Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 9

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Notice

Wikipedia has asked to categorize the page on Cowbois ac injans, but can someone explain to me how to do this. (Cepb 13:14, 6 December 2006 (UTC))

Show as a tree / Show as a list

Wow! Did anyone know this was about to happen? Is this documented anywhere? -- Samuel Wantman 22:29, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. Pretty interesting. I just noticed now and then recalled seeing your edit summary here. older ≠ wiser 01:28, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
And wow again! This should make life a lot easier JQ 02:10, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
FYI, I asked about this at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Show as a tree / Show as a list in Catgegories. Tim Starling provided a link to a post on wikitech-l. older ≠ wiser 12:13, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

I've only just noticed this as well. Looks interesting, and should make navigation a LOT easier. Carcharoth 15:58, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

BTW, I seemed to see several features, some of which have disappered now. First there was the "+" bits that appeared next to the category names, which is still there, but there was also a "Show as tree" and "show as list" option which seems to have gone now. It would have been nice if things like this were discused centrally in a highly visible location. Carcharoth 16:00, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
Ah. From Tim's post: "You can click "show as list" to show it in the old display format. This additionally sets a cookie so that further requests will show a list by default (except pages cached as a tree on the client)." So that explains that. Carcharoth 16:02, 2 September 2006 (UTC)


The 'show as list' option seems to have disappeared - and I find the tree configuration very difficult to navigate. Is it possible for users to choose list instead of tree? DuncanHill 18:38, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Some links that might help:

- Carcharoth 02:36, 3 September 2006 (UTC)


Hi all - I wrote this extension in cooperation with Tim Starling. That it got enabled on all projects surprised me too - Tim seems to like to do stuff more than to talk about it, I guess :P Anyway, I decided to do away with the show as tree / show as list thingy, as it seemd to confuse people - so I wrote a "unified" view that is just like what we had before (three columns with sections for each letter), but allows you to "expand" each node. I hope you like it.

I'm collecting feedback here: meta:Talk:CategoryTree extension. Regards -- G. Gearloose (?!) aka Duesentrieb 19:36, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks - it seems to make more sense now :) DuncanHill 09:48, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

entertainment producers

2006 elections

I'd like to create a category to the effect of Category:Government office holders in the United States facing elections in 2006. Beyond simple information, this could perform an administrative function as all of these articles will need to be updated with the election results (whether positive or negative) by the end of the year. This system could be extended to future elections as well, so that it's always clear when someone's term of office will end. Any suggestions as to name, or whether it's necessary to subdivide by country and/or office? Postdlf 03:02, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

No suggestions on name, but subcategorizing (probably by state) would be good; also subcategorizing by whether this incumbent is running. - Jmabel | Talk 19:34, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
This sounds similar in intent to the (relatively) newly created template:update after. I'm not sure using categories for this is necessary. -- Rick Block (talk) 22:12, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Suggestion on the name: Category:Government office holders in the United States eligible for election in 2006, as "facing" seems a bit vague and pov. Just a thought - ♥ Her Pegship♥ 19:31, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Sub-cat creation

I'd like to create a couple of sub-cats & want to be sure I'm not violating any guidelines...These would be under Category:Children's literature:

These are pretty easy for any editor to use, and the children's lit category is pretty darn big. Any thoughts? ♥ Her Pegship♥ 19:50, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Sounds appropriate in intent. Actually, though, the last one also needs "Children's" in the name. I'd call these:

I think they'd all belong under Category:Children's books, and Category:Children's fiction would probably be a supercategory of Category:Children's novels. Jmabel | Talk 19:58, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Okey dokey, how about
per conformity with other similar cats? ♥ Her Pegship♥ 04:01, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
Fine with me; what do you plan to do with individual stories that aren't books? - Jmabel | Talk 23:28, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

An abstract concept

If I were to create a category for articles that discuss two interrelated concepts that are opposites (such as A priori and a posteriori, Alpha and Omega, or possibly even Time stretching and pitch shifting) where in the hierarchy would that fit? Moreover, would it be considered useful? –Unint 04:40, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

I can't see it being useful to a general reader; in a case like this it is sometimes useful to ask: what exactly is the real-world problem you are trying to solve? That is, what would drive someone to be looking for this? - Jmabel | Talk 23:30, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Placing a subcategory in every possible category that the category's main article could go into

Should a subcategory be put in every possible category that the category's main article could go into? For example, Category:Elvis Presley is in a bunch of categories that the Elvis Presley could go into, including some that are a stretch. Complicating matters, the article is in some of the same categories and also in some different ones. -- Kjkolb 05:26, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Absolutely not. Category:Categories named after musicians is the only appropriate category. Mirror Vax 06:31, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Three-prong approach to category sorting

I went back over the progress of Template:CatDiffuse and the related use of Template:Verylarge. Based on the discussion results over the last month, I went ahead & merged "Overpopulated" with "Verylarge," and based on the following criterion, only Category:Hurricane Katrina is classified as "Verylarge:" the other 11-12 categories were either candidates for catdiffuse, or "verylarge by design," and tagging those categories with anything has been generally rejected as redundant. I therefore promulgated the following...

  • {{verylarge}} should be used for one-time cleanup
  • {{catdiffuse}} should be used if people are likely to keep adding to the category
  • Category tagging is pointless for template-driven categories that cannot be recategorized.

I invite people to participate in WP:ʃ to further optimize Wikipedia as a whole.

Cwolfsheep 02:38, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Alphabetization of articles within a Category

_ _ (This presumably applies to Sub-Cats as well, tho that is unlikely to pinch.)
_ _ At least in the case of Category:Living people, and probably with other large bio-Cats, the alpha'n scheme can be very confusing. The crux of the matter, i think, is that

  • we rely on a standard collation sequence, which means "punctuation counts",
  • we need to invert Western names to surname-before-given-name order, and
  • to indicate that inversion in the piping of the Cat, we by practical necessity use the standard convention of putting a comma and blank between them. (The most obvious alternative is to have more than three fields -- "Category", Cat name, and a single sort key which contains the inverted name -- so that multiple successive sort keys, presumably separated by pipe-chars, can be entered. (How many sort keys? Don't ask; just don't set less than a half dozen as a limit, since the pathological cases can be bad.))

_ _ The example i use (possibly the worst case, tho i didn't search for that) is surnames beginning with O, and either ending there or continuing with something other than another letter. In the order they appear on Category:Living people,

  • "From O" begins with, in turn, names like
  • "Until O." follows that with
  • "From O." has
    • "O., Johannes" (for Johannes O.),
    • "O.C. (rapper)" (unpiped for O.C. (rapper), tho dropping the Dab-sfx in piping would probably be more typical),
    • "OG Ron C" (piping unneeded, for OG Ron C), and
    • less tricky names (with first letter of surname upper- and 2nd lower-case) that almost never produce surprises follow, like
      • "Oak, Raven" (for Raven Oak; note that she follows OG Ron C, bcz the lower-case a follows the upper-case G in "OG ...") and
      • "Ock Ju-Hyun" (piping unneeded, for Ock Ju-Hyun).
    However, within this largest range of surnames, among those beginning with the same letter of the alphabet, all instances of a given traditional East-Asian surname that are unpiped or piped by copying the bio title (rather than copying it and inserting a comma), such as Osawa Itsumi (piping unneeded, for Osawa Itsumi) precede all Westernized versions of the same surname (and any Western surnames that happen to coincide in spelling, or people with the traditional East-Asian surname in traditional order for whom the comma has been inserted), such as "Osawa, Chiaki" (for Chiaki Osawa).

_ _ For a more populous example of this last effect, see "From Ma", with

  • the range of traditionals from (unpiped)
    • Ma Dongbo (unpiped) to
    • "Ma Yinglin, Joseph" (for Joseph Ma Yinglin -- hmm, a given name at each end and surname in the middle; perhaps ideally piped!)

and following it

  • the range of Mas who are "Westernized" (either in title, presumably in accord with common usage, or implicitly by an unneeded comma in the piping) from

_ _ This is at best a maintenance headache, and potentially a problem of users and for bots that rely on the order of Living people. The solution of getting everyone to squeeze out any punctuation, use commas whether needed or not, and convert all letters to upper case (is that sufficient?) Just switches the locus of the maintenance headache, since it's so unnatural. Using a different collation sequence could help some, but it still isn't a complete solution. But i suggest that after transitional nightmares, separating sort keys with pipe chars would draw on the same parsing already used for templates, and still be nearly as natural as the commas currently are.
--Jerzy•t 23:52, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

  • This has elicited no comment. I propose to write a section for Wikipedia:Categorization along the lines of "Not-immediately-obvious effects in Category alphabetization", mentioning these aspects, and the fairly widely noticed Latin-letter-with-diacritic effect (and the fact that Cat piping is about alph but not appearance, if not yet adequately visible) -- unless someone more skilled in getting to the point takes this on.
    --Jerzy•t 15:12, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
I agree with many of your points, but it is probably best to stick somewhere in what is practical.
Ideally, I'd say the indexing should be totally case-insensitive. The standard Wikipedia practices generally insure that the initial letter is capitalized, because that is the way the default categories are with initial capitalization turned on, but beyond that it is a mixed bag. Sometimes acronyms are lowercased except for initial letter, sometimes not. Rather than your suggestion of all-capitals, it would probably be easier to go with initial letter capitalized and the rest all lowercase.
I agree that punctuation, including hyphens, apostrophes, spaces and the like should generally be ignored, except for two situations: a way to divide things like personal names into two fields for family name and given name (now most often comma plus space, with inconsistent results for the few cases where people have used comma without space), and a way to get certain articles at the top of the category listing (commonly done by using either a space or an asterisk as the first--often only, but sometimes when there are more than one they are additionally sorted--character of the sort key). Gene Nygaard 13:58, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Categories named after television programs

Categories named after television series are being placed into all the same categories as the articles about the television series. This is creating a mess in many parent categories as these eponymous show categories are being mixed with actually significant subcategories making browsing difficult and confusing (One example is Category:Sitcoms). It also leads to unnecessary duplication. This was happening with eponymous people categories too, and consensus was for those cats to only be placed in Category:Categories named after people or one of its subcategories. I want to do the same for television series by creating Category:Categories named after television programs and removing all the excess cats from these categories that are already included in the article, where they belong. I just wanted to make sure that this is not a bad idea before creating and populating the category. --musicpvm 03:51, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Renaming of categories - edit history lost!

I recently nominated a category for speedy renaming (Category:Towed Water Sports to Category:Towed water sports), and I noticed that the category page information had been moved in this edit here. This appears to have been a cut and paste move. Is this really the right way to do this? I thought the right way to do this sort of thing was to use the 'move' function, which moves the page history and preserves the attributions of those who created the category in the first place. I may be wrong, as I see that there is no 'move' tab at the top of category pages. An earlier example is Category:Disaster, where I contributed to the blurb and to putting it in the right parent categories, etc. This was later moved to Category:Emergency management. As can be seen in this edit, Cyde's edit summary credits me by saying: "Robot: Moved from Category:Disaster. Authors: Erikssond, Carcharoth, 82.43.124.245, BD2412", but that is it. The page for Category:Disasters was deleted, and so I can no longer review my contributions to this area as it has disappered from my contributions list. Similarly, for the current example, the page history for Category:Towed Water Sports, seen here, will be lost if that page gets deleted. It will then be nearly impossible for an ordinary user to find out who originally created and categorised the category. Have a look at the current page history for Category:Towed water sports, shown here. The edit summary is hopeless: "move info from old category page". This begs the question: which old category page?! (think of someone reading this in 5 years time). I would have asked the editor in question, User:Chidom, but there is an "away" notice on his page.

To sum up, I have recently noticed an increasing tendency for poorly thought out moves and uninformative edit summaries, often destroying the correct attributions for a series of edits on Wikipedia, or making it nearly impossible to correctly trace the history of a page. I suspect this is far more widespread than just the examples I have found. This goes against the letter and spirit of Wikipedia and GFDL. Can anyone suggest what can be done about this? Carcharoth 08:25, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Categories do not have a move function. All you can do is cut and paste. --Kbdank71 14:18, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Like Kbdank says, it's pretty hopeless trying to deal with categories. The best you can do is put the old name of the category in the edit summary as well as the authors, and if someone really needs more attribution info, they'll have to get an admin to recover the deleted revisions :-( Cyde Weys 16:02, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. That is a 'feature' right? I've just lost all my motivation to work on categories. No, only joking. :-) Thanks for the responses. I'm slightly worried it took me this long to realise that categories don't have a 'move' function, though I guess I did know really, as the renaming process being done through CFD is a big clue. Of course, what would help is if the access to deleted edits was restored, but I guess that isn't going to happen anytime soon. Carcharoth 16:59, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

PS. What about the guidelines for edit summaries when moving category pages? Do such guidelines even exist? If those were made clearer, would it avoid the uninformative edit summaries like the one I quote above? Carcharoth 17:02, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
For a non-speedy category rename, we link to the discussion page in the edit summary like this, but for speedies, there is no discussion to link to. --After Midnight 0001 17:35, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

This is part of the reason that I suggested at the village pump that it might be a good idea to allow category page moves under some circumstances. The category already being empty would be an obvious such case: as I understand it, that's basically the reason why the move function for categories is disable in the first place (to avoid someone 'moving' the category, but not the contents, and getting an Unexpected Result). Alai 17:23, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

As an addendum, one bright side is that if moving of (empty) categories is enabled, it should then be possible to "fix" c'n'p moves after the fact, by the usual history merger process. Alai 23:30, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Although if a category is empty, there would be no move, just a delete. --Kbdank71 06:30, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
I meant if the category had been emptied in order to facilitate the move. I realize there's then a slight chicken and egg issue, if one wants to avoid redlinks during the move, but if the move tab were enabled, the histories could then be merged. Alai 05:24, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
Do you mean the articles removed from the category or the heading text removed? Because if it's the former, then this is a moot point; articles added or removed from categories are in the article history, not the category. And if it's the latter, most categories don't have more than a sentence or two explaining what the category is, and only a handful of edits in the history. --Kbdank71 17:27, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

category:Coachella_Valley_films

< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/category:Coachella_Valley_films >.

