you'll see that the six immediate subcats are "Works by ...", all nice and neat. But expand any of those six, and it immediately becomes clear that there is no firm consistency to their subcats. Of the 150 second-level subcats, 116 are "Works by ..." but the other 34 include: "Ballets by ..." (3); "Buildings and structures by" (2); "Songs by ..." (3); and 26 others. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:04, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
Good, glad to help. And I see that we now have Category:Gardens by designer, which I agree is the right way to go. When adding more subcategories to it, I'd suggest "Gardens by ..." as the naming format. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:54, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Native American categories

I am unsure how consistently our "Native American" categories pertain by design to Native Americans in the United States (or perhaps sometimes to natives of North America?) rather than to indigenous peoples of the Americas.

For example consider Category:Non-fiction books about indigenous peoples of the Americas and its subcat Non-fiction books about Native Americans. Probably the subcat is designed in regard to current U.S. territories, perhaps North America on some definition. But we don't have generally have 'indigenous peoples of the Americas' categories with 'Native Americans' subcategories; at the moment I don't see that for the more numerous fiction books.

Seven articles are now in Non-fiction books about indigenous peoples of the Americas rather than its Native Americans subcat. Two are geographical general, one specific to South America, one to Canada. Three are specific to U.S. (territory). All articles in the subcat are specific to U.S. territory --without benefit of any main article or preface.

Depending on purpose, many or all 'Native Americans' categories need prefaces that define by reference to the article Native Americans in the United States, aka Indigenous peoples of the US. The number of categories may be too numerous to put the latter article in all of them as a main article (or * or + article in the list of pages).

--P64 (talk) 20:43, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

When I read "native americans", to me that reads as "native americans from what is now the US" - in Canada they use different terminology, and I'm not sure of the terminology for Mexico, Central America, and s. America. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 20:52, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Undoing a category rename

Greetings! It looks like a pair of categories were mistakenly moved to new names. The relevant edits are this and this. Any routine check (using google ngrams or just searching book titles) confirms that the unhyphenated version has the lion's share of modern usage. I don't mess with categories as a whole, though, so I don't know the best way to go about undoing these changes. I appreciate any advice or help about what steps to take. Rschwieb (talk) 16:50, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

The move of Category:Nonassociative algebras to Category:Non-associative algebras was requested with this edit; the move of Category:Nonassociative algebra to Category:Non-associative algebra was requested with this edit. Ths code "C2D" refers to this criterion; I note that for the first category move, the related article is named Non-associative algebra. If you disagree with the reasoning, I suggest that you take it up with Marcus Qwertyus (talk · contribs). --Redrose64 (talk) 20:17, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Generally, category names follow article names. If you want these moved back, I'd suggest renaming the article first, then submitting a speedy request to rename back to match the article. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 04:17, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Great, thank you both for helping me through this. I'll follow your advice. Rschwieb (talk) 13:18, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Third opinion request

There is an ongoing discussion about categories on the She Has a Name article here. The two of us who are engaging in the discussion have not been able to come to an agreement on our own, and so have together decided that seeking a third opinion would be best. Any constructive comments you are willing to provide in order to resolve this matter would be greatly appreciated. Neelix (talk) 15:04, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

re alphabetizing categories on the article pages

I occasionally notice editors going through articles on my watchlist and re-ordering the categories alphabetically. While this is not a huge deal, I don't really go for this. Categories should be grouped conceptually, so that (say) "Writers from Arkansas" and "Arkansas novelists" would be close together and not separated. "Alphabetically" seems rather close to "random" (although granted lots of times alphabetic groupings and conceptual groupings are similar, e.g. "African-American this" and "African-American that" are together in both cases.)

Is there any guidance or accepted practice on this? Herostratus (talk) 05:49, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

I happen to think it's a bad idea, so if there isn't guidance, we should create some. Grouping thematically makes much more sense, and makes it much easier to maintain (and see which cats might be missing or duplicate, etc.) --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 05:53, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
I agree on all substantial points.
Vaguely I recall someone's try for a guideline in favor, sometime 2012/2013, and I doubt that any guideline pro or con alphanumeric order can achieve consensus.
--P64 (talk) 20:04, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
Yea, there have been discussions before. Strict alphabetic order is not possible since we have templates that add categories. Also, choosing alphabetic order over importance of the category is purely arbitrary and not to everyone's liking. Consensus here is likely impossible due to the many issues and preferences. Vegaswikian (talk) 20:53, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
There can be an alphabetical (or other kind of) listing of themes (concepts), and an alphabetical listing of categories within each theme.
Introduction
==First heading==
First section
==Second heading==
Second section
==See also==
Internal links
==External links==
External links
<!-- Categories -->
<!-- Please maintain the present arrangement of themes, and an alphabetical listing of categories within each theme. -->
<!-- First theme -->
Categories in first theme
<!-- Second theme -->
Categories in second theme
<!-- Miscellaneous categories -->
Miscellaneous categories
—Wavelength (talk) 22:09, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
@Wavelength, Vegaswikian, Obiwankenobi, and Herostratus: Again, templates higher up the article that add categories would muck that up, as would tools that can't read/recognise the themes such as HotCat, AWB, numerous bots, etc. The amount of reprogramming of such tools that would be required to implement this, along with the maintenance of a database that logs which categories belongs to which themes, renders this kind of approach a non starter.
What could be done, though, is a script that changes the order in which categories are displayed (in "read" mode) regardless of the order in which they appear in the article's source markup (ie in "edit" mode). Again, you'd need to maintain a database of which categories are in which themes if you want it to work like that. Frankly, my view is that it sounds like more effort than it's worth - making sure articles are in the correct categories is enough work in itself without worrying about the order in which they appear. WaggersTALK 09:34, 3 June 2013 (UTC) Please use {{Replyto|Waggers}} when replying so that I receive a notification.
actually I disagree - you don't need to solve all problems. This much would suffice: 1) ask all bots to stop alphabetizing 2) ask everyone driving AWB to stop alphabetizing 3) add to the guidance that alphabetization is not desired and can be reverted by consensus if a different ordering is agreed upon. Then for articles where it matters, editors can set up the groupings. You seem to suggest that we need metadata to define the themes, which I disagree with - an HTML comment will suffice. In cases where someone adds a new cat that isn't in the right section, someone else Can fix it later. We don't need perfection, but I've in several cases organized cats (according to tree, like 'writers') only to have it undone by a bot-driver. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 12:31, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
From the left-side panel, you can select "Special pages", and open "Special pages". Then, from the section "High use pages", you can select "Pages with the most categories", and open "Pages with the most categories". Many of the articles listed there appear to have their categories arranged in alphabetical order or ASCIIbetical order.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:06, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
I have no problem with alphabetization within a particular thematic grouping - the reason some of those have so many categories is because of things like Category:Wars involving Italy, so WWII gets Category:Wars involving EVERY COUNTRY - so sorting this alphabetically makes perfect sense. But, why should Category:World War II come *after* all of the "wars involving" categories? That's what alphabetization does - like sticking the eponymous cat to the bottom, instead of at the head where I think it should be.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 16:13, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
I have two responses.
(1) Does Wikipedia have or should Wikipedia have a policy or guideline requiring or allowing or forbidding the placement of an eponymous category at the top of a list of categories? Does an article in Category:Bilateral relations such as "China–India relations" have two eponymous categories? In an article with one or more eponymous categories, if it or they are listed first, then the first theme can be titled "Eponymous category" or "Eponymous categories".
(2) For an article with a very large number of similar-named categories, is it possible to categorize all of those categories into a more comprehensive category (for example, Category:Wars involving more than 100 countries or Category:Wars involving X group of countries), and then replace the many similar-named categories with the more comprehensive category?
—Wavelength (talk) 20:17, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
Do remember that Wikidata is expected to allow better searches. So many of us are waiting to see how that rolls out and the fallout on the categories. I for one anticipate that rollout could eliminate the need for any intersection categories. Since you would be able to do a query for what you need rather than trying to find a category that provides this or worst creating another category intersection that may or may not have value to the community at large. Vegaswikian (talk) 21:04, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
(1) I don't know of a guideline, but I wouldn't be opposed to adding that, e.g. "In general, it is preferred to place the eponymous category at the top of the list.
(2) Yes, but I'm not sure if that would be worth it - such cases are actually rather rare.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 21:53, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
I feel that it may sometimes be more appropriate to categorize by date or era or specific timeframe - for example in regards to historical events or significant people or populations in specific time ranges, and you might have a category by decade and then list them by subcategory by year and then alphabetize by name in regards to specific people, and alphabetize populations separately by group identity (i.e. "African American Freemen" and "African American Slaves" or rather to give more weight to specific people/populations within an era by listing them first. For musicians, you may also want to refer to specific decades and then list specific artist per decade by the name of the artist, listing them by actual date of 1st recording or album, and then listing the musicians alphabetically when multiple artists of that genre or sub-genre began recording in the same year. When someone creates a list that does follow the alphabetic formula they can explain on their talk page; therefore editors should look at the talk page before reorganizing alphabetically, and if there's a dispute they can discuss it.Sylvia Blossom (talk) 03:19, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
The second of five considerations listed at Wikipedia:Categorization#Articles (version of 23:50, 26 May 2013) is "The order in which categories are placed on a page is not governed by any single rule (for example, it does not need to be alphabetical, although partially alphabetical ordering can sometimes be helpful). Normally the most essential, significant categories appear first." I propose that that section be revised to include the illustration which I mentioned on this talk page at 22:09, 2 June 2013 (UTC). If an editor visits the edit window of an article page and sees the hidden comments indicating that there is a purposeful organization rather than just disorganization or incomplete alphabetization, then a visit to the article talk page might not be necessary.
—Wavelength (talk) 01:25, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
I guess the problem with that is that if they're editing with VisualEditor - which will shortly be the default way of editing - they won't see html comments. Similarly (as mentioned above) if they're using HotCat or similar. Maybe page notices are a better way to go?
The important thing is to get the wording right; I'd rather less experienced editors added a category in the wrong order than got confused by a bunch of instructions telling them what order to put it in and gave up. Equally any comments/notice shouldn't have undue weight - in the scheme of things the order categories appear in barely matters, IMHO. WaggersTALK 07:32, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
I completely agree - inexperienced users or those using HotCat can simply stick the cats where they like. My point is, we should actively discourage people from alphabetizing the categories if they've already been sorted in a specific fashion and have HTML-comments to prove it...--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 15:33, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
I, too, agree that alphabetising categories is never a good idea and should be reversed on sight. I would go further and have the guidelines say that any edit whose sole purpose is to re-order categories is discouraged, but that is probably a minority view. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:29, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Help creating a category page

I've been working with categories for a few weeks now and I've read all of the policy and guideline pages about categorization. But I can't find out how to create a category page. I'm not contemplating generating a lot of new category pages (believe me, I've worked more on merging and deleting categories) but I'd like to know how to create a new one should the article require it.

Thanks to anyone who can point me to the right Wikisource page. 69.125.134.86 (talk) 23:50, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Asked and answered here. Vegaswikian (talk) 00:05, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Category:Intel International Science and Engineering Fair

Is Category:Intel International Science and Engineering Fair really needed? It only contains the subject article and four asteroids discovered during the fair. This is not really how categories work IMO. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:54, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Looks like a good deletion candidate to me. postdlf (talk) 03:37, 3 August 2013 (UTC)
Can you list it for me? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 03:49, 3 August 2013 (UTC)
Done. postdlf (talk) 01:56, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Disambiguation page as main article

The disambiguation page British folklore is now the main article of Category:British folklore. It is in the category with a null sortkey.

That isn't right. It's a wrong solution to a real problem, and an old problem i suppose.

One blunt alternative is to make the disambiguation page a main article in effect: provide a category preface that links the disambiguation page (perhaps not using template {{main}}). Another is to replicate the content of the disambiguation as the category preface. Is either one permissible? Commendable?