I do not know the correct location f/ this question:

"Please, why was this page deleted?"

Many movies & television shows emanate from Coachella Valley & Riverside County.

Thank You.

hopiakuta 19:08, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

  • A category by that name was never created or deleted; you might have a typo. Regardless, I'd advise against creating it anyway, because it's not going to be viewed as very useful for categorizing films. Film production may be significant to understanding Coachella Valley, but that doesn't mean that valley is significant to understanding any of the films that happened to have been produced there. Such a detail is probably trivia, and should only be mentioned, if at all, in the film article's production history section. Postdlf 19:25, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

China and Hong Hong categorisation

There seems to be some "instability" in categories relating to the special administrative regions of China, Macau(/o) and Hong Kong. (No names, pack drill, or arbcom cases.) I'd like to open a discussion as to how these should be structured, and here seems the logical place for centralised location (with input as appropriate from whatever related wikiprojects and deletion discussions might feed in). Specifically: how should the term "China" be scoped in category names? To mean greater-historical-China-in-general? As the People's Republic? As the PRC minus the SARs? How many levels of hierarchy is it desirable to have: a PRC-level category, then split into the various provinces, ARs and SARs? Or a "Mainland China" category, excluding the SARs, as a container for the provinces and ARs? (And above that, possibly a China-in-general cat?) Alai 05:19, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

This is a good question, but it seems to be controversial. I think this has already been debated several times but I don't know the specifics. There is probably a China-related WikiProject that has already discussed this and perhaps there is an existing consensus. If not, I doubt that this page is the place to have the discussion. I suggest doing some digging to find some previous discussions. If there is not yet a consensus, bring the issue to a forum which will have a broad range of opinion. Let us know what you find and what happens. -- Samuel Wantman 22:19, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
It may not have been as controversial as it happened to be, if it had not been blatantly objected by a small minority. I agree with you that this page may not be the place, since it's not quite possible to gather a pool of Wikipedians with a satisfatory level of familiarity with the subject. — Instantnood 23:49, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
I have often noticed the above user refering to his content opponents as "a small minority". It strikes me as dismissive, and seems to also suggest his preference for placing greater weight on "majority views" over factual accuracy. I believe anyone can have a say on this issue. You do not need oly HKers to discuss on how HK categories should appear in this site, unless you are hoping they would all aline to your political views. I notice this wasent quite so in a parralel discussion which erupted over this same issue.--Huaiwei 15:48, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Simple: PRC named container, any sub-part that deserves a sub-part (regardless of politics, IE, Hong Kong, Tibet, Macau, Shangai all get the same treatment) gets one. SchmuckyTheCat 20:55, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
You have disregarded the different status of Hong Kong and Macao within the political structure of PRC. Special administrative regions (SARs) are not subjected to (or else contradicts with) many of the articles of PRC's constitution, and they are outside of the hierarchy of ARs (e.g. Tibet AR, Xinjiang, Guangxi), municipalities (Shanghai, Chongqing, Beijing, Tianjin), and provinces (e.g. Guangdong, Fujian, Hebei, Gansu, Heilongjiang). — Instantnood 23:49, 20 October 2006 (UTC) (modified 15:01, 21 October 2006 (UTC))
You have disregarded the different status of Hong Kong and Macao Damn straight I did and I said so. You don't need to repeat it. Your beating on this drum is tired. One category for the PRC. Any sub-part of the PRC should get it's own sub-cat when there is enough need for it. Not based on the bleating of a political separatist. SchmuckyTheCat 00:01, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
In what way would anyone be a separatist if she/he fully acknowledges the constitutional arrangements? Those who blatantly refuse to recognise such constitutional arrangements are indeed putting forward an agenda denying and in opposition to the status quo. — Instantnood 15:01, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
If HK and Macau were to be classified under the PRC, could you specify which part of which relevant constitution would we be violating? You talk about a failure to "recognise such constitutional arrangements". Kindly show us what "arrangement" this refers to?--Huaiwei 15:48, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
First of all, have you ever read the 1982 Constitution of the PRC and the Basic Law of Hong Kong? — Instantnood 20:07, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Would you mind going straight to the point?--Huaiwei 15:43, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
If you've read it I don't think it's necessary for me to tell you. — Instantnood 16:34, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Thats alot of presumptions in one go. For one, you have to provide evidence that I did not read the said documents. And even more importantly, you have to show any reader will come to the same conclusion as you. Do they?--Huaiwei 16:38, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
I didn't say you haven't, did I? — Instantnood 17:10, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
I didnt say you have, did I?--Huaiwei 17:14, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Then why are you asking for evidence to demonstrate that you did not read the said documents? — Instantnood 17:27, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Did I? Read my statement carefully. If you insist I did, then you are validating your own presumptions as true, which then means my request for evidence becomes valid. So what is your stand now?--Huaiwei 18:06, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
(response to user:Alai's comment at 05:19, October 13) Yes Alai. The China category, as well as those named "Foo in China", "Foo of China" or "Chinese Foo" should, and have always been general (if some may have not already been aware of). The PRC categories should normally be placed below the China ones; the mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau categories should be placed below the PRC ones; and those for the ARs, municipalities and provinces below the mainland China ones. Exceptions may perhaps be mountains and hills, rivers, etc., which are almost purely natural features, phenomenon or events with little human and cultural factors. — Instantnood 23:49, 20 October 2006 (UTC) (modified 15:01, 21 October 2006 (UTC))
It has long been argued, that we are generally not in favour of creating any category, or even any article, which carries the words "Mainland China". Besides being not in common usage, it is not considered politically correct to place it within categories by countries, for it is not one, and to consider it as one is a blatant disregard for Chinese sovereignty over HK and Macau. Instantnood has consistently promoted the usage of "Mainland China" for precisely this reason. His suggestion to place "Mainland China", "HK" and "Macau" subcategories under the PRC category underlines his desire to elevate the political status of the two SARS, irrespective of political realities today. In no way would the Chinese consider "Mainland China" and "HK" to be on par. The two SARS are first-level divisions of the PRC, just as its other provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities, etc, are also first-level divisions. Till today, Instantnood has failed to show any constitutional proof that the two SARS are not first-level divisions of the PRC, a point he vehemently stands by but without any solid factual grounding to rely on.--Huaiwei 15:55, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
The People's Republic of China excluding the two special administrative regions (aka mainland China), and the two special administrative regions, namely Hong Kong and Macau, are separation jurisdictions (or domains or whatever) within the People's Republic of China. Treating mainland China's data, figures or information as PRC's is effectively undermining PRC's sovereignty over Hong Kong and Macau. It's irrelevant whether the three are having the same political status or not. However in reality ministers of the Central People's Government, representing mainland China's interests, do have meetings with their counterparts of Hong Kong and Macao to discuss on issues such as health, environment protection, trade, etc.

As a matter of fact, I have shown in past discussions that provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities are constitutionally defined to be divisions, but not the special administrative regions. Articles 30 and 31 of the 1982 Constitution of the PRC, and the Articles 12 in the basic laws of Hong Kong and Macau, are clear enough over this matter: the People's Republic of China divides itself into provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, and it can also creates special administative regions, which are local administrative regions. Meanwhile, please stop protraying SARs as SARS. — Instantnood 20:07, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

As a matter of fact, I have shown in past discussions that...
No, you haven't shown this at all. You've argued it and that argument was rejected. SchmuckyTheCat 04:09, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
The general trend of that discussion does indeed seem to be that the "first order divisions" of the PRC are the provinces, ARs and SARs (without those being equivalent), which would make the flatter category structure seem more logical. I'd be more comfortable suggesting such a course if there were wider input on this, though. Alai 21:37, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Nobody has ever provided the necessary evidence to prove that the special administrative regions are divisions. We can't declare on Wikipedia that George W. Bush is female by consensus. — Instantnood 06:55, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Wider input would be all the CfD's that have removed a tiered structure, or other discussions that have resulted in the failure to create such a tiered structure. SchmuckyTheCat 08:18, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
User:SchmuckyTheCat turned such categories empty (or almost empty) before they're listed on CfD. — Instantnood 13:46, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
(response to user:SchmuckyTheCat's comment at 04:09, November 29) Rather than rejected, participants declined to accept the fact that the special administrative regions are never mentioned in PRC's 1982 constitution nor the Hong Kong and Macau basic laws to be divisions. — Instantnood 06:55, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
So if they are not divisions, mind telling us what they are?--Huaiwei 15:47, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
The constitution is not telling. Both basic laws say "local administrative region", respectively. It's sui generis anyways. — Instantnood 16:34, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
The Basic law is very telling indeed. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall be a local administrative region of the People's Republic of China, which shall enjoy a high degree of autonomy and come directly under the Central People's Government. Could you explain how a "local adminstrative region" which "comes directly under" the central government of a country can exist as a non first-level administrative division of that country?--Huaiwei 16:46, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Does the basic laws say they're divisions? That's the word Article 30 of the 1982 Constitution uses to refer shěng, zìzhìqū, zhíxiáshì, zìzhìzhōu, xiàn, etc. — Instantnood 17:08, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Is it neccesary for the said document to use the word "division" for it to be one? Are all first-level divisions in the world today which are not described with the word "division" in their respective constitutions no longer divisions of their respective countries?--Huaiwei 17:16, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
It's fine if the word division never appears. That's not the case for the PRC. It explicitly calls shěng, zìzhìqū, zhíxiáshì, zìzhìzhōu, xiàn, etc. divisions, but for the special administrative regions it doesn't do so. — Instantnood 17:27, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Would you mind clarifying your above statement? In what instance is it "fine" that the word "division" dosent appear? Why should the PRC be an exception?--Huaiwei 18:11, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
It's fine if the constitution or the relevant law(s) of a certain place makes no mention of the word division. The PRC constitution is special in the way that it explicitly calls some of the units as divisions (shěng, zìzhìqū, zhíxiáshì, zìzhìzhōu, xiàn, etc.), while it does not use the same word for some other units (special administrative regions). — Instantnood 20:25, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
You're suggesting that if the constitution doesn't use a particular word to describe a given territorial unit (the SARs), it precludes us from organising them at the same "level" as the one it does use that description of? I think that the more parsimonious assumption would be that if the constitution doesn't define it as a different level of organisation, and doesn't define "Mainland China" or any other aggregation of "everything apart from the SARs", then it would be more appropriate to categorise the divisions per se, and the divisions-by-all-appearances in a similar manner. After all, the use of the word "division" in the categories or their scoping statements isn't even at issue, just the structure thereof. Alai 20:40, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I have demonstrated below the relations between the special administrative regions and the rest of the PRC. — Instantnood 20:48, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Anyone else have any thoughts on this? The broader issue might be framed as, what's the general categorisation policy as regards states in general? Other thorny issues are de facto states with limited international recognition, stateless territories, and areas where the de facto border differs from the de jure one, and/or the de jure one is disputed between the different parties. Perhaps a vaguely similar one in some respects might be the cases of overseas/incorporated territories. Alai 03:57, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps this is a case of, they're first-level divisions, but "some divisions are more first-level than others"? (Zeroth level?) The SARs are parallel to the provinces in some ways, but not to others (separate law, representation in some contexts). Just how common use is it in? (In the SARs, in the rest of the PRC, and outside of China (especially in English-speaking "reliable sources".) Alai 17:35, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
In response to your remarks in the last pair of round brackets: That's also demonstrated in past discussions. Yet user:Huaiwei and user:SchmuckyTheCat apparently doesn't consider them valid. — Instantnood 20:07, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Continuing on this vein, has there been any resolution as to what to do in cases of dispute? All WP:CG has to say is "you may want to avoid labelling it or mark the categorization as disputed." It seems that there must be some objective criteria in place, else any disputed article will find categorisation as "just another front" in the attempts to push one agenda or another through the addition of Category:X (disputed) and Category:Not x (disputed). What I took away from solutions like Category:Designated terrorist organizations (instead of Category:Terrorist organizations) was that we state the reality (that the organisation was designated as terrorist) without a moral judgement (that it is or isn't in fact terrorist). Is there indeed a consensus that reality should be noted, while perhaps other positions should only be expressed in the body? Let me know... TewfikTalk 06:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

This really isn't an easy question. I've been pondering this with categories like Category:Hate crimes, Category:Political prisoners and Category:Anti-Semitic people, Category:Pseudoscience. There seems to be two policies that are at odds here. One says that categorization should be NPOV, but another says that if an article discusses a subject it is reason enough to put an article into a category. So if an article covers a POV subject in an NPOV way, how should it be categorized? Efforts to change some of these categories to have more NPOV names are often hampered by large numbers of editors who might might not be very NPOV in their positions at CfD. There is utility in all these categories, but there needs to be a better way to make it clear that an article's membership in a category only implies that the topic is discussed and nothing more. Adding text to some categories that says this has also been contentious. There also seems to be a very fuzzy grey area between blatant POV categorizations and NPOV ones. To me, it is more NPOV to have a category called "hate crimes" than "anti-semites", but others probably have a different view of what the grey area is and where to draw the line. -- Samuel Wantman 07:39, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

For my money, an article "X" should be in some category "Ys" if either a) it's uncontroversial that "X is a Y" (mutatis mutandis for abstract noun cats), or b) the article contains a sourced claim that it's generally agreed that X is an Y. It's awkward to ensure this is the case, short of deletion of any cat that seems questionable, since it's not really possible to "tag" a category as needing a citation, or being potentially POV, beyond just adding a markup comment, or a talk page comment, to that effect. Alai 17:27, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

So what constitutes 'generally'? Many of these disputes are not so clear. In any event, then what is the operative principle with categorising an article like Hamas as Category:Designated terrorist organizations instead of Category:Terrorist organizations? TewfikTalk 19:27, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree that the above principle is pretty vague, but the gist is that if "it is generally agreed that Hamas is a terrorist organisation" in the article text would be problematic as regards NPOV, then so is such a categorisation. (I'm not proposing to solve all NPOV disputes at a stroke, just suggest how they translate into the category space.) I don't much see the point of Category:designated terrorist organizations, since it doesn't specify whose designation (and the category scoping pages smooshes together too many such designators for the cat to be neutral, if only a minority of such do so). Alai 19:37, 24 November 2006 (UTC)


OK, I've taken the main two categories that this would affect to SFD, on the basis that by the duck test, the SARs give every appearance of being first order divisions of the PRC. Alai 07:20, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

What is the duck test are you referring to? In what way do the special administrative regions give any "appearance" of being first-order divisions (when there's even no evidence to support the claim that they are divisions)? There are many agreements, collaborations, projects, conferences, meetings, etc., in which ministers and officials of the Central People's Government (CPG) (who represent interests of the mainland), as well as secretaries and officials of the Macau Government and of the Hong Kong Government take part. E.g. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]; [19] [20] [21]; [22] [23]. — Instantnood 20:25, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Some other interesting sources for matters in which other countries are involved: [24] [25] [26] [27]. " I am pleased to note the progress of negotiating an air service agreement with the Government of the People’s Republic of China to pave way for regular direct flights from mainland China. ", a sentence quoted from the last link, for example, highlights the differences between the terms People's Republic of China and mainland China. It also tells in the area of air service the Government of the PRC (i.e. the CPG) is responsible only for the mainland. As for trade matters (the first three links), it's pretty obvious - the subject matter is trade between the PRC excluding the two SARs (i.e. mainland China) with the country concern. — Instantnood 20:39, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
"when there's even no evidence to support the claim that they are divisions"
Somehow I didn't think it was the "first order" part that was issue here... They're part of the PRC; they have a distinct legal status; isn't that every appearance of "being a division"? (Whether a specific Chinese term is used to describe them is another matter entirely.) Either: a) the PRC is divided into 33 entities, of which the SARs are two, and each of which has a distinct legal existance; or b) the PRC is divided into 3 entities, the SARs and "Mainland China" (which is then further divided). The latter seems to be the position that no evidence has been introduced in favour of -- but it's apparently the one we're supposed to adopt, due to your nonspecific dissatisfaction with the former. Alai 03:42, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
If you have ever read the articles 30 and 31 of PRC's 1982 Constitution, the matter is pretty easy to understand. The PRC is divided into provinces, autonomous regions and "municipalities directly under the Central Government". It may established special administrative regions when necessary (which it has two currently). Neither of the articles suggests that special administrative regions are divisions of the PRC. The article 1 in both the Hong Kong and Macao basic laws says they are " inalienable part[s] of the People's Republic of China " (unlike British overseas territories, for instance, which are not part of the UK). The term mainland China is used in laws, regulations, bilataral and tripartite agreements and official activities, etc., to refer to the rest of the PRC collectively. It's hard to think of any possible and valid reason why the actual reality is vigorously disapproved, despite evidence is presented during many relevant discussions. — Instantnood 20:51, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
As I have asked conversely many times before, if HK is not a division of the People's Republic of China, then mind telling us of what is it a division of? Disneyland? The quotations from the article may not suggest them as divisions of the PRC in your books, but they dont suggest them as not being divisions of the PRC either in mine (as well as for several others, if not more).--Huaiwei 23:35, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
As I have said many times before, there's no evidence from the constitutional documents on whether or not special administrative regions are administrative divisions. Are you in a position to assert they are? — Instantnood 09:02, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
If I may ask, historical and cultural perspectives aside, mind telling if England is an administrative division of the United Kingdom, parallel to Scotland and Wales (and Northern Ireland when the NI Executive was not suspended)? — Instantnood 21:45, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries of the united kingdom. I propose you state your stand directly instead of posting a bunch of questions which attempt to lead the reader to a certain predetermined direction.--Huaiwei 23:30, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
My position has been clearly stated for many times. Please kindly don't pretend that you don't know. If Scotland and Wales are administrative divisions, what about England? Is England an administrative division? — Instantnood 09:02, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
I'd hate to jump into this conversation inappropriately, but by chance is this the duck test to which you are referring? ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 19:09, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Undercategorised vs. uncategorised

I've noticed some inconsistency in the use of {{catneeded}} on stubs. Is is desirable to apply this to stubs tagged into a stub category (logically enough), but lacking any "permanent" categorisation? It seems at the very least to be a little misleading, and probably ultimately unnecessary (since it's unlikely the article would be "destubbed" before acquiring suitable categories). If something along these lines is thought to be a good idea, might a more specialised cleanup tag and category be more appropriate, on the pattern of Category:year of birth missing, etc? Alai 02:41, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Though it's not absolutely necessary, I do recommend adding the {{uncat}} tag to stubs, yes. It's a good reminder that a category is still needed, and yes, unfortunately, during my scans of Special:Uncategorizedpages, I routinely run across destubbed articles that nobody bothered adding a category to.  :/ --Elonka 21:57, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
That latter is especially unfortunate. The two cases do seem to me to be distinct, though, and both could be huge in size, if populated on an energetic or automated basis. What about an Category:uncategorised stubs category for articles with stub tags, and no "permanent" categories at all, and an expansion of the use of the specific-type-of-category-missing? For example, WP:ALBUM has Category:uncategorised albums, which I've a pending task-approval to populate at WP:BRFA. Alai 18:53, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

sorting: things named after people

While browsing, I happened to notice that The Dave Brubeck Quartet had been sorted under "D" in its categories. I thought this was obviously wrong, so I changed it to sort under "B". However, then I started to wonder: what about things generally named after people? Should they all be sorted by the person's last name? What about, for example, John Hancock Insurance (currently sorted under "J")? Should it be moved to sort under "H"? I could go either way on that one. And should some comment about proper sorting be mentioned on this page, since people working on an article about a thing may not think to follow the link at "sorting names of people"? -- Xtifr tälk 01:58, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

My own opinion is that people be sorted by last name, but things by their name. The name is John Hancock Insurance, so it should sort to J. You'll never see it listed as "Hancock, John Insurance". As it's not named "Brubeck, Dave Quartet", so it shouldn't be sorted under B. --Kbdank71 06:29, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
In the case of JHI, I'm inclined to agree with you, but I also tend to think that it's sort of a special case. The Dave Brubeck Quartet is filed under "B" at my local record store. In fact, I don't believe I've ever seen it listed under anything but "B", anywhere. And if I were searching for it, "B" is certainly where I would look first. If you can find someplace (reputable/notable) that files it under "D", I might concede that you have a basis for debate, but otherwise... Xtifr tälk 10:33, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Like I said, that's just my opinion, and how I sort things. I really don't care that much about it to raise a stink, so you sort them the way you think is best, I'll do the same. --Kbdank71 16:08, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, I think it would be better to clarify the matter, to avoid confusion, inconsistency and revert wars, but perhaps we need a domain expert—someone trained in library science—to provide a canonical answer. Surely this is not the first time the question has come up, and there must be some genuine standards somewhere. I will point out that my name is "Chris Waters", not "Waters, Chris", that Pope Gregory IX is not named "Gregory 09" and that the Crab Nebula is not named "1952", but those are all sort keys that are (or in the first case, would be) used in Wikipedia. The expression that appears after the pipe is a sort key, not a name, and should be judged on its merits as a sort key, not a name, IMO. So the proper question, in my mind, is not, "is that how it would be listed", but rather, "is that how it should be sorted". Xtifr tälk 21:08, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Your name may not be Waters, Chris, but lastname, first name is generally accepted when sorting people. I have no idea why the Crab Nebula is sorted as 1952. But company names are generally sorted by the company name, regardless of how they got the name. If I'm going to look up John Hancock Insurance, I'm looking under J. Big example: open up your yellow pages, and browse through it. Every company is sorted alphabetically by name. Even the ones named after people. That said, you might want to open an RFC for this, seeing as it's just the two of us here, and we have differing opinions. --Kbdank71 16:19, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
DBQ is a special case, especially in record stores: people will look under B for it bcz they are looking for Dave Brubeck recordings, of which many will be DBQ ones. But in the context of the Cat in question, the focus is not on the person but on the thing (group). (Of course, i'm clueless in this area; i'd have looked under Ono, Yoko for Electric Light Orchestra. Sheesh!)
--Jerzy•t 15:35, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Category listing

Does anyone know of a good way to get accurate lists of every article in very large categories (5,000+ articles)? AWB often leaves 1-2% out, which causes minor problems for something I'm doing. --W.marsh 16:26, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm surprised to hear that AWB has this problem. Has it been reported as a bug? -- Samuel Wantman 17:55, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
Yes, Martin is aware of it, but I'm not sure what if anything is being done to fix it. --W.marsh 18:28, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
I might be able to help, though only if a somewhat out of date listing (time of last db dump) would suffice, which possibly defeats the purpose of the exercise, since it might be even less accurate than the AWB listing. Also, my copy of the db isn't online, so this would only be practical for occasional queries. Otherwise, you might see if you can adapt something in the pywikipedia framework for this purpose, or some other scripting based solution, to automate traversing the category in much the same way a browser does, manually. Alai 01:50, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, but I need the listing updated about twice a week... the database dumps aren't updated nearly that frequently from what I understand. --W.marsh 02:10, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
'Not nearly' is about right, at the present time. In theory it's weekly, in practice it's more like every three. The toolserver seems to be even worse. That pretty much rules out any sort of dump-based solution, so I'm afraid you're stuck with some sort of scripting-based solution. (There's probably others, if Python isn't your poison.) Alai 02:35, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories

Some categories like Category:Film actors include the {{tl:catdiffuse}} template since the category is rather large. Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories seems to say that putting an article in both a parent category and a child may be OK. At what point does the guidance from Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories to include an article directly in the parent and one or more children need to be tempered by the sheer size of the category? Vegaswikian 18:00, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

This is one of the big un-answered questions about categorization. Here's some background...

When categories were initially added to Wikipedia in 2004 there was no mechanism to limit the search result for large categories. Very large categories caused performance problems, and a software change was made to limit the search result to 200 entries at a time. If there are more than 200 entries, users must navigate through multiple pages in order to see all the entries. This page by page navigation mechanism becomes impractical with large categories, as it takes much too long to see the entries at the end of the alphabet. The performance considerations of large categories and page-by-page navigation precipitated policies to depopulate large categories into smaller subcategories.

In mid 2005 the category table of contents template, {{CategoryTOC}}, was created. With the table of contents it became possible to navigate through very large categories with a few clicks. Due to the combination of the performance change and CategoryTOC, there is no longer any reason that categories need to be small.

Multiple category taxonomies have been part of the categorization scheme from the beginning. It is possible to take a category and subcategorize it in many different ways. Use of these "subset" categories makes it difficult to find all members of a "higher level" category; either articles have to be added to both the "subset" and "higher level" categories or the members of the "subcategories" (and, recursively, their subcategories) have to be enumerated. Precisely defining the circumstances in which articles should be added to both "lower level" and "higher level" categories, and even whether this is ever appropriate, remains a source of continuing discussion among editors (see, for example, Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories and Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 7).

This history has led to several overlapping views about the purpose of Wikipedia's categories and to the creation of several distinct kinds of categories:

  • Categories are a tool for browsing: they function as a table of contents, leading users to the articles on a specific subject. An example category of this type is Category:Film actors.
  • Categories are a means of classifying articles: the current conventions encourage placing articles in the most specific category. Having categorization function as a classification system is often in conflict with categorization as a tool for browsing. For example, suspension bridges are added to Category:Suspension bridges, but not category:Bridges. This makes bridges hard to find by browsing unless the user already knows the type of bridge (or is only interested in certain types of bridges).
  • Categories are an index of a subject: Due to the current conventions for categorization, many topic level categories are not useable as an index because they have been broken into subcategories and depopulated. For example there is no way to see an index of all American people. It would be useful to have categories fully populated at the "level of notability". For example directors are much more likely to be notable as "film directors" than as "American film directors".
  • Categories are a database search: Many categories are in essence the intersection of two or more larger categories. For example, Category:American film directors can be thought of as the intersection of Category:Film directors and Category:American people. There are many intersection categories that do not exist that some people might find useful. Adding more and more of these categories clutters up the category listings for articles so they are discouraged and often deleted. In addition, since these categories are manually populated it is entirely likely that an article in both Category:Film directors and Category:American people does not appear in Category:American film directors or, conversely, that an article in Category:American film directors does not appear in one or both of Category:Film directors or Category:American people.
  • Categories are an index of other categories: There are many categories that function simply as an index of other categories. For example, nearly all the subcategories of Category:Categories by nationality and Category:Categories by country are index categories providing an index of a specific set of "X by Y" intersection categories.