--P64 (talk) 22:25, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

That sometimes works, but I'm not sure it's worth doing here, as it would just be a list of key articles within the category, which are easily found via the sub-cats. I wouldn't lose sleep over this, but one possible improvement would be to move the page to Outline of British folklore/ List of topics in British folklore or similar, leaving an uncategorised redirect at the short title. – Fayenatic London 08:49, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Wrong project

This may be the wrong project but we are trying to decide which section of a main article a spin off article belongs in. Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Genetically_modified_food_controversies Thoughts on categorization may help considering where our readers would expect to find it.--Canoe1967 (talk) 20:56, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

RfC: Advertising userboxes on categories which the userbox adds the user to.

This message is to inform all members of this WikiProject that there is an on-going RfC on WP:VPP#Advertising userboxes on categories which the userbox adds the user to. that I think you all may be interested in. Technical 13 (talk) 19:25, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Songs covered by artist

Hi, I was reading The Scientist (song) article and noticed that it was placed in the category "Willie Nelson songs". It puzzled me, because [to an outsider like me] a category named like that seems to suggest that this is a song by Nelson, not by Coldplay. So I decided to create "Songs covered by Willie Nelson" (Willie Nelson songs' subcategory) and put "The Scientist", as well as about ten other songs covered by Nelson, in it. But then I noticed that there aren't any other categories starting with "Songs covered by..." and I think there should be, especially for artists who have recorded dozens of songs, with a large number of them being covers of other artists. In other words, I think a perfect solution would be to have "Willie Nelson songs" divided into subcategories "Songs written by Willie Nelson" and "Songs covered by Willie Nelson", with the rest of the songs (eg. original songs, written for Nelson by some other songwriter) put simply in "Willie Nelson songs".
I rarely have anything to do with categories here on Wikipedia, so if I did something wrong because of my ignorance, I will be happy to revert my edits on those eleven songs, and then request the deletion of that new category. But I'm really curious why aren't there any categories for song covers. — Mayast (talk) 16:44, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

This category is up for deletion, and I'm fine with that. But I'm wondering about what to do with songs that have been covered by another artist? Should they also be categorized as that artist's songs? As I mentioned above, I feel that a category named "<Artist's name> songs" suggests that this artist is an original artist of songs included in that category. So, for example, "Beat It" should be in the "Michael Jackson songs" category, but I think categories like "Fall Out Boy songs", "John Mayer songs" and "Fergie (singer) songs" should be removed from that page. Some very popular songs may have multiple covers and many categories for various artists who performed those songs over the years, and as a result the original artists of those songs get somehow lost in that large number of categories. A similar question was asked here a few years ago, but there was no answer. — Mayast (talk) 13:22, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
I would normally only add categories like that if the song was released as a single or something by the cover artist. For example, Heaven is a song by Bryan Adams, but it was commercially released by DJ Sammy, so, it makes sense to have "Category:DJ Sammy songs" there. However, if another artist made a cover but did not release the song commercially as a single, or if the version is not notable in any other way, then I don't believe the artist should appear at the categories, although their version may be worth mentioning in the article. But I honestly don't know if there are any guidelines for that. If there were, it should be here or here, I guess. Victão Lopes Fala! 13:54, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
Both those links are to the same WikiProject Songs page :) Anyway, thanks for that – I haven't thought about asking about it there (silly me), and it's probably a better place for it :) Now I can see two things at the end of that "Categories" section:
"For example, "Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)" by The Temptations was released in 1971, so it is in Category:The Temptations songs and Category:1971 singles, Category:Songs written by Barrett Strong, Category:Songs written by Norman Whitfield while Category:The Temptations songs is in Category:Songs by artist, Category:American songs, Category:Motown singles and Category:Rhythm and blues songs. It is also in the category Category:The Rolling Stones songs because the The Rolling Stones recorded a notable version which is referred to in the article."
I would say that The Rolling Stones covering The Temptations is much more notable than Fergie covering Michael Jackson or Willie Nelson covering Coldplay :D
"For consistency, the artist name in "Category:<Artist name> songs" should usually be the same as the name in the title of the article."
I guess this one is more about spelling variants of the artist's name, and not deciding whether particular artists should or shouldn't be included in the song's categories. All in all, I think these guidelines aren't very clear and can leave some confusion, but I guess I will ask about it further on the WikiProject Songs. Thanks! — Mayast (talk) 14:24, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Actors_and_Filmmakers#Simplifying_actor.2Factress_gendered_categories

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Actors_and_Filmmakers#Simplifying_actor.2Factress_gendered_categories. Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 18:00, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Help - Bipartate category names

Hi, this may be a dumb question, but I can't find any help. I've been reclassifying items in the Category:Archaeology tree. I have found that with several categories in Category:Ancient History there are items categorised with tags that look like this: [[Category:History books by topic|Ancient era]] The second part doesn't seem to do anything. Before I tidy them up I just want to check that this is a mistake and that there's not something clever going on. Cheers! PatHadley (talk) 23:15, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorry! Some examples: Category:Works about the Ancient era and Category:History books about the Ancient era PatHadley (talk) 23:18, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
The |Ancient era part is the sort key and it affects where in a category list the category appears. Unless you are sure it is incorrect, I would suggest that you leave it alone. WP:SORTKEY should answer your questions. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:55, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
Aha! It all makes sense now! Thanks PatHadley (talk) 17:08, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Rottyful Sky Images

Once a week (usually on Wednesdays), I go through Wikipedia:Database reports/Self-categorized categories and fix up all of them apart from Category:Hidden categories. Usually it's a case of finding an appropriate parent cat and adding that in place of the self-category. This week, I've done all except Category:Rottyful Sky Images and I really don't know what to do with that - I can't identify a suitable parent, but then the content does not match the category name - only one of its members is an image, and that's broken. None of the speedy deletion criteria for cats seems to apply here. Any advice please? --Redrose64 (talk) 12:09, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Well, I cleaned up the articles that were not images and the category loop. Normally I'd suggest moving to commons, but can we move fair use images over there? Vegaswikian (talk) 00:01, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
You cleaned up the category loop by removing it from itself - but I could have done that (I do it several times a week). What you didn't do - and the main reason for me asking here in the first place - was to identify a suitable parent, and place the category into that. It's now an orphan category. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:34, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

FYI re discussion re categorization of cult-related books

FYI re discussion re categorization of cult-related books: See Category talk:Cult-related books#Description of category. 17:26, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

History of a category

Is there any way to see how many items were in a category at some point in the past? Or, ideally, several points (say once a month?)?

I've just realised that although Category:Stubs is emptied pretty often, there are at present over 1,000 articles in Category:People stubs which is not a lot more specific. All of these ought to be moved out by further stub-sorting. It gets topped up from time to time by a bot which trawls through Stubs looking for persondata etc, but presumably the {{bio-stub}} is also manually added by some editors as more helpful than just {{stub}} when they can't think of anything more specific. But I've got no feeling for how the size of that category varies, whether it's been down to double-figures in the recent past, etc. I don't know whether trying to get it emptied and kept empty is likely to be a manageable task or not. I suspect the answer is "no chance", but in case the statistics are lurking somewhere I thought I'd ask here, where the categorisation geeks lurk! Any ideas? PamD

Not as far as I know. The {{PAGESINCATEGORY:categoryname}} parser function (which is expensive) is calculated on the fly by physically counting the pages, not by reading from a database table; since there is no table, there is no easily-read historic data. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:05, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Category talk:People stubs sections 1, 3, 5, and 7 all concern the size of the category. Sections 1 and 7 provide some data from early in the current millenium. It may be worthwhile to contact some of the editors who participated, or even to skim their User spaces, if your interest in the particular category is keen. It makes sense to me that the stub-sorting project, or a biography group, should resume some record-keeping.
Momentarily I will create section 10, Category talk:People stubs#Size of this category. --P64 (talk) 16:27, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
 Done. My note records a few facts and does not call for recollections (see below) or openly consult past participants. ...
But all those sections are >8 years old! That's probably why I didn't raise this question there: the talk page doesn't seem much frequented. PamD 16:35, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Some of the editors who participated may have more recent information.
I doubt that decentralized Category Talk is a good choice for tracking the sizes of many categories but it is a good place if only one will be tracked. It is also a good place for recollections of past size, if the project chooses to muster recollections. --P64 (talk) 16:44, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
  • I have long wished there was a way to track the size of a category over time. That is one annoying thing about categories, it is hard to see the actual changes to their size. I did write out physically some tables on the size of categories related to alumni, year of birth and a few others. If someone wants I could dig them up, but they are at times only vaguely dated. Most come from 2-5 years ago, and I generally can tell at least to the month when the data was recorded.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:12, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Alphabetization of entries in categories about people

Hello all, I recently received a message from a relatively new editor [1] asking why, in the category "English educators", Margaret Hutchinson was listed under "M" rather than "H", as would be expected given that such categories usually list people alphabetically by last name. Does anyone know what the answer to this is? Jinkinson talk to me 03:55, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

This. Categories don't know what an article is about, so we need to add code to the article to make it sort differently than just the order of characters in the article title. postdlf (talk) 05:30, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Defaultsort set to town first for pubs

Whilst happening upon Category:Grade II listed public houses, I noticed that the defaultsort was set to town first for a lot of the entries, resulting in poor alphabetisation in this (and other) categories. Is this correct? --Rob Sinden (talk) 10:08, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

It seems to be one editor's preference: not justified by any policy that I know of, and doesn't seem very useful. I found Wikipedia:WikiProject_Beer/Pub_Taskforce but there is no indication of any such policy or guideline. PamD 18:43, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
(ec)This seems to be a UK thing. I have been dealing with it on church articles. In my opinion, and others, the default sort should by name with abbreviations expanded and punctuation removed if the DEFAULTSORT is used. If the local community wants a different sort in specific categories they should pipe those. The DEFAULTSORT should not be used for that purpose since it messes up the general categories. Not sure where or how this is coming about, but like you, many readers find this confusing. A similar case is the tool for NRHP buildings that sorts like the article is about a person if the building is named after a person. The default should make sense to most readers and not produce apparently random results. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:45, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
Thanks - that's the way I would want to go about it. I'll undo what I can, and I've left a note on the editor in question's talk page. --Rob Sinden (talk) 08:56, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
Hmm - what do we think of pub names that start with "Ye"? Sorted by "Ye", or should we treat it as "The"? --Rob Sinden (talk) 09:20, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
I'd treat "Ye" as "The". PamD 10:09, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
Just found an authority: WP:SORTKEY, talking about "The" etc, says Please also apply these sort keys to deliberate misspellings of these words—e.g. "da" or "tha" for "the", as well as foreign language articles, such as "el" or "der" ..., and though I'm not quite sure whether either of those applies exactly to an archaism, "Ye" is certainly in the spirit of that guideline as something to be treated like "The". PamD 10:46, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for that. I'd say "deliberate misspellings" is applicable here. --Rob Sinden (talk) 10:49, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

RFC: Categorisation of Anglican priests

There is a clear consensus to categorize Anglican priests by both nationality and denomination. Armbrust The Homunculus 13:56, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

{{rfc|reli|rfcid=AE5B517}}

Should Anglican priests be categorised by:

  1. their own nationality (e.g. Category:English Anglican priests)
  2. the Anglican denomination(s) in which they served (e.g. Category:Church of England priests)
  3. both by nationality and by denomination (e.g. Category:English Anglican priests and Category:Church of England priests)
This RFC arises out of a CFD discussion on Category:English Anglican priests, which I have just closed as "no consensus". As I noted in the closing statement:

There is broad agreement that the current category doesn't work, but no agreement on the solution.
As it stands, this category is labelled as a category-by-nationality, but as a sub-category of Category:Church of England clergy it is also used a by-denomination set (grouping priests of the Church of England). Removing this category from Category:Church of England clergy would remove most CoE priests from the COE categories; but renaming it per the nominator's proposal would mean that those English people who are priests in another Anglican denomination would me miscategorised. The parent Category:Anglican priests by nationality is an assortment of categories by nationality and categories by denomination, and it seems that only in the case of Scotland do we have both: a denominational Category:Scottish Episcopalian priests and a nationality Category:Scottish Anglican priests.

--BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:09, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

I have notified WikiProject Anglicanism [2], and all 8 participants in the CFD. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:44, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Discussion

  • Looking at the actual contents it seems that we do not have enough people to justify the by nationality schema. For example Category:German Anglican priests consists of one person who was a priest in Australia. I think we should for now go with a by National Church structure, but have the caveat that in cases like The Episcopal Church we will retroactively apply it to all priests who were within the 13 colonies.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:20, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
    • Surely if that one German (Andreas Loewe) was a German and an Anglican priest, he should be categorised as a German priest? If he was a German footballer who spent most of career in Australia, he would still be in Category:German footballers, as well a categ for his Australian team.
      And if so, why not as a German Anglican priest?
      The concentration of Anglicanism in the former British Empire does mean that many of the by-nationality will be thinly populated. However, the same applies to other occupations which are concentrated in particular parts of the globe, with a thin spread elsewhere. One example is Category:Cricketers by nationality (a similarly-distributed English export), where we some very heavily populated categs, and other very sparse ones. What be the problem with categorising Anglican priests in the same way? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:40, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
Category:Church of Ireland priests should not be under Category:Anglican priests by nationality as the "Ireland" refers to the organisation, not to the nationality of the priests; it should instead be under Category:People by organization. We should have a category for "Irish Anglican priests" (under Category:Anglican priests by nationality) with a "see also" link to the CofI category. The same applies to Category:Scottish Episcopalian priests (priests in the Scottish Episcopal Church, not Scottish people who are Episcopalian priests!) and possibly others. DexDor (talk) 17:36, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
This would seem to lead to category clutter. Do we really want to put every Anglican priest in 2 categories for the one fact of being a priest. That seems to be the very definition of overcategorization.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:13, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
It is routine in many other occupations. For example, Hadley Freeman and Tim Dowling are both in Category:American journalists and Category:The Guardian journalists. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:18, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
Regarding category clutter (@JPL), who a person (notably) worked for is a much more appropriate characteristic for categorization than many other categories we currently have (place of burial, grandparent's ethnicities etc). DexDor (talk) 21:11, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
  • Overlapping. So far, the best solution seems to be to categorise both by nationality and by denomination. That is the only way to avoid either omitting a defining attribute, other than by having a single category for both attributes ... which would be inaccurate for people of one nationality who served in the Anglican denomination of another country.
    My one concern is that there is likely to be significant overlap between the by-nationality and by-denomination categories. For example, I presume that the majority of Church of England priests are English people (although there is probably a significant minority of Scots, Irish, Welsh and Commonwealth people). Similarly, it is likely that a large of majority English Anglican priests served in the CoE rather than in other Anglican churches (though in the days of the British Empire, many went as missionaries to the colonies).
    The situation is complicated by the fact that many of the Anglican denominations outside the UK were established long after the development of an Anglican presence there. For example, until 1927 the substantial Anglican presence in India was organised as a province of the CoE, and the current Diocese of Europe includes all of continental Europe and the former USSR as part of the CoE.
    Despite all the tangles, I can't see any viable alternative to categorising separately by both attributes ... and some of the difficulties about the CoE's geograhical scope may e alleviated by creating a few subcats of Category:Church of England priests, such as Category:Church of England priests in India. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:05, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
  • By denomination for all and by nationality where sufficient numbers merit it. I've used 3 denominations and 3 types of clergy below to illustrate a comprehensive tree structure.

Category:Church of England clergy - parent of

Category:Church of England priests
Category:Church of England deans
Category:Church of England bishops

Category:Church of Ireland clergy - parent of

Category:Church of Ireland priests
Category:Church of Ireland deans
Category:Church of Ireland bishops

Category:Scottish Episcopalian clergy - parent of

Category:Scottish Episcopalian priests
Category:Scottish Episcopalian deans
Category:Scottish Episcopalian bishops

Category:Anglican priests - parent of

Category:Church of Ireland priests
Category:Church of England priests
Category:Scottish Episcopalian priests

Category:Anglican deans - parent of

Category:Church of Ireland deans
Category:Church of England deans
Category:Scottish Episcopalian deans

Category:Anglican bishops - parent of

Category:Church of Ireland bishops
Category:Church of England bishops
Category:Scottish Episcopalian bishops Laurel Lodged (talk) 20:12, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
  • @Laurel Lodged: both Deans and Bishops are types of priests. They should therefore be sub-categories of priests, rather than of the parent clergy categories. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:35, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
  • @BrownHairedGirl: Not really - they're types of clergy. Unless you consider a general and a colonel to by types of soldier. Laurel Lodged (talk) 20:59, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
  • @Laurel Lodged: Generals and colonels are both types of military officer, which in turn a type of soldier. Similarly, bishops and deans are a types of priest, and priests are in turn a type of clergy. The principle of Wikipedia categories that pages should be in be the most specific parent category, which in the case of bishops and deans is priests. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:05, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
@BrownHairedGirl: Pardon if I decline to enter your fantasy world of what you would like me to have said. Keeping this brief:
Hmm. Not so much civility there :(
And the categ hierarchy you set out repeatedly breaches WP:SUBCAT: "A page or category should rarely be placed in both a category and a subcategory or parent category (supercategory) of that category". Some tidyup needed. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:07, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Survey

Categorise by their own nationality

Categorise by the Anglican denomination(s) in which they served

  1. This seems the best with our current contents.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:20, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Categorise both by nationality and by denomination

  1. Category:Anglican priests by nationality should have a subcat for Anglican priests of Irish nationality. Category:Church of Ireland priests can remain, but should not be under a people-by-nationality category. See my more detailed explanation in the Discussion section. DexDor (talk) 17:42, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
  2. For me, the third option is the best. The scheme of categories chosen needs to take account of all centuries back to the 16th. Of course, until the 19th century (and even later) the C. of E. had dioceses in most parts of the British Empire. It is odd that we have a Category:Church of Ireland priests‎ but not a Category:Church of England priests‎. Despite what someone said in the last discussion, a huge number of Church of Ireland priests‎ were English and Welsh, and even now some are. I suppose all those in Category:16th-century Anglican priests are English, but I see no harm in that form being used for the century-by-century categories. From 1801 to 1869 the established church in England and Ireland was the "United Church of England and Ireland", and the Church of England (or else the United Church of England and Ireland) was the established church in Wales until disestablishment took effect there in 1920. So we need to avoid any narrowness of approach which works for one century but not another. Moonraker (talk) 21:00, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
  3. The third option makes the most sense, with the caveat that there may not be enough content to justify creation of some of the potential categories.
    Denominational categorization is important. Not all Anglicans are Church of England; groups like American Episcopals are actually Anglican without using that term; and offshoots like Continuing Anglicanism are Anglican without being part of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Accordingly, I suggest that Church of England priests, Church of Ireland priests, American Episcopal priests, etc., should be included in a parent category for "Priests of the Anglican Communion" (or similar wording) and a similar umbrella category should be created for Continuing Anglicanism. Both of these belong in a higher category for "Anglican priests" (or "Anglican clergy").
    If categorization by nationality is desired (and it appears to me that there is a perceived need for categorizing by nationality), there needs to be a clear distinction from the denominational categorization. --Orlady (talk) 02:48, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
  4. By denomination for all and by nationality where numbers merit it. If the result would be too many small categories by nationality, then don't create them. Only create them where it makes sense to do so. Laurel Lodged (talk) 20:15, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
  5. So far as I can see from the discussion so far, this is the only workable route. Denominational categorisation is important, and so is categorisation by nationality. Combining the two doesn't work for a significant minority of biographies. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:22, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
  6. Both methods of categorization provide useful information about the subject, and it appears there are many exceptions concerning nationality and regional denominations (e.g. not all Church of Ireland priests are Irish). Floatsam (talk) 03:40, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Template:Check category and category pages

The template {{Check category}} doesn't put the page into any maintenance cats if used on a category page; this is because it uses {{ambox}}. Please comment at Template talk:Check category#Category pages. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:57, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

RfC about whether one-entry categories should exist

It's here: Wikipedia talk:Categorization#RfC: Forever Alone?. Herostratus (talk) 15:06, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Opinions needed re: subcats

I made a number of edits to remove redundant categorization of items that were in both Category:Violence against women and Category:Rape per WP:SUBCAT. @Drowninginlimbo: has stalked my edits and reverted almost all of them. see [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