With the current software there are inevitable conflicts that result because editors do not share a common view on the purpose of categories. There has been discussion about software changes that might be able to help sort this out, and create a system where these views can all co-exist, but no change is likely in the near future. -- Samuel Wantman 19:04, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

So the simple answer is that the solution is category intersection if that ever happens. In the meantime there is not a 'correct' answer, as I expected, and various editors will have different opinions and we need to respect that. My biggest problem with the large membership is that it spreads out the subcats onto many pages. So unless you remove most articles from the parent there is no way to see all of the subcategories on one page. Of course we now have a few cases where the number of subcats exceeds 200. Vegaswikian 19:22, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
Yes, there will be different opinions, and we should try to keep the discussion focused on what makes categories most useful for the common user.
There are alternatives to depopulating, that solve your problem with big categories in which subcats get spread out. One is to pipe them so that they are all at the beginning. Another is to move all the subcats to a new category (or move all the articles to a new category). So for example, Category:Bridges ever got unweildy, it could be divided into Category:Types of Bridge which take most of the articles out of Bridges, and just leave the subcats. -- Samuel Wantman 21:04, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
I have added a subcat like Category:Types of bridges in other places when I felt it was necessary. I did consider it for Category:Bridges when I was over there but I considered it as very iffy since the main cat was not all that large. Maybe size should not be a concern then this extra category approach is used to better identify articles in multiple classifications. Vegaswikian 21:21, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

A minor mystery

Anyone know what's going on at Category:People by nationality and occupation? I can find no entry in the deletion log, nor any cat-page history, but there's a large number of cats that have this as a "phantom parent", and many others than link here. Is this being caused by a rogue template, or something? Alai 01:52, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

I see, as you all were: caused by a rename in progress. I've bluelinked it, to spare others similar headscratching. Alai 02:01, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Category for Warriors book series

Hello. I'm planning on making a category for the Warriors book series, but there is already a Category:Warriors. Can someone suggest a title for the planned category? DoomsDay349 01:18, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

stubs and categories

I have noticed a few users "categorising" articles by simply adding stub tags, (often replacing the {{uncategorised}} tag with a stub). Can we formally add a sentence explicitly explaining that a stub tag (or any maintenance tag) does not categorise an article (in an encyclopedic sense), despite the fact that it does add a category. Martin 14:29, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

This is an important point; I agree that it should be addressed here. -- Visviva 16:01, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree with this to a point. However, stub categories should be just fine if the stub category is already a descendant of Category:Fundamental. If you oppose this, you should say why you think the alternative would actually be useful to users and not just make-work for editors.

I believe this discussion was begun after objections to Martin's User:Bluebot automatic tagging as uncategorized of pages with stub categories. You can see the previous discussion at User_talk:Bluebot. Grouse 16:20, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

It is vaguely related to our discussion, but it is a persistent problem. I totally disagree that stub categories are ok if the stub category is already a descendant of Category:Fundamental, this goes against the whole point of categorising articles, for example, if I was trying to navigate to Artificial demand from Category:Economics, I would look in Category:Microeconomics, I wouldn't even consider looking in Category:Economics and finance stubs. To think stub categories replace our normal categorisation system is to misunderstand how the categorisation/stubbing systems work. Martin 16:28, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I understand how the categorization and stubbing systems work just fine, thanks. :) Honestly, if I were trying to navigate to Artificial demand, I would just type it in the search box, so I think this this example is a bit artificial, if you will. But you would have a similar problem if you were looking for JEL classification codes. It should probably be in Category:Economics journals, yet it is in the grandparent category Category:Economics instead. Since Wikipedia is a work in progress, sometimes articles will be in categories that are too general. But rather than tagging them with {{uncategorized}} because the category is too general, the correct response would be to simply tag a more specific category. If one can identify that the category is too general, it is easy to identify the specific category that is needed.
There are also examples where the category of the article was already as specific as it was going to get. For example, Martin added an {{uncategorized}} to Edwin Black. If his proposed policy were in place, my solution would have been to add the category Category:American journalists, which is the category of Category:American journalists stubs. This, in my opinion, would accomplish nothing. Grouse 17:05, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Er? The history shows that it was me that categorised that example properly, which is the desired effect of the template. Your idea seems to be that leaving it in the stub category only is acceptable, and not to bother adding the appropriate categories. Of course you would just type in Artificial demand, but by that logic categories are totally pointless. I am at a loss as to why you think having normal categories is in any way a bad thing when a stub tag is present. My fundamental point is this: Stub categories and normal categories are there for different reasons and serve a different purposes, neither replaces the other.. Or more specifically, stub tags do not replace categories. Martin 17:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
It is a mischaracterization to say that I think having a non-stub category is bad when a stub category is present. I have never said anything like that, and that is not the alternative to what you are proposing. What I do think is that one should not add {{uncategorized}} when a stub category already exists. Especially in this case where the stub category is the same as the replaced category.
If the desired effect of the template is to get the person who added the template to add other categories, then I would say you did admirably this time, but I fail to see the point. Just add the other templates instead of adding {{uncategorized}}. If you leave it to others to complete, there is no guarantee that they will add a more specific category than what is already established. Indeed sometimes they cannot.
I think categories are useful in general, but you have not demonstrated a way that your proposed change to category policy would be more useful to users.
I think we can both agree that stub categories do not replace categories. The difference is where the stub category is already a part of the rest of the category system (i.e. a descendant of Category:Fundamental Grouse 17:37, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Please re-read the initial comment I made, this is really nothing to do with the uncategorised template. This thread is about one thing: Stub tags do not replace categories. If you have a problem with the template, discuss it on Category talk:Category needed with the people who use it. Martin 17:41, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Fine. Then let me re-sum my general point here: Articles should have a category that descends from Category:Fundamental. It's okay if this only occurs via a category that descends from Category:Stub, or via a combination of categories that descend from Category:Stub and those that do not. Multiple inheritance is good :) Grouse 17:57, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Speaking as someone who has dealt with many thousands of uncategorized articles, especially via the list at Special:Uncategorizedpages, my opinion is this: Though having a stub category is acceptable as a temporary solution, it is not a good permanent solution. As such, I recommend placing {{uncat}} on articles, even if they are properly stubbed. I routinely see "old" articles show up at the Special list, because the article got expanded, and then someone removed the "stub" tag, but still didn't add any categories, so it left the article "floating" again. Now, I do like stub categories, because at the very least, they do keep an article out of Special:Uncategorizedpages (as does any other maintenance category), so they're better than nothing. But stubs are not an acceptable substitute for real categorization. --Elonka 19:21, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Well I can definitely see your point, and this is honestly the first persuasive reason I have seen for adding a non-stub category. But I think a better solution to the problem would be to add a category rather than {{uncat}}. Grouse 22:10, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I use it when I find an article that is lacking a category and I'm not sure where it should go and don't have the time to research it. Using your argument, we should not use most templates like wikify or cleanup or source but we should fix the problem and not tag it. Vegaswikian 22:22, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I think it would be more like finding a single spelling mistake or unwikified word—you'd change that rather than tagging it wouldn't you? Here, a category the article could be put into would even already be there—as the parent of its stub category. Grouse 23:02, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, that could be used to put it in a broad area that is closer to the actual category or in some cases the correct category. However that could force cleanup at the top category levels. Editors don't seem interested in putting articles in the right great grand children. The grand parent is acceptable in many cases. Vegaswikian 23:28, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Surely the easiest thing to do is to add a note within the {{uncat}} template, so that it reads something like:
This article, image, template or category is uncategorized or is only in stub categories. Please categorize it so it may be associated with related articles, images, templates or categories. Thank you.
That would save having to change stub templates (of which there are many), and would make it clear that the article should be in permcats. Grutness...wha? 22:29, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
"But you would have a similar problem if you were looking for JEL classification codes. It should probably be in Category:Economics journals, yet it is in the grandparent category Category:Economics instead." Having created the article and categorized it I disagree for two reasons. First, in economics this classification system is used very generally - it's not specific to the Journal of Economic Literature or even to journals. Second, and relatedly, its the basis for the economics categories in WikipediaJQ 06:17, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Should stubs have categories? Certainly. Is a stub category as useful for finding an article as a non-stub category? Definitely not. However, that being said, I don't think it's appropriate or helpful to apply "improvement needed" tags (such as {{uncategorized}}, {{wikify}}, {{sources}}, etc.) to stubs. The editor knows the article is incomplete, that's why he or she identified it as a stub. If someday the article progresses to where it is no longer a stub, we can start telling the editor what's missing. Otherwise every stub will wind up with a list of missing items that will be longer than the article! --ubiquity 22:27, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I disagree that adding a stub to an article should exempt it from improvement tags. Even stubs need to have a reference, be properly formated, and contain enough information so that readers can understand why they should be in Wikipedia. Also, I don't see any problem with adding a {{uncategorized}} tag to a stubbed file. Adding the tag means it will be looked at sooner by the Article Categorization team. Right now that team will fix the tag within about 45 days. WVhybrid 00:34, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

As a practical matter, I feel like I've frequently seen stub templates removed from articles and not replaced by real category tags. Having an additional category will help prevent unnecessarily orphaning articles. -- Avocado 00:56, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I've been battling the uncategorized pages for awhile now. I see what they're trying to do - the backlog is horrible and woe-inducing. But it isn't really all that helpful in the long run. My best solution would be, however, just to address the issue on the users' talk page; it's probably just misguided good faith. Crystallina 03:41, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I entirely agree with Elonka when she says that "a stub category is acceptable as a temporary solution, it is not a good permanent solution"; but that's simply a corollary from everything about stubs, which is they are expressly and explicitly temporary conditions for (supposedly) improving articles. (Of course, that's true of all article, in theory, to a greater or lesser extent.) In order words, temporary articles, until we get a "real", or "permanent" one. Beyond a certain amount of tags, I think there's rather diminishing returns. ("This article is orphaned, uncategorised, unsourced, unwikified, a dead-end page, a stub, needs cleaned up, but other than that, it's great.")

The broader point is that there's a continuum between "this article has quite literally no categories, whatsoever" (including stub cats and maintenance cats), to "we're completely done categorising this article". Thus the question arises, a) where to draw the line for the purposes of {{uncat}}, and b) what other "category of some kind is missing and needed" maintenance categories are useful? From a triage point of view, I'd rather see uncat used only on articles lacking either a "real" category or a sorted stub type, because for one thing, 45 days is a quite a long time, and for another, it neglects what the delay would be if all the "uncategorised stubs" were tagged in this manner. If the two were in separate "queues", we'd be able satisfy the concerns of those wishing to systematically categorise absolutely everything, without completely swamping the articles most urgently in need of even the basics.

On a side note, as it's already been suggested that creation of new articles without categories might be disabled, it would be a pretty small step to prevent articles already with categories from having them removed, and doesn't have the same "scaring the newbies" downside. That would deal with the problem of a sorted stubs turning into a completely uncategorised article, at a stroke. Alai 05:54, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I note that as of the October 31st db dump, there were 65,132 articles tagged with one or more stub types, and no other categories whatsoever. (Several thousand of them probably now also have the "uncat" category, added since then.) If one were to count those in stub categories, out-and-out maintenance categories, and nothing else, it would doubtless be significantly higher. (If someone can tell me precisely to determine what's a "maintenance" category in an automated way, I might be able to say how much higher.) Of course, one could pretty much reduce this almost to zero at a stroke by bot-categorising everything in a "X stubs" category into an "Xs" category (almost every stub type has a corresponding permanent parent), but that would simply cause a massive "category diffusion" problem. (That is, if you think stub categories are useless due to being too large to search through, imagine exactly the same articles being moved to a permanent category.) The above-referenced Category:American writers are a case in point. Alai 07:51, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

  • (in response to the original post) Yes, that would be good, but I think your best bet would be educating the relevant users whenever you spot them. >Radiant< 12:04, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Proposal for new stub template, erm, thingy

Ok, I am not up at all on the whole technical aspect of wikipedia, but what IF we set up the stub template to require a subst tag, and then included the parent category of the stub category in the subst'ed text? Thus, when you type:

{{subst:musician-stub}}

you get

this article about a musician is a stub. You can help expand the stub by yada yada yada
[[Category:musicians]]

Or better yet, I am not sure if we can do this, but if we can use the subst tag to return ANOTHER template text AND the category text, so that typing:

{{subst:musician-cat-stub}}

you get

{{musician-stub}}
[[Category:musicians]]

This entire proposal may be techincally possible, but practically unweildy as well. Just an idea, as it would greatly speed the process of categorizing articles. Any responses? --Jayron32 04:33, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

First impression: not wise. We'll just end up with lots of "categorized" articles that are 3-10 levels too high up in the hierarchy, such as someone in "cat:musicians" who should really be in "cat:Argentinian hip-hop artists." This is fine where the hierarchy is well-maintained by local editors who will quickly step in to re-categorize the articles, but that's seldom the case. We'd just be hiding the categorization problem, not solving it. -- Visviva 04:40, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
Fair enough. I am involved heavily in the brute force categorization project myself, and I always try to put an article in the most specific category possible. I was just mostly thinking outloud. The people working on the categorization drive are all hard-working, well meaning editors, and I was just trying to come up with a solution to lighten the load a bit. I see your point though, that this really just hides the problem, it doesn't solve it. --Jayron32 04:49, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
The first scheme is a very bad idea: stub code is not a pretty sight when subst'd into an article, and it would make re-stubbing and other maintenance tasks much more painful. The "Russian doll" templates would work, wouldn't require any changes for stub-sorters or anyone else, and is something that wouldn't need a huge amount of consulation to do (unless there's a rebellion at TFD after you've done this for 3000+ templates...). However, as Visviva indicates, there's no real "win" in doing this: the categorisation will be at best incomplete, and will sometimes be adding to an already large "catdiffuse" problem. Though those are obviously on-going issues anyway. (Mind you, note that the likes of {{musician-stub}} is pretty high up the stub tree, never mind the categories as a whole, and isn't the best starting point for auto-adding cats. Most stub types correspond to much lower, and more reasonably like, portions of the cat tree.) Alai 06:33, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

OK. Another proposal: Is there a way to coerce the creator of an article to categorize it when it is created? Would it be possible to, if they haven't categorized it already, to bring up a category tree and ask them to choose one before the article is created? Again, probably far to grand a plan, and also probably has unseen consequences I am not seeing. Perhaps a less coercive method might be adding a category field below the edit summary field, and then having a warning screen pop up if the field is left blank (are you sure you don't want to categorize this article? If not, click yes to submit as it is) something like that. --Jayron32 04:49, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

This seems to already be under active discussion -- though I can't lay my hand on the page right at the moment. :/ Obviously it will still be hard for new editors to comprehensively categorise their articles, unless we add a positively huge amount of "mixed initiative" to the system. (User, tentatively: {{bio-stub}}? WP: So it's a person, eh? OK, We'll be needing a nationality, occupation, year of birth category, and whether they're living, or else when they died. User, rolling eyes, closes window.) Alai 06:22, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I do not believe that stub categories and the like should be considered valid as far as the {{uncategorised}} template goes. Once the stub or notice is removed, the article suddenly becomes uncategorised, meaning that someone has to go and cat it again. Lankiveil 02:40, 12 November 2006 (UTC).

What's "and the like"? If you're thinking of (other) maintenance categories, the key difference is that stubs are sorted by topic, in a manner that deliberately parallels the 'real' categories, whereas the average cleanup resource is not. The question is not, "should sorted stubs be also be put in a permanent category", to which the answer is, I think everyone agrees, "yes". (Come to that, ideally they should be completely categorised, which is another kettle of fish entirely from "put a category on it and call it done".) Rather, it's whether non-permcatted sorted stubs should, as a pragmatic matter, be put in the same maintenance category as entirely uncategorised articles. For myself, I think to equate the two would be a very strange choice of priorities, especially given the size of the task(s), as I've illustrated above. Alai 02:57, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree that as a matter of priorities, the articles that are not in any sort of category, not even a sorted stub category, should be done first. Grouse 23:04, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

An article that is only in stub categories is uncategorised as far as I am concerned. Piccadilly 22:58, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I try to help out on the categorisation project, but it's huge, and dispiriting. Although not the perfect solution, I think Jayron's second proposal would be a real help, and much better than the current situation. --Sepa 23:22, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Category:Terrorists proposal

Note: This was cross-posted at Wikipedia talk:Categorization, Wikipedia:Village pump (policy), and Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Policies

Category:Terrorists was up for CfD, which passed as Delete. In a deletion review, I proposed an alternative categorization that would merge several top-level categories into one. My proposal is at User:Irixman/TerrorismProposal. Before I am bold and just do it, I really want some feedback -- should I? What do y'all think? :) Please direct any and all comments to User:Irixman/TerrorismProposal#Comments -- Irixman (t) (m) 16:55, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

"Nationality" vs. "location" categories

I notice that Category:British academics has as a subcat Category:Academics by university in the United Kingdom, which seems a little dubious. Furthermore, I notice a lot of articles have only the former, as if it implied the latter (or admittedly just through common-or-garden omission). I suggest the latter cat be moved out of there, and into a top-level by-institution category, and if there's anyone working on caregorisation of these, suggest they add the missing "nationality" categories. Alai 04:02, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Nationality vs. location are often mixed together. This is a common problem all through the categorization structure. It is often compounded by the additon of language categories. Thus "English foo" is often used (incorrectly) to mean English-language, located in England and of English origin. There should be three seperate category hierarchies for each meaning. Each hierarchy should clearly state which of the three meanings are intended. The other hierarchies can (and probably should) be linked with "See also:" links, but not by making them subcategories. I believe the current naming conventions are "Things in foo" for location, "Fooish things" for national origin, and "Fooish-language things" for language. --Samuel Wantman 21:34, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd go along with that. Alai 22:15, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Oddly missing categories

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung was recently marked as uncategorized. Much to my surprise, we don't have a Category:Music criticism. Nor do we have Category:Criticism in which to place it. (There is a Category:Music critics, which doubtless belongs in Category:Music criticism.) I've done some category work myself, but not a ton, so I'm probably not the one to work out where something this large belongs. I'd appreciate if someone else can work out where this appropriately would fit into the existing category tree or whether something equivalent is already there but I didn't think of the correct term. - Jmabel | Talk 07:51, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

The best existing category is probably Category:music publications... i.e., the perm-parent of the stub-cat it was already in, anyway. I see there's a Category:literary criticism, so if there's a deep reason we don't have other criticism cats (or as you say, what else they'd be called) it escapes me too. I also notice that Category:critics is in Category:criticisms, which seems wrong. I think I'm going to go ahead and create it under Category:non-fiction -- I did toy with Category:essays, but that seems slightly over-specific, if somewhat characteristic. Alai 08:10, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Categorization as process

Some legitimate concerns have been raised above about the use of {{uncategorized}} on articles that have been stub-sorted. I think there is a real problem with thinking about categorization in a binary way; in practice, it's more of a process, or even a cycle. The usual stages of categorization, I think, go something like this:

0. The article is in no categories of any kind.
1. The article is not in a descendant of Category:Fundamental; it is in general maintenance categories only.
2. The article is in at least one descendant of Category:Fundamental, but these are topical maintenance categories (probably stub categories). (not sure if "Living people" would count here).
3. The article is in at least one true category, but this category is not as specific as it should be. For example, an article is in Category:Bridges when it should be in Category:Bridges in North Korea.
4. The article is well-sorted in one hierarchy, but is not sorted (or not fully sorted) in another. For example, a bio article may have birth and death and nationality categories, but no profession category.
5. The article's categorization is absolutely perfect ... for the moment. But as the category structure continues to evolve, it will inevitably slide back to stage 3 or 4.

Thinking about it this way, our one template seems a little crude. I wonder if we should have a second template, {{notfullycategorized}} or something, which could be placed on articles in stages 2-3 -- that is, something instead of {{uncategorized}} to place on articles that are in stub or over-general categories only. Or do we perhaps already have such a template somewhere? -- Visviva 03:47, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

That's largely in line with much of my thinking (some of which I've given people the dubious benefit of further up the page). I'd suggest we have at least one additional template (and cat). More specifically, I'd think at a minimum: {{uncat}}, as at present, to be applied to anything categorised only on a maintenance-operation(s)-required basis; {{uncatstub}}, to be applied to any sorted stub template lacking a "permanent" subject category; and a number of more specific "category missing" maintenance categories by type of subject. Films, books, singles, albums, etc lacking a publication/release year, genre; people lacking a YoB/YoD/occupation/nationality cat; anything that can be identified as a "required category" on a per-class basis. Some of these exist already: there's Category:uncategorised albums, and things like Category:year of birth missing (which probably more precisely means the information is missing from the article, so might argue for yet-another-distinction). "Notfullycategorised" is a probably best mainly as a top-level umbrella, being not very informative or helpful by itself. Alai 06:55, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
If implemented, it should require a description of the information that caused the template to be added. Without this, someone could look at the article and not see what was missing in the eyes of another editor. Vegaswikian 07:09, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
Good point. -- Visviva 07:14, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
That makes sense -- more specific tags for more specific problems. Not sure how far we should go in terms of "sorting unsortedness," since ultimately such efforts are better devoted to actually categorizing the articles. That may be something that needs to be looked at separately for each topic area with a diffusion problem. At any rate, it seems clear that {{uncatstub}} would be a good idea. -- Visviva 07:14, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
Definitely per topic, that's the only basis it makes sense on; and either a diffusion problem, or just an axis-of-category-completely-missing problem. The advantage of a "sorting unsortedness" step is that it could be automated fairly readily: see my bot task item on populating the uncategorised albums (for starters). Likewise, it'd be relatively straightforward to go a database query to get everyone in Category:people and/or with the WPBIO talk-page tag (though I think the former was largely used to populate the latter) missing a year of birth category (etc), and then have a bot tag them as such {{uncatyob}} populating Category:Missing year of birth category, say, or all 60K stubs with no perm. cat. I agree that it doesn't make sense to do this by hand. Alai 07:43, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
I think tier 4's somewhat broadly defined. To me, an article that just has birth and death categories isn't really categorized, because there's no chance that anybody will ever find it (or, for that matter, go looking for it.) 3 and 4 often go together, not always because of negligence, but because the article just doesn't give enough information to categorize specifically, or because a specific categorization would require technical or specialized knowledge. I'm also hesitant about calling any article "perfect" in categorization; there are usually plenty of very specific categories that you'd never think would exist, but do. It's a process, as you said before, and much like the rest of Wikipedia, one that can always get better. Crystallina 05:00, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Fairly said. 3-5 is more or less of a gradient -- or rather, stages 3 and 4 both describe different independent gradients -- and no one can ever be sure that an article has reached stage 5 without having perfect knowledge of both the article topic and Wikipedia's entire category hierarchy. -- Visviva 06:51, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I went ahead and created Template:Uncategorizedstub and Category:Uncategorized stubs. I won't be populating them until (and if) my bot's task gets final approval, though if anyone else wants to use them in the meantime, or of course tweak them, decry them, delete them... Alai 23:59, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Yay!  :-) -- Visviva 06:51, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
OK, my bot task trial has gone more than a week without adverse comment, so I'm going ahead with this, starting with the Novembers, of which there's a goodly chunk. If no-one objects, I'll do the Octobers later. Alai 17:38, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Categories creeping into articles

Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:The_Beatles&oldid=87626006 and you will see a well populated category with a significant amout of text about the Beatles. Leaving aside the any questions concerning the quality of the writing, this text is article-like in its nature. It even has a photo (not a categorized one - just directed linked to the page). In gereral, whilst some text which helps readers and editors use a category can be helpful, I propose that this type of writing be excluded from category pages. What do people think? Greenshed 22:46, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I would generally agree that there should be less than a screenful of text, and that the purpose of that text is to explicate the scope of the category rather than to describe the topic (that's what {{catmore}} is for). Suppose there might be exceptions, but can't think of any offhand. -- Visviva 04:23, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
I hold the opposite view. There are several categories that have been this way for quite a while without objection. One that comes to mind is Category:Suspension bridges. Many categories would benefit from more text. Especially categories like biological classifications, which would be more useful if they had more information. I worked up an example at one point for how biological categories could be set up that would make them much more useful. Take a look at this mock-up. One value of having editable text is that it creates the possibility of creating an organization for a category that is not alphabetical. Granted, this would not be maintained by the software, but in cases of stable hierarchies (like biological classification) it would work.
I think there should be more intros added to categories. The intro paragraph to the main article often works well. I find the opening paragraph of an article more satisfying than the catmore link. In the case of the Beatles, the intro would look something like this:
File:Beatles retouched.jpg
The Beatles, an English musical group from Liverpool, are the most critically acclaimed, commercially successful popular music artists in history. They continue to be held in the highest esteem for their artistic achievements, their huge commercial success, their groundbreaking role in the history of popular music, and their contributions to popular culture. Although their initial musical style was rooted in the sounds of 1950s Rock & Roll, the group explored a great variety of genres, ranging from Tin Pan Alley to psychedelic rock. The innovative music and style of John Lennon (1940–1980), Paul McCartney (1942—), George Harrison (1943–2001), and Ringo Starr (1940—) helped to define the 1960s. More...
--Samuel Wantman 05:00, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Categories should have VERY short (like 1-2 sentances MAX) introductions, with redirects to main articles as needed. The examples above should be rewritten to match that. Categories are not the place to have information, it is only supposed to be a collection of like-topic articles. We have articles for a reason. --Jayron32 05:39, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I like those examples, actually... The problem is the duplication and added maintenance; the Category page is unlikely to get nearly the level of attention that the corresponding article page receives. I wish there were a way to transclude the lead section of an article only -- although it would be possible to borrow the "intro" section of a portal, in the rare cases where one exists. In the case of lists, I think it might be ideal to have a collapsible navigational template, one that could also be included as appropriate in individual articles. -- Visviva 05:49, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
I guess I ageee with the one or two sentance guideline above with a comment that the information should be generic and not likely to require updates based on main article content changes. Vegaswikian 06:17, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
What about transcluding something like Portal:The Beatles/Intro? -- Visviva 06:23, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
That's longer then I was thinking and it is again an article rather then explaning what the category is for. I did nto make that later point clear above since I thought that was implied. Vegaswikian 07:25, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Size matters. Like Visviva said, there should (certainly) be less than a screenful of text. It should be visually obvious that it's a category, at first glance, and some of the creeping examples fail that test. For example, I've trimmed back Category:Param Vir Chakra and I think the second sentence I've kept there adds value, but duplicating the article's leading paragraph wouldn't. Mereda 14:52, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I definitely disagree with "article-style" category page content. The average category page should be a brief scoping statement, and no more. Some special cases may require additional information beyond this (for example, "catdiffuse" pages might offer some guidance as to how this should be used in more detail, but regardless, it should be relatively brief (so as not to require repeatedly scrolling down to get to the category contents, to take an extreme case), and not to duplicate the function of content better placed elsewhere. Alai 14:54, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Reading over the arguments pro and con above, I think there may be agreement with the idea that the text on page should be content that improves the functionality of the category. I don't think the Beatles example is a particularly good example of this. If there is a category with a large number of articles and sub-categories which might overwhelm a first time visitor to the page, a few sentences might add needed guidance to the subject and highlight articles with key concepts and information. In some cases, it could provide an alternative organization to the subject such as this mock-up. I don't think the effort on this page is to specify the details about what this text should be, but rather to clarify what its function is on the page. In my view, text can be added to:

  1. Clarify what the subject and key concepts are.
  2. Direct users to the topic article.
  3. Link to related categories and other navigational aids.
  4. Present useful organizations of subcategories and articles that cannot be displayed alphabetically.
  5. Help editors and users understand what belongs and what doesn't belong in the category.
  6. Alert users and editors about WP:CFD discussions.
--Samuel Wantman 18:56, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I am pretty positive about Samuel Wantman suggestion above, although his suggestion might stand some refinement. I would like include some guidance on the categorization project page which discourages "article-style" content (eg facts) on category pages but permits (possibly encourages) content that helps readers to get the maximum benefit from the category information. I also think that I have not articulated this principle in a very clear manner - perhaps someone can do a better job. Greenshed 20:54, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
I also basically agree with this. Something about the list bothers me, but I'm not sure what. Having said that if it got added to a guideline I could support it as minor changes could be made at any time. Vegaswikian 22:48, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Should categories be sensitive to line breaks?