Drowninginlimbo claims that Category:Rape is a non-diffusing category, which to me doesn't make any sense at all - first of all, it is not labelled as such, and secondly, if it is really non-diffusing, then ALL of the contents should be put in ALL parents (that's what non-diffusing means) - but this isn't the case nor how the category has been used to date. I think having Category:Rape as a diffusing subcategory of various violence cats makes more sense, and I don't think there is a need to bubble all of the contents of Category:Rape up to the various parents - we could simply keep the head article Category:Rape in Category:Violence against men and Category:Violence against women and then keep all other articles that deal with rape, rape cases, rape law, rape analysis etc in Category:Rape (and relevant subcats) and not dual=categorize them all in Category:Violence against women and Category:Violence against men. Please share your opinions below so we can come to consensus here.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 17:18, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
I think removing them from Category:Violence against women distracts from the fact that many of these articles are issues that mostly affect women. This particular categorisation is also not NPOV for you as you edit from a anti-Feminist POV. It also helps hugely with navigation to have them included in both categories. I'd also prefer it if you didn't refer to my reverting your edits as 'stalking', this isn't your personal encyclopedia and your edits aren't above reproach --Drowninginlimbo (talk) 17:40, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Categorization is based on policies, not on your personal feelings. No-one will dispute that Rape isn't relevant for violence against women - that is why it is a subcategory thereof. The real question is, of the 1381 pages in the Category:Rape category, why do you believe that 6 or 7 should be in the parent? it's inconsistent, and violates WP:SUBCAT. Do you have a policy-based reason for your edits? I can't find any. also please don't claim that I edit from an anti-feminist POV.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 18:02, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
I was reverting the edits you had made as I didn't feel there was consensus for it, I will go through and edit the ones you didn't revert at a later date. Okay then, I won't claim it, although you have made similar claims against me based on the same actions you have made --Drowninginlimbo (talk) 18:05, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
  • Note that currently Category:rape has 12 subcategories and 46 articles, and ~1300 articles below that. Drowning has given no explanation why around 2 sub-categories and ~6 articles should be placed in the parent of Category:Violence against women, but none of the others. If rape is relevant to violence against women (which no-one will disagree with), why not put everything in Category:Rape in Category:Violence against women as well? It doesn't make any sense. Rape is a sufficiently detailed topic that it merits its own category tree, and that whole tree is in Category:Violence against women. The "it helps hugely with navigation" argument could be used for any article about rape, and we have hundreds - so either we move ALL of them up to the parent since it helps navigation, or we keep them categorized in subcats per WP:SUBCAT.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 17:43, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Doesn't that ignore the fact that rape often IS about violence against a specific gender, not humans as a whole? Your proposed categorisation is ignorant of the very reality of rape. Why can't you include articles in both? --Drowninginlimbo (talk) 18:16, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
We have WP:SUBCAT for a reason - since categories are supposed to help with navigatin. There are simply too many rape articles to bubble all those relating to women up to the parent. All rape articles are relevant to Category:Gender-based violence, Category:Sexual_and_gender_prejudices and Category:Sexuality and society, but we don't place all rape articles in those categories as well. This is simply how categories work here.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 18:21, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
But removing Category:Violence against women means that the categorisation does not reflect that rape is often a gendered issue. I would argue that some articles have both categories, whilst others have just Category:Rape, as that category does not adequately reflect much of what Category:Violence against women entails --Drowninginlimbo (talk) 18:28, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
The current reversions you did were arbitrary Drowning - they weren't based on any analysis of what should be in the category, you were simply reverting any change I made. You did not add Category:Gang rape, Category:War rape‎, Category:Marital rape‎, Rape during the occupation of Germany, Rape during the liberation of France to the parent. Why not? I could cite dozens or hundreds of other articles that are about rape + women that could also go in the parent. It's arbitrary. It's better to clear out the violence cat of most of the rape articles and keep them all centralized in the rape category; leave the articles to discuss gendered issues of rape, don't use the category system to try to prove some point.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 18:34, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Not all rapes are committed against women. The Sexual Offences Act 2003, which is a British law, says (in subsection 1(1)) "A person (A) commits an offence if— (a) he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his penis, (b) B does not consent to the penetration, and (c) A does not reasonably believe that B consents." The gender of neither party is explicitly stated, but clause 1(1)(a) in using the words "with his penis" implicitly makes person (A) male. That does not make person (B) female, nor does the use of the use of the word "vagina" in the same clause. Sexual violence by men against men does exist, and for eleven years British law has recognised that. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:53, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
We all register that both women and men are raped, in fact the sad truth is that more men are sexually assaulted than the public realises. However, the topic of conversation is whether or not it's relevant to categorise articles about rape with the gendered categories of Violence against women/men as well as Rape, especially if the articles themselves are about not just Sexual Violence, but Sexual Violence against women/men and one of the genders in particular (in that they are relevant to Gender Studies) --Drowninginlimbo (talk) 20:37, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
read WP:DNWAUC - no-one is debating whether rape has something to do with gendered violence, and you'd have a hard time finding articles about rape that ARENT about gendered violence. It is essentially a violent crime based on gender. But you are ignoring WP:SUBCAT and the reason we have that, which is to reduce proliferation of categories and maintain consistency in terms of which articles are categorized where. If, as you suggest, we start moving things from Category:Rape and putting them in Category:Violence against women in any instance where a woman is somehow involved, and Category:Violence against men in case where men are involved, we'd also have to do the same for the national-level categories, so for example Kobe_Bryant_sexual_assault_case, and everything else in Category:Rape in the United States, including most sub-categories, would _also_ have to be placed in Category:Violence against women in the United States and Category:Sex crimes in the United States. If extended to its logical conclusion, your suggestions would entail moving hundreds or thousands of articles and dual-categorizing them by parents. It would also create an endless source of debates, such as the one at Talk:Rape_culture where people are saying "It happens to men, so should be in Category:Violence against men", etc. It's a huge time sink and waste of time, and the much simpler, easier solution is to follow the process we use everywhere else for topic categories, which is, if the subject of the article is about something more specific that has a subcat, the article goes in the subcat, NOT the parent. The solution with Category:Rape, in recognition that it impacts all genders, is to simply put the category in both gendered parents. Our category tree can be dozens of levels deep, but the reason it's usable is because we don't replicate the parent categories on all of the articles in the children. Drowning, you have yet to cite any policy-based reason for violating WP:SUBCAT; you tried to claim that Category:Rape was non-diffusing but you've offered no arguments or evidence of same. The only argument you have to date is "Rape is a bad thing that happens to women b/c they are women, therefore it belongs in the top-level cat" - but you haven't given any criteria to discern which of the 1300+ rape articles we have should go in the VAW parent cat, and based on what? Let's stop talking about gender studies philosophy and start talking about how to apply categorization rules based on WP policy. I have given a clear policy-based argument, and I can back it up from instances of same throughout the tree.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 20:58, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Obi-wan is clearly correct here, Drowning. There is zero need here to replicate the parent categories on the article. That goes above and beyond any debate about the subject of the original article. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 22:35, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Although I think it would benefit the articles to have the gender specific categorisation, I have reverted my changes to remove the 'Violence against...' categories for the time being as consensus seems to side with yourself @Obiwankenobi: --Drowninginlimbo (talk) 23:09, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Categories of people by year of birth/death

There is an ongoing discussion in the Village pump (Agora) at the Greek Wikipedia (el.wikipedia.org) about keeping or deleting birth/death categories like Category:1980 births and Category:1985 deaths. I know that the english and the greek categorization policy could be different, but Ι would like to have your opinion about keeping or deleting those categories. Thank you in advance.--Vagrand (talk) 05:45, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

The year of birth (and to a lesser extent the year of death) categories may be useful one day with a category intersection facility - e.g. to enable readers/editors to select articles about people notable in a particular field in a particular (approximate) period (we mainly categorize by occupation+nationality rather than occupation+century). These categories only add 2 (fairly stable) category tags to an article; I'm more concerned about categorization schemes that cause an article to be in many (sometimes poorly defined) categories and cause lots of watchlist noise. So, on balance, my opinion is to keep these categories, but acknowledge that they are different from "navigation" categories which normally get diffused once they contain a few hundred articles. You might also want to look at categorization on the German Wikipedia which differs from that at enwp. DexDor (talk) 06:31, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
They're still useful for navigation, because every biography will have a birth (and eventually, death), and in that way can help function as a kind of master index rather than the often picky and arbitrary categories for such things as occupation, place of origin, etc. I've used them when I'm unsure of the spelling of an article, or its title might use diacritics, or its title might have a disambiguator which could also vary widely, and if I don't then find the article I'm looking for in that category I'm reasonably confident it doesn't exist yet. "Diffusing" usually hinders that, if you aren't already intimately familiar with how a category structure has been "diffused" (or structures, if every other applicable category is as specific as it can be), or if you only know one fact for sure about a subject when a "diffused" category structure requires you to know two or three to find an article because the categories intersect separate facts. A few hundred articles in a category is not a hindrance to navigation when you know at least roughly what you're looking for because the categories sort alphabetically. postdlf (talk) 13:14, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
Actually these probably should be migrated to Wikidata. Vegaswikian (talk) 17:45, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Actually, in Greek Wikipedia, we are discussing to write dates of births/deaths on wikidata and after that to delete those categories (if we deside to delete them). Xaris333 (talk) 05:04, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Proposing a category; Artists who use body fluids as a medium.

Hi! Never made a category before, but I noticed a category Wikimedia has that we lack here, that being artists who use body fluids as a medium in their work. We have an article; Body fluids in art, but no category for the artists themselves for tagging their pages. What do you think? --BenBurch (talk) 22:14, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Sub-Categorization for Presidents

I am creating a separate Portal:Laws in India, every country has President in Country. Now when viewed Category:Presidents by country it describes that "This category contains articles about the office of president as it exists within a country or nation-state, and people who have held the office." It is absolutely correct which explains things that whoever held the office as President would be listed in category.

But there is the need for making distinction between ex-Presidents and current President. So, I proposes to create separate sub-category for ex-Presidents of the Country and put all the ex-Presidents in the Category of ex-Presidents. There is the great difference between Person currently holding position and Person was holding position.

Another reason that I want to know who is the Current President of the Honduras. Now by visiting page Category:Presidents_of_Honduras it show 65 Pages i.e. Office Holder of Presidents but can't know instantly who is the current President of Honduras. If the new Category ex-Presidents is created and ex-Presidents moves there then only the current President of the Country would remain there. It would make easy to know from Categorization who is the Current President of the Country. Vineet Gupta , Advocate, 605, Sector 10D, Chandigarh (talk) 14:14, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

we don't in almost all cases do current vs ex categories, and such cats are regularly deleted. It just leads to too much category churn. A list is better for marking who is the current X, when they started, when it will end, etc.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 14:54, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
You could also add the current office holder to the category's description page. It just wouldn't make sense to keep a separate category for just one individual when there are so many other ways of presenting that information. The main purpose of categories is to group related articles, and splitting them up in this way would hinder that. More readers are interested in seeing ALL the office holders together than in having to jump to a separate category just to see one of them. postdlf (talk) 15:03, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
@Vineetgupta22: Please see Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:23, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

IEG proposal on the category system in the English Wikipedia

I have submitted a proposal for an Individual Engagement Grant for the first phase of a project looking at the category systems in Wikimedia wikis. In this first phase I will research the nature of the English Wikipedia's category system, as the first step in designing ways to optimize category systems throughout WMF wikis. In later phases, I plan to

  • Research how readers and editors utilize the category system in the English Wikipedia.
  • Investigate the category systems in other language Wikipedias and in other WMF projects.
  • Explore the value and feasibility of using Wikidata as the basis for the category system across WMF wikis. If deemed appropriate by the community, work with the community to develop and implement this.
  • Utilize user-centered design methodologies to prototype various enhancements to the category system to improve the user experience. If deemed appropriate by the community, work with the community to develop and implement such enhancements.

If you would like to endorse this proposal, you can do so here. I would also appreciate any other feedback, pro or con, which can be posted here. Thanks! Libcub (talk) 06:05, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Knights of Malta categories

Today I created Category:Sovereign Military Order of Malta, intended to be a category for all articles related to the modern Order as reconstituted in 1834. The SMOM has a body of pages around it not unlike those for countries, such as those in Category:Foreign relations of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. This seemed to me to be a logical new category, because before, articles like the foreign relations one were lumped together with pages on the medieval Knights Hospitaller and its descendants in places like Britain (Venerable Order of Saint John) that are not part of the SMOM.

The snag came when I got to the pages in Category:Knights of Malta. The vast bulk of pages in that category seem to be SMOM members, but not all of them. I started to move the relevant pages to Category:Knights of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, but stopped myself for a couple of reasons. First, a large majority of pages in Category:Knights of Malta seem to be SMOM members; it would be far less tedious to move the non-SMOM knights out of the category and into something else. Second, while the SMOM's institutions underwent a very clear break in 1834, allowing the category structure to easily show a difference between "before" and "after", the SMOM's membership did not have such a clean break, and there are many knights, like Carlo Candida, on both sides of the divide.

Add to that the already confusing terminology in some other pages, like Category:Grand Masters of the Knights Hospitaller, which has members from the medieval era to the present day. Even if pre- and post-1834 knights of Malta belong in one category, the terminology used in those ranked subcategories is not consistent. I think I need help sorting through all this.