This would be helpful in breaking up long lists of categories at the bottom of pages. e.g. for Arnold Schoenberg you might divide the categories as follows: 

<!-- occupation by geo/religion/etc -->
[[Category:American music theorists|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:Austrian music theorists|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:American composers|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:Austrian composers|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:Jewish classical musicians|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:Jewish composers and songwriters|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:Jewish painters|Schoenberg, Arnold]]

<!-- music -->
[[Category:20th century classical composers|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:Modernist composers|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:Expressionism|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:Wagnerites|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:People with absolute pitch|Schoenberg, Arnold]]

<!-- geo -->
[[Category:Musicians who left Nazi Germany|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:Austrian refugees|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States|Schoenberg, Arnold]]

<!-- general birth/death -->
[[Category:1874 births|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:1951 deaths|Schoenberg, Arnold]]
[[Category:People buried at the Zentralfriedhof|Schoenberg, Arnold]]

This could display as:

But nav-template style would work well for this:

Categories

Comments? – flamurai (t) 09:25, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Interesting idea. I can imagine a few complications (how do we handle cleanup tags, and such, which add categories from all the way at the top of the page?). But barring that sort of thing, I've developed a template solution you might find very interesting -- currently, the template only links to categories, but it could be easily modified to include pages into the listed categories (with sortkey and all). See User:Luna Santin/sandbox for an example of its use (permalinks: transclusion and template). Doesn't seem quite perfect, just yet, but may be worth exploring. Luna Santin 09:56, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Am I understanding this correctly? You are proposing a software change? I think this has possibilities, but I worry that there will end up being edit wars about category categorization. -- Samuel Wantman 21:52, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

articles appearing in both parent and subcats

I've been finding a seemingly endless amount of articles categorized in both parent and child cats. For example, look at Category:Pennsylvania counties. You will find the article Adams County, Pennsylvania appearing in both Category:Adams County, Pennsylvania and it's parent Category:Pennsylvania counties. Is this a mistake or is there an exception that allows this. Thanks, Gjs238 07:07, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

This has been a contentious issue. Please see WP:SUBCAT. -- Samuel Wantman 19:42, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Categories getting out of hand

Does everything need to be categorized under every possible association that can be conceived for it? Look at Namibia. At this moment, it's categorized under:

  • Countries of Southern Africa
  • Countries of Africa
  • Member states of the Southern African Development Community
  • Countries and territories on the South Atlantic Ocean
  • Member states of the African Union
  • Niger-Congo-speaking nations

Does there need to be a category for Southern Africa in addition to Africa? Isn't the meaning of "Southern Africa" rather vague for classification purposes? If the set of countries chosen for this category is self-defining, then it serves no purpose anyway.

Of what use is the classification "countries and territories on the South Atlantic Ocean". Every fact doesn't need to rise to the level of being a category. How about the fact that Niger-Congo languages are spoken in Namibia? That can already be ascertained from the article, by clicking the links for the languages that are enumerated. Going in the other direction, the category stripe only leads to an ordinary page on Niger-Congo anyway. There isn't any need for it to be category. If every fact is explicitly categorized, every article is going to wind up having a zillion category stripes at the bottom. To the extent that most of these associations are notable, they'll already be covered by links in the body of the article. If they aren't, and if they're significant, then they should be.


What really gets me is exemplified by the subcategories underneath the category "Member states of the African Union". Banks of the African Union? Chairman of the African Union? African Union-related lists?

Some pruning seems due, or else the whole categorization process will reach absurd proportions. --Largo Plazo 15:54, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

The links to those categories may not help people reading the article, but they do help people browsing the categories. --Smack (talk) 06:06, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

{{uncat}}

I find it useful when all new articles created without a category tag, automatically have a {{uncat}} template appended to them. Would save a lot of work we put in adding this template later. Not sure if this is the right page for this discussion though?? STTW (talk) 13:35, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

  • You might find this proposal interesting: WP:EIC. Crystallina 20:12, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the info, hope that the proposal gets through quickly. STTW (talk) 20:43, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Proposal for managing song lists (Simpsons episodes) using categories

I'd like to get some advice from those who have been intimately involved with the use an exploitation of categories in Wikipedia.

I have a proposal on the table Wikipedia:WikiProject The Simpsons/Proposal for managing song lists on Simpsons episodes which I suspect may be using categories in the way they were not intended.

I'd be very keen to know if this is considered a Bad Thing, or if it's a good use of categories. One of the respondants (on the talk page) expressed concern that it would create a large number (about 200) of categories with a small number (1 to 5) entries in each - this is because it's trying to be systematic use of categories so some extremes (a category with one entry) are a necessary by-product of it.

Please take a look at the proposal and let me know what's the "engineer's eye" view of the proposal, or if I should escalate it elsewhere. Thanks --Mortice 15:50, 27 November 2006 (UTC)--

I don't think this is a good thing, and I have responded in detail here. Thanks for asking for feedback. Hopefully it will save us all a great deal of time and effort. Your effort creating them, and ours, trying to get it removed. -- Samuel Wantman 01:19, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Thankyou very much, that was exactly the sort of insight I've been after for the last few weeks while considering this implementation. I have an alternative plan (using a bot and not categories) which I'll now propose instead --Mortice 20:25, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Category:uncategorised people

I've created the above, on the pattern of the existing Category:uncategorised albums, Category:uncategorised books, etc, and started populating it from the US-bio-stubs. If some people are interested in working through these to categorise the articles, I can find plenty more where those came from. Alai 00:44, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps too many: at the time of the last db dump, there were 12,934 "bio-stub" (and sub-types) with no non-stub category at all -- and that's no even counting those tagged with {{uncat}}, or in other maintenance cat. I live in hope that this will work as well as Category:uncategorised albums and similar seem to, but this might not be the right level of "granularity". If anyone here is wanting to work on a particular area of category, please let me know and I'll do what I can to facilitate. Alai 20:53, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Category labels

I've been thinking about some general purpose templates for categories that might help in their management. I hate the {{catdiffuse}} template, and would like some that are much more user friendly, not blatantly self-referential and move us towards the category structure discussed at Wikipedia:Category intersection. I'm not sure of all the details, so I want to get feedback before I do anything.

The basic idea is to label categories so that people understand the different ways we use categories. The language would be written for the users of wikipedia to help explain the use of the category, while at the same time it would indirectly help editors know how the category should be populated. There would be templates for each of the following:

  • Topic Categories -- Topic categories are high level categories containing both articles and subcategories. Typically, these do not contain any articles about specific instances of the topic. An example of this type of category is Category:Film
  • Index Categories -- These are the "Primary" category talked about at WP:CI. An index category contains all the articles that are members of a class of articles defined by a topic. It is a master index of the topic. All members of one of these "X" categories are an "X". An example of this type is Category:Film directors (though it is not currently populated). The template for this type of category might have a link to the topic article for the category and explain how subcategories might be helpful.
  • Subcategories Subcategories are secondary index categories, a more specific means of classifying articles. Articles put in subcategories would also be put in the index categories that are their parents. The template would have a link to the parent category.
  • Navigation categories These categories only contain subcategories and are intended to help people navigate through the category structure. An example of this is Category:People by nationality and occupation
  • Intersection categories The intersection of two (or perhaps three) primary categories. The articles placed in these categories should also be in the primary categories. The template would have links to the primary categories.
  • Subject categories These are low level categories mainly containing articles that are related to a topic. Typically, they are eponymous categories and not part of any larger taxonomy. An example of this is Category:George W. Bush.

Implicit in this is that there are precedents for all of these types of categories. For example, all the discussions we've had about how to categorize eponymous categories apply to "subject categories". Diffusion would apply to "topic categories", duplication would only be between "index" and "subcategories", etc...

I'm going on a Wikibreak for about 10 days. If there is support for this idea, I'll start working on it when I return. Or perhaps I'll find that someone else has already begun. -- Samuel Wantman 01:02, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Not especially fond of this idea. Generally articles should be in the most specific category possible. Putting articles in both "index" categories *and* the subcategories (*and* intersection categories??) is essentially duplicating the purpose of lists, to no particular benefit that I can see. If I'm understanding this correctly, this would essentially wreck the function of categorization for browsing as well as for ontology (although Wikipedia's ontology has never been very sound, anyway). More importantly, this would seem to triple the number of categories on many articles, to no apparent benefit. -- Visviva 08:05, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't think I follow: isn't this squishing about three different things together? Firstly, there's how to handle and maintain under-specific and over-full categories (those currently tagged with {{catdiffuse}}; there's the function, structure, and rationale of the categories (SW's proposed list); and lastly there's the subcategory duplication issue. Aren't these all essentially separate issues? I don't see why SW feels the second follows from the first, or why V. feels the third follows from the second. (Personally I feel the first is a must in some form, and I'm more or less agnostic about the other two at present.) Alai 13:04, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm back, and I'll try and explain what I'm getting at. I've been looking at categories and trying to make sense of how we use them. That is what led to the above descriptions. If categories get tagged as being of a certain type, people will have a better sense of where articles belong and how to find them.
There is more than one issue here and perhaps I should have left the duplication issue out of this for now. With or without the duplication as part of the description, I think having these sort of labels would be helpful.
I don't really understand why people are bothered by "under-specific and over-full categories". I like these big categories. They are fun to browse. They function as a complete index of subjects. Even Category:Living people which I detested when it was created, I now find interesting to browse (check out the new TOC thanks to User:Rick Block). I don't agree with the "Generally articles should be in the most specific category possible" argument. This argument made more sense when categories were starting out, but as the structure grows, categories are getting more and more specific. Only putting articles in the most specific categories makes the categories less and less useful for browsing and for use as an index. If articles are removed from what I am calling an index category because they are only found in what I'm calling a subcategory or intersection category, than we are in effect saying that all users will understand and want to go to those specific categories. That often is not the case. I'll give an example of this. When categories were first implemented and getting populated, Category:Film directors was populated with all of the film directors. I found this to be a delightful category to browse. I could see all the film directors in one place, see who might be missing and pick one to read. Later, as the category got too big (there was not yet {{CategoryTOC}}), a decision was made to depopulate the category into categories of film directors by nationality. I hate these nationality categories. I think nationality often has little to do with being a film director. Yes, there is utility in sometimes looking at categories like Category:French film directors or Category:Japanese film directors, but I want to see them all together more often than I want to see them separately. I rarely care to distinguish between American, Canadian, British or Australian directors. We have in effect said that nationality is a defining distinction when in reality sometimes nationality is not all that important. What I'm advocating is the ability to have both. Populate both the general and the specific, and be clear about how and why we're doing it.
So my big point is that I think we should be populating categories based on the functions of the categories, and that leads to the duplication issues. I'd like to discuss the tagging together with the duplication, because if we are going to say that a category is meant to be used as an index, it should be fully populated. It would be possible to leave Category:Film directors unpopulated and tag it as a navigation category. That is how it is currently configured. So by saying that I want to have fully populated index categories I'm implying that duplications could and would happen.
What we have now is this {{catdiffuse}} tag which says that the category is too big and should be depopulated into the subcategories. Why is it too big? I don't know. Why should it be depopulated? I also don't know. Just because someone has come up with smaller subdivisions is not a good reason to destroy a perfectly good index category. Can we discuss why we have the category before we decide to break it up into pieces? What function is it meant to serve? Who might want to use it? How does it relate to the subject matter? What distinctions are important defining characteristics for an article? What distinctions are important to only a minority of users? How will people want to browse through these articles? We need to put some structure into this system to create discussion about these type of questions. We can discuss whether a category should function as an index of the subject or as navigation tool to find other categories. Tagging categories will hopefully get us to help define this structure so that work on categories will be more coordinated between editors.
If you look at the types of categories I have described above, and compare it to the current evolution of our categorization structure, I think you will find that index categories are disappearing. They only survive when there are few member articles. Otherwise they get depopulated and turned into navigation categories. I think this is wrong. We are overcategorizing at the expense of having useful index categories. If I look in the back of a book about film directors, there will be an index of directors. A film guide will hopefully have an index of all films. There might also be indexes broken up some other way, like by year, or by genre. Multiple indexes in books are a plus (though they take up too much paper). Good books about topics have good indexes. Wikipedia should have them as well. -- Samuel Wantman 11:19, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but it would seem that lists are more suited to the purpose of providing general indices. They can be centrally maintained, can contain links to articles that don't exist yet, and can even supplement that with extensive additional information. I do take your point about nationality categories, but categories like Category:Film directors should be -- and generally are -- broken up on *multiple* axes, for example, by genre, time period, etc. -- Visviva 13:36, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
There is actually a difference between a list and an index. Take a look at featured lists. They are annotated and sometimes illustrated and provide more than just a plain list. An index can list articles in a topic area, like a contents list. Compare Category:Panthera species and Panthera. Do you see the difference? Carcharoth 14:51, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Exactly so. Lists often fail as indicies in Wikipedia. They are often not maintained especially when they simply duplicate the categorization effort. People are much more likely to put an article into a category than to find the list where it belongs. Alphabetical indicies without annotation are exactly what categories were designed to do. -- Samuel Wantman 20:47, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Overcategorization

Check out this new proposed guideline. Mostly the work of long-time CfD regular User:Radiant!. -- Samuel Wantman 06:26, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Cats and sandboxes

I see that we have recently acquired a section called Keep cats out of the sandbox. Would this, perhaps be an appropriate illustration? - Jmabel | Talk 04:17, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

"Events" categories

I've been cleaning out Category:Tasmania (moving items to sub-cats, etc) and found many which would be suitable for "Events in Tasmania" or something similar. I couldn't find an "Events in Australia" or similar category to put it in, and Category:Events didn't have an "Events by country" or similar sub-cat. For the moment I have split them up (ie. sporting events are in "Sport in Tasmania") and I have seen "Visitor attractions in..." and "Festivals in..." used for other places. I'm happy to create and populate Category:Events in Tasmania if that is the best name, but is there a preferred naming convention that I should use? -- Chuq 03:25, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Categorism comes under constructive criticism

I posted the following under the same heading in the talk page of the Association of Categorist Wikipedians (on the Meta website), but I think it is relevant to this talk page as well so I basically cut pasted it below:

With all due respect Categorists I think that the categorization system is not working because it is too complicated and difficult to understand for both the reader and the editor. It was intended to be a system but ended up becoming a chaos. The pages which explain the purpose and guidelines of the system are just too long, (I looked at them but felt daunted). The editors assign the articles to the wrong categories because they do not fully understand the system.