[EDIT] Here is the category tree after undoing some of my changes:

Click on "►" below to display subcategories:
Sovereign Military Order of Malta

Fishal (talk) 01:03, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

I deleted Category:Knights of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta which you left empty. If I misunderstood you and you want to re-create it, go ahead, or leave me a note to undelete it. – Fayenatic London 13:57, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for taking care of that. I think the scheme makes sense now. Fishal (talk) 21:17, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Eyes needed

Neutral eyes needed at Talk:East Harlem#Question about categories (the final thread on the page) BMK (talk) 23:08, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Category pages will be movable soon

See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive262#Category_pages_will_be_movable_soon. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:52, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

How to deal with conflicting sources on how to categorize a topic

I'd like advice about a situation where there's disagreement about WP:Categorization. When there is disagreement (from sourced material, and among the editors) on how to categorize a topic, how shall this be handled? It certainly doesn't need a Controversy section discussing the disagreement, nor is it clear how to mention it in the text or how to deal with it in relation to related topics. The case I have in mind is an alternative health modality, Rolfing. The debate is whether it should be described as bodywork, manual therapy or manipulative therapy, or massage. Presently the article uses the term massage, however practitioners of Rolfing say that it is not massage. This disagreement comes about because a number of secondary sources call it a type of massage, while a number of other secondary sources avoid using the word massage and some even bother to clarify that it's often mistaken for massage. The word massage is sometimes used by the general population as a synonym for bodywork, yet bodywork practitioners often understand that the term "bodywork" is more inclusive; see bodywork (alternative medicine) for a brief review of this. (The word "massage" comes from the word for dough (masa for instance) and it has a connotation of kneading the muscles. Hands-on approaches that are more sophisticated than kneading will sometimes avoid the term massage.) Another factor: there is a massage tradition that has developed over time, and Rolfing does not have a place within that tradition but rather has its own history, teachers, schools, etc. One cannot attend massage school to learn Rolfing. Is there a WP policy on how to handle this sort of problem? I welcome suggestions, and also if an experienced editor would be interested in collaborating with me to put together a draft of changes to propose to the page's editors, I would appreciate it! (PS. I'm researching this question prior to adding the sources I've found that weigh in on each side of the debate - so the current article has only a couple of sources that pertain to categorization but I have more.)--Karinpower (talk) 18:56, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

These links might be helpful.
—Wavelength (talk) 19:22, 29 May 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, Wavelength! Nice moniker, by the way. I have found some of these but some are new to me, so thanks. Incidentally, there *is* an entry for Rolfing in the Alt Med glossary, as a subcategory of "Manipulative and body-based methods" (under letter M). Massage and Rolfing are both on that list. Most of the references on WP, and many of the others, support the position that Rolfing is not a type of massage (including the massage and bodywork articles you linked to). But I'm wary of just making the edit on the article because the current group of editors have sharp teeth. Would you be willing to add the article to your watchlist and be ready to chime in on the topic? We could use some unbiased additional perspectives. Thanks!--Karinpower (talk) 03:47, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
On your suggestion, I have added "Rolfing" to my watchlist, but I am not guaranteeing participation by me on the article or its talk page. My time is limited, and I have priorities. However, I have these comments to add to this discussion.
  • I suggest a thorough review of as many definitions as possible for each of these expressions:
"Rolfing", "bodywork" (alternative medicine), "manual therapy", and "massage"
  • I suggest communication with one or more authenticated representatives of the Rolfing profession, for the purpose of finding an official online definition of "Rolfing" which can be used for resolving this disagreement.
  • I suggest that the most prominent definition (which might be the most common definition) for each expression be followed.
  • I suggest that the umbrella term(s) which by definition best apply to "Rolfing" be used for Wikipedia.
  • In my personal copy of the book "Getting Better", by Adelaide Bry (ISBN 0-89256-044-4), Chapter 19 of Part I is entitled "Rolfing". Here are some excerpts, which do not necessarily represent its categorization correctly.
    • "They have allowed themselves to be stretched, elbowed, pummelled, and massaged until some of them cried—and most of them are grateful for the experience." (page 160)
    • "The reason Rolfing hurts is that the Rolfer massages your body on a very deep level." (page 161)
    • "As the Rolfer continues massaging, he and the patient discuss these feelings." (page 162)
  • I suggest that it might be possible to place the article in more than one of the three categories that you mentioned.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:37, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! Very helpful. (Regarding offical Rolfing rep, the marketing director has participated on the talk page and can be consulted, as well as their website, www.rolf.org.) --Karinpower (talk) 17:19, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
In response to your question, I started a discussion at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Miscellaneous#Rolfing: classification. Here is a link to the version of 03:02, 31 May 2014.
—Wavelength (talk) 04:00, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Category removal

Hi I have an interest in TE Lawrence - and was intrigued to find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:T._E._Lawrence has had categories removed. Subsequent conversation with the remover has not elicited either a policy or substantive and understandable rationale for the removal. Subsequent english author categories have also been removed. It would be very useful if someone who is experienced in this project to point out to me or the removalist - the error of our ways. The conversation appears to have gone no-where and it would be very helpful if a regular practitioner in these climes would be able to indicate where the error is (I have never found a reason for why categories should not be in a category - and that is ignoring the hidden categories) satusuro 05:06, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

This has now developed into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#User_effecting_major_category_changes_for_biographies - satusuro 14:02, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Request template move

Hi all. I've requested that {{Distinguished subcategory}} be moved to {{Non-diffusing subcategory}}. Please contribute to the discussion at the talk page. Thanks. SFB 15:28, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Help

Hi, I have a question I didn't find the answer here in Wikipedia:Categorization, I want to know what's wikipedia policy for Sport Competitions with a main category and some subcategories. for example we have this page Cycling at the Asian Games and this main category [[Category:Cycling at the Asian Games]]. now we have two options, can someone tell me which one is correct.

1. adding the main page to these categories of [[Category:Asian Games events]] and [[Category:Cycling at multi-sport events‎]] and [[Category:Cycle racing in Asia]].
2. or leaving the page only in the subcategory of [[Category:Cycling at the Asian Games]] since it's a subcategory of those 3 main cats. Mohsen1248 (talk) 18:41, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
@Mohsen1248: You never got a response, but better late than never! WP:EPONYMOUS shows that where an article has its own category, the article should be listed in both the eponymous category and the usual parent categories, unless there is a clear reason why this choice would cause issues. I actually disagree with most of the reasons to exclude the article from the parent, such as not having Religion in Afghanistan‎ in Category:Religion by country. I don't find the negatives (i.e. the article is not discussing religion by country, but religion in one country) persuasive compared to the positives (i.e. having a category where a reader can view all of Wikipedia's "Religion in [Country]" articles). SFB 15:38, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
@Sillyfolkboy: Yes, I think you are right here, actually that's what I did when I didn't get any response here. Mohsen1248 (talk) 16:19, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Leaflet for Wikiproject Categories at Wikimania 2014

Hi all,

My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.

One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.

This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:

• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film

• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.

• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.

• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____

• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost

The deadline for submissions is 1st July 2014

For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to:

Project leaflets
Adikhajuria (talk) 17:04, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Stub being content categorization?

Are stubby articles categorized as stubs considered a form of content categorization? See Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2014 July 5 for the discussion -- 65.94.171.126 (talk) 04:40, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

A cat question over at WP Help

Rather than repost here, could someone please help with Wikipedia:Help desk#Templates, navboxes, categories, and my utter, utter confusion? Many thanks, Anna Frodesiak (talk) 06:04, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

I need the opinion of members of this group, at the Cfd from July 18th about Category:People by ethnic or national origin. It is a rather elemental category, so I'd like additional review. Very view people are participating at Cfd, which is sad. Thanks very much! -- 068129201223129O9598127 (talk) 21:27, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

CfD nomination of Category:Categories by geographical location

Category:Categories by geographical location has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming. You are encouraged to join the discussion on the Categories for discussion page. CN1 (talk) 19:11, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Removal of cats from cats related to books, films and games

There is a user - Marvin Delamo (talk · contribs) - who has been removing certain categories from category pages; they also seem to be removing category sort keys from those cats that remain. The cats concerned seem to be related to books, films and games. Is this part of some agreed scheme? --Redrose64 (talk) 07:32, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

If the edits are all of the nature of this one, they don't appear constructive. All he's done is remove the sortkey from one and moved the other category from a more to less specific one. All their edits have been marked as minor and all of their edit summaries merely repeat the name of the edited page. So I'd say revert all their edits and warn them. postdlf (talk) 14:12, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
(As I've done now...[13]) postdlf (talk) 15:11, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

After noting another account continuing the exact same pattern of category editing (marked as minor, edit summary just repeats the page title, cat sorting removed), in the same subject area and even to some of the same pages, I've blocked both; see also Alejandro-Delamo (talk · contribs). Can't say I've ever seen anyone move a category page into article space before.[14] Please everyone keep an eye out for more of the same, in the subject area of South American film categories. postdlf (talk) 17:44, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Category:Shogi players

Hi,

I have a question regarding assigning categories to articles. In particular, I am interested in what kinds of things need to be considered when assigning Category:Shogi players to articles. Is it simply enough to show that a person plays shogi (e.g., as a hobby, etc.) or does the person have to derive some of their notability from shogi (e.g., as a professional shogi player, amateur champion, or author, etc.)?

Let me use the following two people as examples to help explain what I am figure out.

  • Yoshiharu Habu is a professional shogi player who is arguably the greatest shogi player of all time. Almost all of his notability (in a Wikipedia sense) stems from shogi, so it makes perfect sense to assign Category:Japanese shogi players to his article. Habu, is also by chance, a very strong chess player. He has played in quite a few international tournaments with fairly good results and has been awarded the title of FIDE Master. Shogi is Habu's profession while chess is more of a hobby, but still his chess playing has received some coverage in various media sources. So, it seems appropriate to assign Category:Japanese chess players and Category:Chess FIDE Masters to his article.
  • Garry Kasparov is a former World Chess Champion who is arguably the greatest chess player of all time. Much of his notability does indeed come from his chess playing, but he is also well-known as an author and politician, etc. Therefore, It makes perfect sense to assign any relevant categories related to chess, politics, Russia, etc. to his article. Kasparov, like quite a few other professional/amateur chess players, plays (has played) shogi (as well as other board games). He, however, doesn't seem to derive any of his notoriety from shogi other than as a curiosity: a former World Chess Champion who played a game of "Japanese Chess"[15]. It's not wrong to say that Kasparov plays shogi, but I am not sure if it is right to categorize him as "shogi player".

When would it be appropriate to assign Category:Shogi players to chess players such as Kasparov who may "play shogi" for fun as a hobby, maybe online or maybe in tournaments, and who may have received some minor coverage for doing so, but for the most part derive none of their notability (in a Wikipedia sense) as a "shogi player"?

Thanks in advance. - Marchjuly (talk) 07:05, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

If you go up the category tree you get to Category:People in the games industry which says "This category is for people involved in the business of games, from manufacturer CEOs to designers to professional players." and the category above that which "classifies people by their notable ... hobbies" which I think means people who are notable because of a hobby (whether or not they are also notable for anything else) so Kasparov shouldn't (based on his current article) be categorized as a shogi player. The question to ask is "does this person's shogi playing make them notable?" - if the answer is yes then I would place the article in the category, if the answer is maybe then I would leave the article in the category if it's there already. If we categorized everyone by hobbies that don't make them notable then, for example, Category:Golfers would contain more articles about businessmen, lawyers etc than articles about golfers (which wouldn't help navigation). DexDor (talk) 19:04, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
@DexDor: Thanks for the reply. Do you feel that Almira Skripchenko should be categorized as a "shogi player" according to your criteria? She plays shogi and this can be cited by sources, but she derives no notability from it as far as I can tell. Currently, there is no mention of shogi in her article. It is possible that something could be added at a later date, but I am not sure even if that would be enough to consider her a "shogi player". A discussion I had with another editor on Talk:Almira Skripchenko#Shogi has come to the conclusion that it would be OK to remove the category if there are no objections. Nobody has posted any, but I thought I just ask here for advice before doing anything. Thanks again. - Marchjuly (talk) 22:13, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
If an article makes no mention of a subject (e.g. shogi) then it shouldn't be in a category for that subject. Note: just searching for the word "shogi" may not be sufficient; for example an article about a notable person in Tokyo would belong in a Japanese people category even if the word "Japan" doesn't appear in the text. DexDor (talk) 22:28, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure that nothing currently in the article implies any association between Skripchenko and shogi. I think the editor who assigned that category just did so based on their RW knowledge of Skripchenko. I've discussed this with that editor on the article's talk page, and they have agreed that the category can be removed. I was just looking to see if WP:CATP had a specific policy regarding this kind of thing. Thanks again. - Marchjuly (talk) 00:51, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Create a BOT to alphabetize and organize categories automatically

As someone who has been doing this manually for years, I hereby dutifully beg of anyone who is technically proficient and knows how to create and run a bot that will:

  1. Automatically sort all Categories on each article and category page alphabetically;
  2. Create a uniform system for where to place categories on each article and category page that commence with numbers, such as years of birth/death, centuries, and any category that starts with a number/numeral.