Although I am a specialist in taxonomy and systematic biology I was not able to understand this system. Unlike biological classification which is hierarchical (each species belong to one genus, each genus to one family...etc never multiple relationships such as one species in two genera). Articles relate to on another in a multiple fashion creating a net-system that is difficult to represent. I find it difficult in particular to guess all the possible categories that should be included and many times I make a guess that sounds logical but I find that the category I thought of has never been created. For example, Libya is a member of the Arab League and the OPEC, the former is an established category so I guessed the later would be too but so far a category:OPEC does not exist. Why not?! I don't know.

This system requires spending a lot of time (I am pessimistic on this point) from those who understand it and believe in it if it is ever to succeed. And it should be protected from editing by others, otherwise it is like having many banks issuing all sorts of banknotes simultaneously and randomly. A list of related articles on the article's page would be more useful to read and easier to edit. If the list is too long, it can be divided up under several headings. I have seen so far four systems on different computerized encyclopedias and this list system was the most simple and effective in my opinion.

Please take all this as constructive criticism, I do share with you the view that there is a need for an effective system to help us make sense of the shear amount of information. Ahmed Elnagar 13:03, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Yeah Wikipedia's software is very unforgiving when you use the wrong name or forget the "the" before "Petroleum" (I did try "opec", "OPEC" and "Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries" all didn't work) but that's my mistake. It is surprising however, that while the category existed, those who created it didn't bother to link all member countries. This may give the visitor of Libya's page the wrong idea that the only international organizations in which it is member is the Arab League (or that the only members of OPEC are those which can be found on the category page). Check for example Category:OIC countries (Organization of the Islamic Conference), the organization includes 57 member countries and on the category page I can see only 6 + the organization itself (which doesn't appear on top of the category list as it should). If you link to articles by a simple list as I suggested, the chances are better that a non-exact link will be corrected (by redirect), once you link to the organization's page you are sure that the list of members is complete. Ahmed Elnagar 00:42, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Indeed, actually finding the little blighters can be a... challenge. Best plan is often to look at the "main article" if there is one (there is in this case), or a "sibling" article that should be in the same articles. If that doesn't help, try navigating the category hierarchy, and if the worst comes to the worst, do a WP search, restricted to the "category" namespace. Alai 16:57, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
I would suggest in a case like that of "OPEC" to change the name of either the article or the category so that they match each other (in addition to creating redirects for both). I was confused when I saw that the alternative names of the organization eventually will redirect to "OPEC", and thought that this would be the best recognized name and the one that should be used for searching on Wikipedia. The same applies to the OIC (category and article inconsistently named differently). Ahmed Elnagar 17:40, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree that there seems no good reason why the two shouldn't match. On the "common name" principle, I'd suggest a CFR nom with target Category:OPEC. OTOH, having found either one, the name of the other isn't hard to find, given the categorisation and "main article" link. Alai 18:06, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Pregnancy

I think there should possibly be a category for pregnant women. That is, women, with entries on wikipedia, who are currently pregnant. I don't know if there's one already, but I've never seen it. We have categories for loads of other things, so I think this one would be nice. I thought I'd suggest this first, before I actually went ahead and did it. Morhange 05:35, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Little or no encyclopaedic merit, and inherently temporal, and those lots of undue "labour" (sorry) to maintain. Please don't. Alai 16:53, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Request for input re. quackery

There has been a long, bitter war fought at homeopathy about whether category:quackery is appropriate for the article. The "for" side claims the cat reflects what the scientific and medical community believes, whereas the "against" side says that it doesn't meet the standard of the categorization guidelines (i.e. cats should only be applied when it is self-evident and non-controversial). The against side also points out that the opinion in the medical community (especially in Europe) is far from unanimous. I'm hoping that people watching this page, who are probably well-versed with cat issues, might offer an opinion on the talk:homeopathy page. The quackery category has actually been nominated for deletion again, but there doesn't seem to be a consensus forming[28]. --Lee Hunter 01:54, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

User:LeeHunter keeps using the following reasoning as an excuse for removing the category tag. Here is his edit summary:
It might be more appropriate to qualify the original statement, because lots of people who might normally be considered unreasonable, unschooled, anti-scientific, ignorant of the subject, "you name it", or even actual pushers of quackery (in this particular case Lee Hunter's wife is the owner of an alternative therapy business [30]), will always object and consider it controversial, if not for purely economic reasons, at least for ideological ones.
It is therefore quite unreasonable and illogical to expect anything at all (especially categorization) to be uncontroversial to all people under all circumstances ("i.e. to anyone"). That is asking an impossibility, so regardless of the current circumstances, the current wording needs changing:
There will always be people who will object, and I doubt that it is the intention of the current wording to give such persons who are the exception that proves the rule veto right, allowing them to push minority opinions as a means of suppressing majority opinions.
Just like everything else at Wikipedia, the NPOV rules apply to categories, IOW they must be allowed to represent all significant POV, and this category is a POV from the scientific viewpoint, so those who hold the opposing POV should not be allowed to suppress it. -- Fyslee 12:37, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
There is an argument that the name of something is a point of view. But the name of something is also important in that people will be looking for things under that name. Therefore POV redirects (to the accepted, most-widely used, hopefully NPOV name) are allowed. Similarly, there is an argument that POV category names are sometimes necessary. There are lots and lots of events called massacres for example, and the correct place for NPOV balancing of whether something should be called a massacre is the articles. However, that shouldn't mean that things like Category:Massacres should be deleted. It is a word that is widely used to describe things. Just because it can also be misused doesn't mean we should avoid it. Just like the language use manuals, we should document what things are called, not get involved with determining how words should be used and deciding what names are and aren't acceptable. Having said that, I agree that the quackery category is inappropriate. Carcharoth 14:51, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

The basic problem here is that people tend to argue that if one can advance an "objective definition" of a category "Xs" in such a way that it's clear that the subject of article "Y" meets it; whereas often the effectively equivalent statement in the article body "Y is an X" would never stand without qualification, response, or statement of a contrary position (or at least would get tagged with a "citation needed", also not really an option for categories). e.g. it would hard to imagine that "Mordechai Vanunu is an Israeli criminal" would pass muster as a appropriate assertion to make bald-facedly in that article -- to say nothing of BLP issues -- but it stands as a categorisation, and rather bizarrely so in my view. Obviously we shouldn't simply give tiny minority viewpoints a "veto" on categorisation, but we should aim for something a good deal better than "you weren't able to have the category deleted, and I've managed to edit-war it in there". Dare I say we should have, as a bare minimum, consensus to categorise, in any allegedly controversial case, not just absence of a consensus not to. Alai 18:17, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

This is currently a big problem for many categories. There is a grey area of categories that are seen by some to be NPOV, yet POV by others. In my view, if a category repeated ends up at CFD for being POV there is probably something wrong with it, and we should try and rename it, delete it, turn it into a list, or post a clearer definition of what belongs in the category. There is a fundamental conflict in our policy that leads to this problem. We say that if an article discusses a topic it can be put in a category for that topic. On the other hand, many categories do not just label the topic, but also imply judgements about the article. Sometimes these judgements are blatant POV magnets and there is no controversy about deleting them. For this reason we have Category:Racism and do not have Category:Racists. The "racist" category makes a judgement about people in the article. It is hard to see someone in the category and think that it might be because they were falsely accused. When it comes to people, the best option is to delete any categories like this and make lists that annotate, cite and explain why people are on the list. So even though a topic exists, and an article discusses it, that is not reason enough to have a category. In the case of category:quackery, the category's name makes a strong judgement about the articles. Perhaps it could be named something that does not imply that the practices are a fraud, but that they are questioned by main-stream science. If not, the category should probably be turned into a list. The bigger problem for the community is to figure out where the line should be drawn between the POV and NPOV categories. I recently found myself arguing to keep Category:Political prisoners (it got deleted) while at the same time advocating the deletion of Category:Anti-Semitic people (it was kept). In my mind I drew the line between these categories. We can't seem to agree on where to draw the line in large part because we don't agree on where the categories fall on the continuum between POV and NPOV. I don't have an answer for this. -- Samuel Wantman 08:25, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Category versus list

(Copied from Talk:Panthera)
I've just created Category:Panthera species, which gathers all the articles on Panthera species. Does this duplicate what is done here at Panthera, or is the category useful as well? (I also created some missing redirects, and bypassed some double redirects, so the work wasn't entirely about creating the category). Carcharoth 14:36, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Also compare with this. Carcharoth 14:53, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
(end copied section)
Copying the above here for general comments. I think the new category I created is useful for navigating within the category structure (if you were a biologist looking for things by their genus and species name - a layperson would be looking for words like Leopard and Lion). The article Panthera acts like a list, and is more organised (the category is just an alphabetical listing). What do people think? Carcharoth 14:44, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

We have categories for navigation. In the case of biological classification, the ordering of entries is helpful if organized and annotated like a list, but it is also useful to see an alphabetical listing like a category. So why not have both ways of organizing this information together on the same category page? The individual articles do not need to duplicate this effort, as they can simply link to it. Quite some time ago, I made a mock up of what this might look like for Felidae. -- Samuel Wantman 08:41, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

List meet Article. Category meet List. Article meet Category. Wonderful. All three have married harmonoiusly to produce a viable offspring! :-) I've always been against transcluding articles onto the blurb at the top of category pages, but this is a case where it really might work. Transcluding would be best so that people can update the Felidae article as normal, but still allowing those browsing the category pages to 'see' the article. Now, how on earth do you get this sort of thing going? I'm sometimes just tempted to start obviously good ideas like this, and watch them snowball, rather than start another discussion. So I've changed Category:Panthera species accordingly. Carcharoth 02:27, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
To make this work, you should be able to navigate through the entire Linnaean taxonomy easily without ever leaving category space, and there should be a single category per classification. I would use the latin name and rank in the taxonomy and call it Category:Genus Panthera instead of Category:Panthera species. So these categories would only have other categories using this scheme. There would still be an article called Panthera which should just have a description and a prominent link to Category:Panthera species. So I think there should be a link to Panthera from Category:Panthera species, and only the introductory text put in category. I'm also thinking that the taxonomy boxes should also link to this sytem. The overall scheme I'm presenting is that you navigate in the categories and get more specific information in the articles. As for getting this going, try it out in a corner of the taxonomy and when your ready try and get more people involved. I've made most of these changes (except the category rename and changes to the taxobox). I don't think it is quite ready yet. -- Samuel Wantman 07:40, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. I like most of those changes you made. One problem I have with not transcluding is that the edit history of Categories is lost when they are renamed. So I wouldn't want too much "article-type" editing done on category pages. Another problem is the existence of Category:Panthera, which has more than just the species and has more general article related to the genus. How should these two problems be tackled? Carcharoth 11:16, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, most of the above discussion now makes no sense, as someone has removed the Panthera species redirects from that category that I created. See User_talk:Dddstone#Edits_to_Pathera_species_redirects. Would you be able to comment on this? Carcharoth 14:05, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I agree with what seems to be evolving here, I (a biologist) would prefer the genus and species names, but I don't think that it is appropriate to have a redirect page residing in a category. Why not have the information in an article (e.g.- Panthera species)? Dddstone 14:17, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

(the following was copied from User talk:Carcharoth)

I don't think that it is appropriate to have a redirect page residing in a category. Apparently, some time ago it was decided not to use genus/species name for article titles, so I thought that I was fixing old redirects. I didn't realize that you had just made all of those changes recently, but I think my changes were appropriate. Actually, I like the idea of the category that you created, but it does not seem to agree with the existing scheme used for other panthera species, so we would need to re-engineer the whole category and its subcategories, which I personally wouldn't do without group discussion first.

Also, the text on the category page has been moved to an article of the same name. Somewhere in the WP:MoS, it says that category pages should not have more than one window's worth of text in them, if necessary. Dddstone 14:08, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

OK, let's take the points one by one. (1) Where does it say that redirects can't be put in a category? If people are browsing the category pages looking for something but they don't know the common name, they should be able to get to it easily by browsing to the Latin name. Also, some existing redirects are currently categorised (or should be) using the templates you see at the bottom of some of them (for example, common typos or miscapitalisations). (2) Discussion about this, including both the appropriateness of the scheme and discussion of the idea of having the article text on the category page (for this sort of thing only), not category page on the article page, as you said above, is at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization#Category_versus_list. I see you've commented there, so I'll copy all this over there. Carcharoth 14:19, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

(end copied section - new comments below please)

"(1) Where does it say that redirects can't be put in a category?" Maybe it is not against WP policy, but in this case I think it will result in category clutter. Remember that the vast majority of Wikipedia users won't be biologists.
(2)" not category page on the article page, as you said above" I think you misunderstood my meaning. It is certainly appropriate to have some explanatory text on a category page, lots of them do.
Dddstone 14:35, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
(1) Maybe a list would be better. But the original motivation was looking at Panthera and realising that there was no simple index there. Categories are good at doing simple alphabetical indices. (2) I was referring (not clearly enough) to your comment that the text on the category page had been moved to the article page, when in fact it was the other way around: first the article was transcluded at the top of the category page, and then part of the article was copied to the category page, leaving a link behind. Whatever happens, the whole thing needs tidying up to make sure nothing was lost. Carcharoth 14:57, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
I have (temporarily?) blanked the text on the Category:Panthera species page. If a list is what we want, we can edit/rename Panthera species (Genus Panthera?) and go from there. Dddstone 16:07, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Category that does not exist but does exist?

This category is displayed the message that's it does not exist, when there are 2 entries in there.

And ideas?

I've read the help page on the subject and can't see whats wrong? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pjb007 (talk • contribs) 13:45, 13 December 2006 (UTC).