Please see the centralized discussion at Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 61#Create a BOT to alphabetize and organize categories automatically. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 08:48, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Discussion re-opened at VPP

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 114#Create a BOT to alphabetize and organize categories automatically. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 22:38, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech help required to improve categories

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 114#CatVisor and User:Paradoctor/CatVisor#Planned features if you are willing and able to assist this innovative WP project move along it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 23:05, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Landform categories, large and small

I have a question about how small and specific landform categories have to be before it's OCAT. Landforms include lakes, rivers, mountains, bays, etc. Within Category:Landforms of the United States by state, there are categories for each state as well as by-state categories for 19 different types of landform. For most states, landforms are further categorized by county, while there are also statewide categories for each type of landform. For example, Georgia has statewide categories for caves, hills, islands, etc. It also has a Category:Bodies of water of Georgia (U.S. state), within which are categories for lakes, rivers, etc. Within Category:Lakes of Georgia (U.S. state), there are 9 articles as well as a category for reservoirs that contains 43 more articles. Lake Seminole is in Category:Reservoirs in Georgia (U.S. state) as well as Category:Landforms of Seminole County, Georgia and Category:Landforms of Decatur County, Georgia. This is the pattern for most states I've sampled: specific landforms are categorized statewide, while landforms in general are categorized by county.

There are exceptions in the case of some larger categories for larger states. For example, caves and peninsulas of Florida have statewide categories, while Category:Lakes of Florida contains 59 articles as well as sub-categories for five of Florida's 67 counties. Those by-county lakes categories contain between 8 and 85 articles. Choosing Leon County at random, I found that none of the eight lakes articles in that county are also in the statewide Category:Lakes of Florida. Interestingly, none of those articles are also in Category:Landforms of Leon County, Florida; instead, that category contains Category:Lakes of Leon County, Florida, whereas in the other states I sampled, individual lakes articles are in the by-county landforms category, even in those cases where they're also in a by-county lakes category.

New York is another illustrative example, being a large and well-populated state. Category:Rivers of New York contains 206 articles as well as sub-categories for four of New York's 62 counties, those latter containing between 1 and 14 articles. I sampled the first five articles in Category:Rivers of Orange County, New York, and they're all in both that category as well as Category:Rivers of New York. Category:Lakes of New York contains 120 articles and no by-county categories. The reservoirs sub-category contains 65 articles as well as one sub-category for Westchester County with 10 articles. I checked the first four of those articles, and they're all in both Category:Reservoirs of Westchester County, New York as well as Category:Reservoirs in New York.

Maine is the example that brought this question to my attention. It's a rather small state (particularly as regards population), and yet it has the most extensive by-county categorization I've noticed--largely a result of widespread by-county categorization by one wikipedian about four years ago. For example, there are by-county lakes categories for 14 of Maine's 16 counties. Those categories contain 2-7 articles each, for a total of 68 articles. Only 29 of those articles are also categorized in the statewide Category:Lakes of Maine. An indefatigable WP categorist recently edited many articles on Maine lakes, adding them to the statewide category while also leaving them in the by-county category, but the wikipedian who had created the by-county categories undid many of those edits.

So my questions are:

  • Most states have a landform categorization scheme in which landforms in general are categorized by county, while specific types of landforms are categorized statewide. Is there value in achieving standardization of this scheme in states that are not currently applying it?
  • When one or a small number of counties have an especially large number of a particular type of landform (e.g. 65 articles in Category:Lakes of Polk County, Florida), should the articles in such categories also be categorized in the statewide category for that landform, which contains articles for that type of landform for most counties?
  • If yes to the above, anyone have a rough opinion as to how many articles merits a by-county category?
  • What do people think of an alternative to the above, in which the statewide category for that type of landform is made an allincluded category?

I pose these questions here because they strike me as having general policy-interpretation implications, rather than being limited in their interest specifically to landforms enthusiasts. I don't know whether this essay is authoritative, but its recommendations struck me as germane to this issue, and particularly to my second question: Wikipedia:Overcategorization/Intersection of location and occupation. Jbening (talk) 22:08, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

  • A good start. WP:SUBCAT provides some general, but not definitive guidance in this area. The {{Non-diffusing subcategory}} template is rarely used as the concept itself may not be readily understood. And so arguments and edits and reverts. All included categories with its {{All included}} template is openly rejected by some editors who remove it from categories and undo any work that has been done to make an all included category. More arguments, edits, reverts. And the cutoff number of entries to make a category (for landforms or anything else) is not commonly agreed upon and so is just another subject of argument/edit/revert. with all this activity and confusion, it is little wonder that the category trees often display no coherent pattern. Hmains (talk) 03:16, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Film project categorization

The film project appears to believe that a "consensus" there can override normal Wikipedia-wide categorization procedures, and parent (and grandparent) categories can be added to articles which already have child (or grandchild) cats on them. Thus, an article which already has Category:American Western (genre) films, which is a child of Category:American films by genre, is having Category:American films added to it, even though that category is the parent of the "American films by genre". My understanding is that this is not the normal procedure here. BMK (talk) 22:17, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree. I would like any category with a "For convenience, all ... are included in this category." to explain who this categorization is convenient for - it makes things less convenient for those who maintain categorization. Editors can use a tool to get a list of all the articles in a category (including subcats) - currently this category has 44143 articles. How is a category containing 20944 articles directly convenient for readers ? DexDor (talk) 05:33, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
Non-diffusing categories are used in about 500 instances. Are they are all to be discussed here? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:00, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Request for opinions

I've requested opinions regarding the appropriate usage of categories when the verifiable information appears at a "sub-article". Discussion here. Thank you for your feedback! DonIago (talk) 13:01, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Category:Commons category with local link different than on Wikidata

Hello, category experts. Am I the only one who is bothered by the grammatical structure of this category name? Shouldn't it be "Commons category with local link different from that on Wikidata"? —Anne Delong (talk) 14:18, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Of or In

With regards to the naming of Bishops (in the case I am looking into) by country, should the preposition be in or of. For example, at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2014 October 1 we are discussing Category:American Anglican bishops‎ (because it is a category by country not nationality), which has been proposed moved to Category:Anglican bishops‎ in the United States. Should this be at Category:Anglican bishops‎ of the United States (because the people may not physically be in the US presently, they may have just had a period of time where they were doing there bishoping there). Looking into Category:Bishops there is a mess of options, however Category:Italian bishops has a a slew of subcategories listed as Bishops of XXXX. Cheers, --kelapstick(bainuu) 12:03, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Category intersection requires stricter categorization

How many (English) Wikipedia pages would you expect to find at the intersection of Category:Monarchy and Category:Geology ? A few maybe (e.g. members of royal families who were also notable as geologists).

How about at the intersection of all of Category:Monarchy, Category:Historical geology, Category:Geometric topology, Category:Veterinary medicine, Category:Epistemology of religion, Category:Museology, Category:Tourism, Category:Propaganda, Category:Astronomical dynamical systems and Category:Digital technology ? I.e. how many wp articles are about something that is a subtopic of all those topics ?

In fact, there are currently tens of thousands of pages at that intersection - one category alone having over 17000 pages. And yes, that category really is a subcategory of all 10 categories listed above (and many others) (as of 17-18 Oct 2014). The full structure is rather large to show here, but, for example, to see (one way) how Category:Tourism is a subcategory of Category:Geometric topology follow these dots .................. There are also many cases where the categorization is circular (e.g. Category:Ethnology and Category:Ethnicity).

Thus, (with the current category structure) a reasonable category intersection query can require a huge processing resource and then produce a long list of mostly irrelevant articles. No wonder that the category intersection tools are currently out of service ([16]).

If we are ever to get category intersection working well (if at all) then we need to be much stricter about enforcing the rule that "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.". It would also be very helpful if we had some automated way to identify categorization loops (which clearly means that something's gone wrong in the categorization).

Any comments or suggestions? DexDor (talk) 20:59, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

How to respond when someone makes massive changes in categorization

3 weeks ago, a user moved the article States-Provincial to Provincial-Council (Netherlands), without any explanation. I reverted this because it:

  • defied the previous discussion on Talk:States-Provincial;
  • the new name was odd: with a bad hyphen between 'Provincial' and 'Council' (in the previous discussion I had proposed 'Provincial councils in the Netherlands'), the capitalisation of Council (suggesting it to be an official name, which it is not) and a needless qualifier 'Netherlands' (there is no article Provincial-Council).

I invited the user to reopen the discussion on the talk page, if s/he wanted it, and thought no more of it, but just today, I discovered that the user also changed the categorisation of provincial politicians in the same way. Now there is Category:Members of the Provincial-Council of the Netherlands (shouldn't 'council' be at least in plural, if the renaming was agreed upon??) with 12 subcategories for the 12 provinces, which also have been renamed. And the user moved all 95 mentioned politicians to the new categories. (To be fair, the same user was the person who created some of the original categories in the first place.)

A few days ago, blanked categories have also been tagged for speedy deletion, apparently by a user who only saw (how could s/he) that it was empty and did not see that this was the result of a bad move.

On the Dutch Wikipedia, changing the title of a category has to be discussed on the discussion page for categories. Individual articles are not allowed to be moved until the discussion has been closed. Those preposterous moves will be reverted, even if the category will go through at the end of the day. I wonder what the English Wikipedia policy is on this? And can all those moves only be reverted 'manually' (one by one), or is there an administrator who can do it quicker? Bever (talk) 23:09, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

When it was proposed that the software be changed to give ordinary users the power to rename categories (assuming that's what you mean by "changing the title of a category") many experienced wikipedians pointed out that it would lead to problems like this, but WMF went ahead anyway - see Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive262#Category_pages_will_be_movable_soon. Has Dutch wp put a technical restriction in place to prevent undiscussed category renames? DexDor (talk) 05:30, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
It seems that the user did not, technically, rename the categories, but instead created new categories (see for example this edit) and moved all articles to the new categories. So this would also have been possible in the past.
But perhaps the new renaming option would encourage users to make more erroneous moves without proper discussion. So there has been some discussion indeed on the Dutch Wikipedia about restricting this new right to moderators (sysops), but no decision has been made yet. See nl:Wikipedia:Verzoekpagina voor moderatoren/Overige#Hernoemen van categorieën. Bever (talk) 02:56, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Reality shows, participants and overcategorization

I started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:OC#WP:PERFCAT and reality shows regarding reality show participants and overcategorization. Feel free to chime in. Thanks. Nymf (talk) 14:11, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Upcoming Indian films

Please see the discussion here, regarding which categories are appropriate for articles about upcoming Indian films. Fortdj33 (talk) 13:58, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Category loops

Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 47#Category loops (version of 11:30, 25 October 2014) has a discussion of category loops, and a link to User:Danilo.mac/Category loops, where 200 category loops are listed.
—Wavelength (talk) 14:33, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject X is live!

Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.

Harej (talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Children are pre-teens, right?

User:MarnetteD suggested six weeks ago 2015-01-26 that Category:Child characters in literature --which now specifies "biologically and/or chronologically under age 21"-- should be restricted to age 12, perhaps 13 or even 14. Only today I read the notice at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Novels#Category definition and replied there with observations concerning our comprehensive practices concerning of Child writers and --in a word I didn't use-- Children's literature. That is, we include teen/YA writers and generally include teen/YA literature.

MarnetteD cross-posted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Books#Category definition. I am the first to reply at either location.

Today I have extended the notice by cross-references posted at Wikipedia talk: WikiProject Children's literature#Children are pre-teens, right? and now also here. --with bluelink cross-references among the three substantial WikiProjects but none from their talk pages to this one.

--P64 (talk) 01:10, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Just to add some background this came up when another editor was adding the "Child characters in film" category to the article for Alex from A Clockwork Orange. This lead to the discovery that the category (and several others) instructions included the wording that people were considered children until the age of 21. A discussion ensued at the film project about this Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Film/Archive 55#Child category definition. I know that books and novels have some specifics that go beyond what was decided at the film project so any new input that members of this project want to add will be welcome. MarnetteD|Talk 01:40, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

On the reachability of categories

It's my understanding that, generally speaking, a category should be reachable from Category:Contents. Moreover, if it is not an administration category, it should be reachable via Category:Fundamental categories. Right now, Category:Categories by parameter (and by extension, most of its direct subcats) fail the latter test. Is this a problem? --NYKevin 23:29, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Had to do a bit of research on this ... I'll put in first a couple of excerpts from WP:CAT:

The central goal of the category system is to provide navigational links to all Wikipedia pages in a hierarchy of categories which readers, knowing essential—defining—characteristics of a topic, can browse and quickly find sets of pages on topics that are defined by those characteristics.

There is one top-level category, Category:Contents. All other categories are found below this. Hence every category apart from this top one must be a subcategory of at least one other category.

The category you pointed out is currently closely accessible from Category:Contents. My thinking is that Category:Fundamental categories is intrinsically focused on the Article space, and the category you've highlighted is, by its placement, not really an Article space category, but rather related to encyclopedia administration. I can understand from an academic point of view why the category was created, but I think this is one case where a list or wikipedia-space page would have been better than a category - just my personal view on the matter. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:48, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
I suppose that makes some sense, but why isn't it tagged {{administration category}}? Should I just go add the template, or do we need a discussion? --NYKevin 03:25, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
I would support adding "{{Wikipedia category|hidden=true}}" or similar to Category:Categories by parameter and Categories-by-foo categories. These are not categories that should be of interest to readers. DexDor (talk) 05:06, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Notification of discussion on the categorisation of fictional universes at WikiProject Comics

If interested please join discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Comics#Propose developing umbrella categories and navigations according to "Fictional universes in literature", "Fictional universes in film" and "Fictional universes in television programming". GregKaye 18:37, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

The males movement

There is an increasing proliferation of categories of males in various contexts, e.g., Category:Male writers. It is not clear why these categories are needed. Is there a policy that clarifies why such categories are needed or not? Should they be nominated for deletion? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 11:34, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Well, we have Category:Men and Category:Women, and they both have (indirect) subcats such as the one you mentioned. Those categories are subcats of Category:People by gender, which is in turn a subcat of Category:People categories by parameter. At this point, things are starting to get a little strange, as I noted in the discussion above, and I'm not really sure what that category is for. People by gender is also a subcat of Category:Gender, but it's not essential to the concept of gender, in my opinion. We might be able to trim this whole branch of the category system, but it'd probably take a (large) RfC rather than just a CfD. --NYKevin 19:46, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Rather than have many Male-fooers categories (and, of course, the female equivalents) I would rather have a large category for men (like we have a large category for people born in 1971) (possibly at "Category:Male people" which is currently a redirect). Category intersection could then be used to identify people who are a male writer (or whatever). Having lots of subcategories of Category:Writers makes it more likely that articles are not placed in appropriate categories (e.g. Category:Writers by century).
Category:Gender should be (only) for articles about the topic of gender - so Category:People by gender should not be a subcategory of it. That applies generally to X-by-Y categories. DexDor (talk) 04:53, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
The average reader doesn't know that CatScan is a thing. The average editor doesn't know how to work it (the interface is somewhat complex even when it's in English, and I can't even pull up the live site right now; WP:CATSCAN is tagged as outdated). I'm not sure of this proposal. --NYKevin 23:20, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

I have found a way to resolve the situation, at least on a small scale. WP:CATGRS says that any categorisation by these kind of labels should be supported by a reliable source. I think one would be hard put to find a reliable source labelling someone as a "male writer." So the existing policies do cover the issue. But very few people are aware of them. - Kautilya3 (talk) 23:29, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

For the record, while technically I agree that "male writers" categories aren't necessary — "literature by women" is a thing that people study in its own right as a gendered topic, thus justifying "women writers" categories on WP:CATGRS grounds, but literature by men is studied exclusively as ungendered literature, with virtually no recognized tradition of studying the writers' maleness as a distinguishing feature of the work in its own right. So, to me, it's not a "sportspeople" analogue where both men and women operate primarily in gender-specific contexts which justify both male and female specific subcategories, but a "politicians" analogue where women's categories are justifiable but men's aren't (women in politics are still studied by reliable sources as "women in politics", while men in politics are always only ever "in politics" and are never studied as a gendered class of politicians.) But that said, allowing male-specific writers categories became necessary last year when people started intersecting "women writers" categories with "writers by format" ones, thus causing WP:CATDIFFUSE violations by which the women were being ghettoized from natural subcategories ("novelists", "poets", etc.) and thus leaving the ungendered parent categories as male-only groupings — and thus subjecting Wikipedia to a sexism debate in the media. I don't think a "male writers" tree was the right solution to the problem — the "final rung" rule in WP:CATGRS already offered exactly the correct way out of it — but it was the solution that consensus landed on. So we're stuck with it in the absence of a new consensus to explicitly move in a different direction. Bearcat (talk) 21:14, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Medical and surgical terminology

I'm confused by two aspects of the "Category:Medical terminology", namely:

  1. Why its several subcategories don't include one for an enormous list of terms, to wit, "Category:Surgical terminology". For example, we do have a list article for the many "-otomy" terms, which would possibly (probably?) be better served by belonging to such a category.
  2. More fundamentally, why we have any "Category:<foo> terminology" at all, given that:
  • The articles in "Category:<foo> terminology" will almost certainly belong to a "Category:<foo>" as well, and
  • Any article that merely defines the meaning of a term in "Category:<foo>" quite obviously is a candidate for transfer to Wiktionary instead.

So I guess I'm asking whether every "Category:<foo> terminology" is an instance of over-categorization, which I believe we want to avoid.

To me, the gold standard for the existence of any (reader-facing) category is that it helps the reader find articles that interest them. (I do understand that some, tho' relatively few, cats may exist solely to ease the task of administering articles, categories and projects.)

I'm also posting this section to "Category talk:Medical terminology". Yoyo (talk) 01:24, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

I claim the preceding edit; I forgot that my nickname "Yoyo" is not my username! :-( yoyo (talk) 03:21, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
Category:Medical terminology should be only for articles that are at the intersection of medicine and linguistics (e.g. Anatomical terminology, Federative International Committee on Anatomical Terminology, Medical Subject Headings, Terminologia Histologica) - not articles like Acholia or Permanent cell. I.e. the category should exist, but many/most of the articles currently in it should be removed from it. For more on my thoughts on this see User:DexDor/TermCat. DexDor (talk) 05:10, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
Meanwhile all "terminology" categories are polluted to such an extent that we'd better delete them and start populating them all over again. Marcocapelle (talk) 17:58, 28 June 2015 (UTC)
I'd hope that if we delete them we salt them rather than recreate them even. Even if there are a few articles that legitimately belong in a "Foo terminology" category the existence of the category seems to attract inappropriate articles. It amazes me how editors keep adding articles such as Witness Security Programme (Ireland) to these categories. DexDor (talk) 21:23, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Category:Award winners

Shouldn't nearly all subcats of Category:Award winners be nominated for deletion per WP:OCAWARD? If yes, how can be best organize this? Marcocapelle (talk) 17:47, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

One strategy would be to "kill" the most recently created award winners categories - e.g. find the categories created in the last 10days (a category intersection tool can do this) and take them to CFD. Hopefully, this would re-educate those users who are creating such categories. Over time we'd then increase the time window and see if we're making progress - i.e. deleting such categories faster than they are being created. DexDor (talk) 21:30, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Mass category changes by Jum550

FYI: Special:Contributions/Jum550. Perhaps someone has more experience with what's going on—appears to have something to do with wiping out Category:Gender by country. I left a note on the user's talk. (Please ping if you want a response.) – czar 17:19, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Misuse of Container categories?

I started working on trying to improve Category:Container categories by putting articles within them into more specific subcategories, but I'm now wondering as to the validity of this work, since in many cases it could be argued that a great many categories are using {{Container}} when from what I understand, it could be easily argued that the category *should* contain articles.

I think I'm going to stop what I've been doing because I'm not sure anymore that what I'm doing is actually helping categorization. Creating more and more subcategories start to appear to me to be stretching usefulness, and I'm starting to think that really, it's more about whether the category really *should* be a container or not, not about trying to create enough subcats that all the articles can be subcategorized.

I'd be more interested in the definition of a container category being improved so that it is more clear when it should apply and when it should not. Recently another editor told me that Category:20th-century British medical doctors "obviously should not be a container cat". If it truly is obvious, why is the container cat not removed from this cat, and where is it defined so that I could see what makes this "obvious"? Anyway, I have no idea how to proceed on getting consensus on updating the definition of a container category so that it could be removed from a large number of categories currently defined as such without inciting huge debate. I'm hoping the community can help. --Slivicon (talk) 18:45, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

I agree that a great many categories are using {{Container}} when ... it could be easily argued that the category should contain articles. Some examples: Category:Judaism, Category:Media and entertainment controversies, Category:Lists of sportspeople, Category:Mammal female reproductive system, Category:Massachusetts. I've had a look at the history of some of these categories and not found any meaningful explanation of why the tag was added (e.g. "refine cat"[17]). I suggest you act WP:BOLDly and remove the tag from categories where it does not appear to be appropriate (preferably with an edit summary explaining why the tag is inappropriate on that category). Many editors may think "someone must have added that tag and presumably they had a good reason" so don't bother removing it. For categories such as Foos-by-country it's not so unreasonable to say it should not contain articles directly, but even for these categories there are counter-examples. DexDor (talk) 05:36, 19 June 2015 (UTC)
Part of the reason why some categories have an inappropriate "should contain only subcategories" notice is that the wording of the template was changed with this[18] edit. DexDor (talk) 17:59, 19 June 2015 (UTC)
DexDor cites the 2011-01-28 revision of a category template. It was explained by User:Mclay1 and slightly discussed during the fortnight beginning -01-25, Template talk:Container category#Redundancy of the default message to Template:Category diffuse. Two years later there was no reply to another editor's plea, "Wording too strong, where is the weak wording version?".
Mclay1's two category categories Weak container categories and Strong container categories were deleted several days later simply because they were empty. I don't know whether and where that may have been discussed elsewhere.
Template {{Category diffuse}} is now quite strongly worded, "very few, if any, articles". I see that it was up for deletion three times 2007 to 2012, but haven't time now to read those or even the primary discussion Template talk:Category diffuse. --P64 (talk) 17:43, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
Category:Weak container categories and Category:Strong container categories were speedy deleted WP:CSD#C1, which is not normally discussed. The only discussion relating to those is at Template talk:Container category#Redundancy of the default message to Template:Category diffuse. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:14, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
I tried to thoroughly define and organise category sorting, but it became too difficult so I gave up. It was so long ago that I can't remember why I did certain things or even the definitions of category types. As far as I can remember, a container category should only contain subcategories and possibly an eponymous article. Whether or not a category should be a container category is to be decided by editors. If a category doesn't have enough subcategories for every article to be subcategorised, then the category shouldn't be a container category. The definition of container category doesn't need to change. The tag for container category is to let editors know that articles should not be placed directly in it and so other editors know to clean up the category. There are bound to be some categories that have been incorrectly tagged. McLerristarr | Mclay1 13:00, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
@Mclay1: "There are bound to be some categories that have been incorrectly tagged" - So far, I've found that determining this is less than simple, hence why I started this discussion. At first I thought it was if the name of the category did not clearly show that it was a container, but after a couple CFD attempts on that front being opposed, I see that naming consistency has apparently nothing to do with it. Then I thought that perhaps it was if the category had articles in it, it should not be a container - but when to decide that additional subcategories should be made and the container tag stay, versus removing the container tag? I've also run into one situation now where someone had a category that was 1 of a large number of similar categories, but that one category was the only one with the container tag - no clear reason in name or other that I could see for this one out of many to have a container tag, but oh man did he revert with a vengeance when I tried to remove the container tag with an explanation. After the container went back, I then tried to rename to more clearly define the container nature of the cat so it made more sense, since it was 1 of a large number, but oh man, that didn't go over well. Keep in mind, that this only applies to editors who care that container tags are used properly (I've run into some editors who seem to feel that keeping Category:Container categories in some form of clean and consistent order is of no value (fine for them, I happen to disagree). --Slivicon (talk) 13:36, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
I'm sure there might be cases where a certain naming structure for a category means it should be a container category; however, in general, container categories are not any particular kind of category; they're just categories that have suitable subcategories so that articles should be placed within those subcategories rather than in the parent category. For instance, Category:John Smith, the category for the hypothetical singer John Smith, may have the subcategories Category:John Smith albums and Category:John Smith songs. If every current and foreseeable article about John Smith (except the eponymous article) is about one of his albums or songs, then no articles need to be placed in Category:John Smith and the category should be tagged as a container category. That doesn't mean that all categories for singers should follow the same convention, because some singers won't need their own category, some singers won't have enough articles to justify subcategories, and some singers will have a lot of articles that don't all neatly fit into subcategories. If a category is tagged as a container category, but there are articles that don't fit into its subcategories, then the tag should be removed. If someone resists that change, then it should be discussed on the talk page – there could be a good reason or they may misunderstand what a container category is (it's obviously not just any category with subcategories). McLerristarr | Mclay1 15:11, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
I like your example. At first glance, it seems to indicate that, apart from the eponymous article, all articles in the container category can safely and simply be partitioned between the extant subcategories. But that would mean, then, that a song by the fictional John Smith should not appear in both subcategories "Category:John Smith albums" and "Category:John Smith songs". Since most of his songs are likely to occur on one or more of his albums, surely both subcats do apply to such songs. So perhaps the meaning of "fit(ting) into subcategories" is this: that the subcategories provide enough finer groupings that an interested reader can choose one of them to find all, and only, those articles within the category of particular interest to the reader. To elaborate, each subcat adds an attribute that all articles within it share; such attributes - and hence subcats - need not be mutually exclusive; and each attribute needs to be one that might help a reader filter the articles, choosing just those articles possessing it from a potentially enormous list of articles in the parent cat. Pragmatically, a subcat should in most cases help the reader substantially reduce the number of articles they need to scan in order to find those with the desired attribute.
Please bear with me whilst I extrapolate upon the example, in order to gain a better understanding of how these categories should work; and do correct me if I mess up!
So supposing John Smith is a gospel, blues, rockabilly and country singer, as evidenced by his oeuvre, and supposing that at least one of his songs fits appropriately within those several genres AND has an article, each such genre - gospel, blues, rockabilly and country - is a reasonable candidate for a category to apply to those articles. However, since many artists practice within those genres, it suffices to intersect the two John Smith subcats above with the independent cats for those genres; there is no need to create further John Smith subcats for blues songs or blues albums, for example.
Suppose now that John Smith has actually produced his latest country album, "A Dozen Velvet Cummerbunds", as well as singing all the songs, and furthermore, has written the lyrics and music of the first hit song from it, "Lime Green Velvet Cummerbund", but not arranged it; for simplicity's sake, let's suppose that he has neither written the words or music for, nor arranged, any of his songs before this album. It seems reasonable that, to help future readers find songs he wrote and arranged, when his fame has faded to a dim, distant memory in, let's say, five years, that one might create new subcats of "John Smith", namely, "Songs with music by John Smith", "Songs with lyrics by John Smith", "Songs arranged by John Smith" and "Albums produced by John Smith"; even though there's only one article in each new subcat. The container cat "John Smith" will still contain only one article, the eponym, with references obviously to each of the JS subcats. The article "A Dozen Velvet Cummerbunds" belongs to the new subcat "Albums produced by John Smith"; the article "Lime Green Velvet Cummerbund", to "Songs with music by John Smith", "Songs with lyrics by John Smith" and "Songs arranged by John Smith".
Now in five years' time, John Smith has produced another three albums: two of his own and one of his new husband, Tom Brown's. There's one article about each of these albums, each detailing everything notable about it, and clearly, each belongs to the subcat "Albums produced by John Smith"; to keep things tidy, there's a short new article of the same name, which does little more than tabulate them chronologically, but also links to each of the album articles. Some astute editor has noticed that the extant "Category:John Smith albums" is ambiguous, and has "renamed" it to "Category:Albums performed by John Smith", avoiding confusion with the "Category:Albums produced by John Smith". Now Tom Brown's album belongs to the "Category:Albums produced by John Smith" and to the "Category:Albums performed by Tom Brown". At this point the "Category:Albums produced by John Smith" has progressed from merely adding an attribute to one article about one JS album, to the status of a container category for albums performed by both JS and TB. The two "performance" categories become de facto subcats of this container cat.
Just to keep things interesting, JS announces that he now wishes to be known as John Smith-Brown, which means of course that the poor, long-suffering editors have to decide what to do with all the existing JS articles and categories; do they now belong to JSB? ;-) Yoyo (talk) 17:35, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
@Yoyo: You are essentially correct in what you're saying. You're correct that subcategories do not have to mutually exclusive. However, you said, "Since most of his songs are likely to occur on one or more of his albums, surely both subcats ["Category:John Smith albums" and "Category:John Smith songs"] do apply to such songs." In my example, Category:John Smith albums would be a category for articles about his albums, so no songs would be in there. Not that it matters. One mistake you made though is suggesting making a category for only one article, which goes against Wikipedia guidelines. But in terms of everything relevant to discussing container categories, we agree. McLerristarr | Mclay1 21:24, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
@User:Mclay1. Regarding "If every current and foreseeable article about John Smith (except the eponymous article) is about one of his albums or songs, then no articles need to be placed in Category:John Smith and the category should be tagged as a container category." - apart from the eponymous article (and the Container tag indicates that even that shouldn't be directly in the category) there could be Book:John Smith, Portal:John Smith, List of awards received by John Smith, Cultural impact of John Smith, Death of John Smith, Early career of John Smith, List of women who have a child fathered by John Smith ... Hence, Category:John Smith should not be tagged as a container category. Anyone placing the Container tag on such a category is demonstrating their lack of imagination (about what articles/lists might be created) or lack of knowledge of Wikipedia (that things like books and portals exist) and (more to the point) confusing anyone who comes along later trying to correctly categorize, for example, Book:John Smith whilst also complying with the instruction "This is a container category. It should contain only subcategories." DexDor (talk) 20:17, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
@DexDor: Whether those other pages could exist depends on how notable John Smith is/was. Some topics, for example The Beatles, have so much written about them already that it's unlikely that any new content will be created. So in some cases, there will be times when labelling a category as a container is fairly safe. Hypothetically, if there is the possibility for more articles about John Smith, the main point is that currently there isn't. So it is currently a container category. Whether or not it should be labelled is debatable. I'd say that it won't confuse anyone. An unversed editor is far more likely to just ignore the message or never see it to begin with. McLerristarr | Mclay1 21:24, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
If John Smith is notable enough to have an eponymous category then he will almost certainly be notable enough to have an eponymous article and where's that supposed to go if Category:John Smith is tagged as a container category? If he's got an eponymous article and some related articles (e.g. his songs) then an editor may create Book:John Smith (and maybe even Portal:John Smith). If he's still alive then there's the possibility of him doing something spectacular and getting a separate article about, for example, his death. Even after his death new aspects of his life could be revealed (example). In short, it's rarely, if ever safe to assume that no pages will arise that could be categorized directly in Category:John Smith. If it's "fairly safe" (whatever that means) then (IMO) that's not sufficient to put a "only subcategories" notice on the category. I don't understand the logic of your last sentence - you seem to be saying "it's ok to put up a notice telling people (incorrectly) not to put pages directly into this category because people will ignore it anyway"; editors (e.g. the OP) shouldn't be expected to have to choose which notices to obey and which to ignore. DexDor (talk) 21:53, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Category:Illustrators by nationality has been managed as a container category in some sense, having 56 subcats and no pages as members, but its template message is one from another system of category management. By the way, 9 of the national subcats contain one page.

Two years ago cat Children's book illustrators had only a few national subcats directly, such as {Canadian children's book illustrators}, before creation of the intervening subcat for national subcats, Children's book illustrators by nationality. Then it was easy to interpret the biography pages in the main category as ones no editor had identified as Canadian, etc. These pages display no category management template messages and little or no text preface. The appropriate instruction to editors would be complicated. "by nationality" is a container category but those illustrators un-cat by nationality do not show up as its member pages to be diffused. Meanwhile the main Children's book illustrators is not a container, having subcats of various types, but we do hope that its member pages will be diffused to one of the national sub-subcategories --whose names are no longer displayed since the cat structure has grown the intervening level at this point. Certainly the long list of (mainly) biography pages includes many with determinate nationality, and only one rather than multiple nationalities --as I suppose, and vaguely recall, a much smaller number of biographies in the main cat were limited after late 2013 diffusion into new national subsubcats.

(Just now I re-sorted CBI by nationality to near the head of Illustrators by nationality but made no other changes in this region.) --P64 (talk) 16:41, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

I've managed to go through all of the container categories in an attempt to diffuse where I could, removed container tags where it seemed obviously misplaced (but had to get a lot less strict about it than when I started, as I wanted to avoid too much opposition - basically started only looking at those with pages directly in the categories). Now User:Topbanana created a report for me of all container categories which had pages directly categorized at User:Slivicon/CCATS, so I'm working my way through that, doing what I can to either diffuse, look at the validity of the container tag, or seek out help. Slivicon (talk) 01:20, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Maincat template

Hi, an editor is placing {{maincat}} templates in the body of articles (example: BioMed Central#Journals). I always thought that this template was for exclusive use in categories, not in mainspace, but perhaps I am mistaken? Opinions welcome, thanks! --Randykitty (talk) 17:01, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Fictional locations

Category:Fictional locations is tagged as a container category (unsure whether this is correct or not). I've been able to move articles to subcats, but now there are 3 remaining and I'm unsure how to move them or if they should be moved into subcats: Fictional location, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, Template:Infobox fictional location. I'm asking this here, as I'm also wondering if container categories allow for articles in some circumstances? --Slivicon (talk) 13:09, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, I have seen a category tag stating that most of the articles should be in subcategories.
—Wavelength (talk) 14:50, 26 June 2015 (UTC)
You've seen the "diffuse" template, that's not exactly the same as the "container category" template. My personal opinion - for what it's worth - is that a container template is not really meaningful because either the containerization is entirely obvious (e.g. a by country category) or it should have some flexibility to allow very few articles directly in the category (which is exactly what the diffuse template says). So I wouldn't worry too much in this case and just leave it as is. Marcocapelle (talk) 17:54, 28 June 2015 (UTC)
@Wavelength: I believe the older {{parentcat}} had a banner similar to saying "most", but at some point that was redirected to {{container category}}. My impression having been working on container categories for a bit now, is that it is an additional tag for situations where even though it's obvious it's a container, people are still lazily adding directly to the cat (and maybe they find it helps), or in other cases some editors are ruthless about keeping the cat diffused and find that tag helps as a reference. Finally, some seem to think it is a requirement to have that if you want people not to put stuff directly in the cat. I see User:Marcocapelle's point, but I've been finding that often categories have had multiple, arguably redundant things added to them in an effort to prevent things being lazily categorized. Who knows how effective those efforts are. Even myself, attempting to improve container categories lately by either diffusing or removing tags has had pretty limited success.... Slivicon (talk) 20:34, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Film categorization

Is it the case, as claimed by an IP editor, that "for convenience" all German films are listed in Category:German films, even if they're already listed in, say, Category:West German films? The IP has made the same claim here and here for American films, British films, French films, Italian films and Japanese films. Is this correct? BMK (talk) 00:50, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Also posted at WT:FILM, so per WP:MULTI, discuss there. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:41, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
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