It's because categories are populated automatically, but they don't "exist" as a page until they have been created and saved, with information on that page; for instance, their own categories, and a description of what is and is not included within the category. (Check out the Wikipedia:Categorization FAQ for more info. I went looking for the right categories to add yours into, and found that a category already exists to do what you want, with the name Category:Universities and colleges in England; so you don't need to create a new (redundant) cat. --LQ 14:06, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Subcategorization question

So there's a small revert war going over whether Category:African American basketball players and Category:American basketball players fall under the duplication exception in Wikipedia:Categorization_and_subcategories. (Actually, it's not a rules discussion, but one user who insists that removing the players from the parent category somehow implies that they're not American.) I noticed that this exact parent-sub pairing is mentioned in the subcategorization guideline, but can't find any discussion of it whatsoever, so I'm not clear if this is a consensus guideline or simply one editor's opinion. I don't care which way we go, but in the absence of consensus, my instinct is to go against duplication. Thoughts? | Mr. Darcy talk 02:44, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, I wrote the first draft of Wikipedia:Categorization_and_subcategories, and the issue was and still is somewhat contentious. There was a huge amount of discussion about this which you will see if you look in the archives of this page starting about the beginning of 2005 and continuing to the beginning of 2006 when this page underwent an overhaul. As I see it we have been in transition from an old policy that did not allow any duplication due to the inability to navigate large categories to a future that will have huge categories and the possibility of having category intersections. I am an eventualist, so I'm trying to get us moving toward that future scenario. I wish we could all get over the instinct to go against duplication, and the basketball player example is a very good example of where duplication makes sense. There are many good reasons for having a duplication here, which are outlined at Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories and also in Wikipedia:Categorization/Gender, race and sexuality. In general, I think we need to think more about the utility of categories, and less about their size or specificity. If I were to look in a book that had a complete index or list of American basketball players, I would be shocked to find that all the African American ones were segregated in a separate list or index. I would expect them to be in both lists. There is nothing terribly difficult about browsing through huge categories, but there is something very jarring about having to look in several categories to find complete listings of articles when categories are used as indexes. -- Samuel Wantman 09:37, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
More than anything, I'm discovering how little I actually knew about the categorization guidelines. From that subpage on gender/race subcategories: Dedicated group-subject subcategories, such as Category:LGBT writers or Category:African American musicians, should only be created where that combination is itself recognized as a distinct and unique cultural topic in its own right. You must be able to write a substantial and encyclopedic head article (not just a list) for the category — if this cannot be done, then the category is not valid. According to that blurb, Category:African American basketball players should not exist. Is that really correct? I've seen that type of subcategorization all over Wikipedia and have almost certainly placed articles in such subcats myself. If it's wrong, we've got a lot of work to do to remove those subcats and reeducate editors. | Mr. Darcy talk 19:56, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure I agree with you that "according to that blurb, Category:African American basketball players should not exist". I think an article, or part of an article could be written about the topic. It could discuss the importance of basketball in inner-city black neighborhoods, the large percentages of players that are black, etc... Saying that we "must be able to write a substantial and encyclopedia head article" might be too strongly worded. Perhaps it should say that it "must be possible to write a valid cited article or substantial section of an article about this topic." There are also exceptions to this. A glaring one is many of the subcategories about nationality. I think it would be very difficult to write an article or section of an article about Canadian biologists yet we have a category of that name and thousands like it. As far as I know, there is nothing special worth mentioning about being a biologist from Canada as opposed to any other country. There is a strong community consensus to have these intersection categories and they do serve a purpose and should probably stick around until the software can create these intersections automatically. However, I strongly believe that the topic article level "Index categories" are more important than intersection categories, and should not be depopulated into non-topic-article level subcategories. Please see this discussion above. -- Samuel Wantman 21:23, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, I can't say I agree with that sentiment. The guideline says "must be able to write a substantial and encyclopedia head article." You are saying that it should say something different ... but it doesn't. Ergo, according to the guideline, the category should be deleted (and there's a CfD on it now, noted below). If you don't like the guideline, revise it according to the consensus, but until then, we need to abide by the text as it is written. | Mr. Darcy talk 04:43, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Guidelines are written to describe current practice and they evolve as current practice evolves. Once written, they are not meant to become hard and fast law. My comment was to point out that I don't think that sentence in the guideline exactly describes current practice, nor should it. -- Samuel Wantman 19:11, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
As the person who wrote most of the final guideline on that particular discussion, the intended reasoning was to apply specifically to controversial topics such as racial, gender or sexual orientation classifications. It wasn't meant for straightforward and uncontroversial groupings like "Canadian (occupation)". And perhaps the wording is unclear, but the intention is that it be possible to write a real head article about the particular grouping; nobody ever seriously suggested that the article has to already exist before a category can be created. And for what it's worth, I do have to agree with Samuel Wantman that an article about the role of basketball in African American culture is possible. Bearcat 00:36, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

space vs. *

From the article: "Many editors feel that the space character produces the best aesthetic appearance when the category is displayed. Using a space or asterisk after the pipe is the customary way to categorize an article in a category with the same name" I wish it was standardized to space. Maybe they could do a find for "[[Category:xxx|*" and replace it with "[[Category:xxx| " Zephyr103 08:52, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

I'd like it standardized that the space is used for eponymous articles and lists, and the asterisk is used for other entries that should be at the top of the list. I'll look around and find an example of a category done like this. -- Samuel Wantman 09:10, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I'd certainly like to see some sort of standarisation, one way or another. This sees a lot of use in stub categories, since one generally wants to have both the stub template and any sub-categories top-sorted, but which to use, and indeed even whether, is pretty ad hoc. (A special case, certainly, but inheriting much of the confusion of the general one, methinks.) Any sort of 'firming up' at all would be a good step. Alai 17:48, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
My 2¢ is to stick with the [space] as the only pre-alphabet index, as I imagine anything else (incl asterisk) might prompt puzzlement. I've also seen "µ" (micro) used to categorize templates and/or the like; although (or perhaps because) it appears after the alphabet, I'm not entirely sold... Regards, David Kernow (talk) 19:31, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Mu is the "standard" sort-key character for stub categories as they appear in permanent categories. As it's one thing that we have managed to be somewhat consistent about, I'd rather factor it out from the "misc. top-sorting discussion". (Well actually, I'd rather leave well enough alone entirely...) Alai 19:39, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

I think Samuel Wantman's notion about having two levels would be okay, if it were something that were set out in the guidelines so that it were more consistently followed.

It should also be made clear that this isn't any special trick that causes the sorting software to do something different, not for example something that the software interprets as a command instead of a regular sort key. All characters are sorted; it is just that these are two of them near the top of the sorting list, coming not only before the uppercase letters we normally sort by, but before the numerals 0-9 as well. That means, for example, that when there are multiple articles placed at the top in this way, they can be sorted amongst themselves by including the additional sorting information after them—most often best done by using the normal sort key with just a space or asterisk in front of it. I guess the most important point here is that Samuel would always be able to prescribe which one appears at the very top (of course, someone who disagreed might change that).

Note also that there are a few articles which use the exclamation mark (!) as the sork key for this purpose. That is, in fact, a more logical choice than the others such as the asterisk, because it is the very next character after the space in terms of Unicode number (space is 20hex or 32dec, and ! is 21hex or 33dec), the thing that it is sorted by. There are seven other intermediate characters after the ! before you get to * (42dec). Also, we have the existing use of the asterisk as our bullet-creating code that might cause confusion for some people. Gene Nygaard 05:19, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I think the [space] on its own (i.e. [[Category name| ]]) and [space] followed by something (e.g. [[Category name| *]]) could be used to create at least two sections before the alphabet but without displaying anything other than the [space]...?  Regards, David Kernow (talk) 05:30, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
It would only be one section, not two. No division between all of them starting with a space, all indexed under the space character. Gene Nygaard 03:28, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
The indexing for the members of this category (even though it's a red link) is what I had in mind. Yours, David (talk) 06:58, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
David Kernow's mock-up looks good, but I suspect that it will confuse the vast majority of people who won't understand how it got that way. I don't quite understand why it displays that way and wonder if it is a bug that will disappear in a future version. Perhaps this way will catch on, but I'm doubtful. Perhaps for now the quidelines should make it clear that the top position should be the eponymous or main article, you should use a space to put things on the top, and we can let the rest sort itself out over time. When it does, we can add more guidelines. --Samuel Wantman 23:27, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm with SW on the spaces vs. the other spaces: nifty trick, though. I suspect that * is sometimes used because of the association with "bullets", whereas for example "!" looks that little bit more mysterious when it appears in that context. I'd suggest we do one of two things: either we reserve " " for main-article top-sorting, and use "*" for all other top-sorting; or we use strings-starting with " " for all top-sorting, but using ensuring that main articles are sorted as the first such. (Using " " only, as against " " followed by an alphabetic key.) If the latter is thought to look better, due to the above-mentioned bug/feature, I suggest we ask the devs if it is indeed a "stable" behaviour. Alai 04:38, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

time-sensitive under-represented population cats

Hi -- currently the African-American basketball players category is being [considered for deletion]. I voted to delete, b/c the AABP category is largely redundant with its supercategory of American basketball players. Underrepresented populations are I think always useful axes to track (although I think we should do a better job of explaining why in our guidelines up front because some folks still don't get it) but representation within fields, activities, accomplishments, locations, etc., change over time. For instance, African-American basketball players in the 1940s and 1950s (maybe of the 60s, i'm a little hazy on the history) is of interest in all sorts of ways. Has the question of time-delimiting these categories come up anywhere? ... I'm also thinking, for instance, of fields like "female lawyers" -- a novelty in the 19th century and first part of 20th century, and a worthy category, but only if it were time-delimited. (IMO). similarly women biologists -- we're now almost at the point, I think, where modern female biologists are too many for it to be a useful or interesting category. thoughts? --LQ 23:51, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Proposed addition to general guideline #8

I'd like to make the following change to guideline #8. It currently reads, Categories appear without annotations, so be careful of NPOV when creating or filling categories. Unless it is self-evident and uncontroversial that something belongs in a category, it should not be put into a category. A list might be a better option. I'd like to add the following sentences, A simple test that might help determine whether a category is appropriate, would be to ask whether the categorization could stand alone as a simple statement within the body of the article. For example, "XTopic is a YCategory". If it would require some kind of qualification, as in "Some people think that XTopic is a YCategory", the category might not be sufficiently self-evident.. My reason for proposing this change is that this would reduce the ambiguity around the words "unless it is self-evident and uncontroversial". --Lee Hunter 19:10, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

I wish it were that simple, but I don't think it is. Categories are not always an "is a" relationship. They are often, an "X relates to Y" or "the X article discusses Y". I'll give you an example, Matthew Shephard is categorized under Category: Hate crimes against LGBT people. None of the articles in the category are hate crimes, they are biographies about victims of hate crimes. In addition, in Shepard's case, his murderers were never charged with a hate crime, but his murder touched off a nationwide debate about the topic. I believe his article should be in Category:Hate crime without the "s", because the article relates to and discusses the topic. Since "hate crimes" could be controversial and debatable, it should be defined as crimes where people were charged and convicted of hate crimes. I make a distinction between topic categories and index categories (see my proposal above about category tagging). If an article is put into an index category, it should fit the "X is a Y" distinction you propose. If it is placed in a topic category, the topic category should be defined so that it is clear that being in the category is not a positive or negative assesment on the subject of the article. What I'm trying to make clear is why we have categories like Category:Racism and not Category:Racists. The "racism" category is a topic category. Being in that category does not make the subject of a biography a racist. It might be because the person works against racism. "Racists" on the other hand, would be an index category that would fail your test. -- Samuel Wantman 20:23, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

"no subcategories" and [+] when it has no subcategories

Please get rid of "no subcategories", and [+] when it has no subcategories when you browse the categories. It might take a bit of coding and server usage, but it saves time and makes it easy to see which categories have subcategories. Zephyr103 02:00, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

You might want to search out the developer who added the [+] to the category listings. I agree with what you are asking for, and suspect that it would take quite a bit more processing to determine whether or not to display the [+]. Imagine a category with 200 subcategories. The code would have to look at all 200 subcategories. -- Samuel Wantman 02:10, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Discussion about diffusing categories

I have a recurring problem when editors on their own, after no discussion, take on the task of diffusing large categories into smaller subcategories. I am fully aware of how this used to be the norm, and necessary for technical reasons, especially with subcategories by nationality. However, that is no longer the case. Many perfectly fine categories are getting chopped into little pieces for no good reason. A pure wiki system of regulating this does not work. Unchecked, categories will be diffused into meaningless tiny overcategorizations. It has been my understanding that the diffusion of large categories should happen only after there has been discussion. Id like to formalize this as policy and propose that CFD be the forum for these discussions. The problem is that unless this is caught early, it is huge task to undo or redo. The policy should be "Depopulating of existing categories should not be undertaken without discussion at CFD". There could be an exception for quick depopulation shortly after the category was created, and if it was created by the same person. I'd go so far as to say I think that if depopulation continues after a warning, it should be a blockable offense. Any other opinions? Please respond on the CFD talk page. -- Samuel Wantman 01:49, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

House (TV series)

Not sure where to put this so if it should go somewhere else please let me know and I'll move it (or let me know where you moved it and I'll follow it). I've been wandering around wikipedia adding house to diseases and disorders that turn up in the series House M.D., and I had a thought. What about a category that can be applied to medical disorders, diagnoses/possible diagnoses/diseases mentioned on House? Can I get some input on whether this would be appropriate or not? Thanks. WLU 15:54, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

That sort of category is a Bad Idea, and it would likely be deleted in short order if you did create it. Ones key thing to keep in mind when creating categories is that they should be for defining characteristics of the articles. The fact that the disorders were included in a tv show is not significant enough to justify a category. - EurekaLott 22:48, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
Moreover, that a particular disease was used in the plot of a currently popular TV series is (IMO) not a significant enough fact to include in the article about the disease. I think such references could be construed as advertising for the TV series (violating WP:SOAP), and they are certainly in the realm of trivial facts. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:51, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
On the other hand, this could be view as improving the awareness of people about an obscure disease. That being said, simply dropping that fact into an article on the disease or into a trivia section would not seem to be proper. If the article had a section on efforts to make people more aware of the disease, then adding a TV show that highlighted the disease could be OK. Vegaswikian 19:55, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Category:Human power?

Not sure where to put this, so I'll put it here: Would it be a good idea to create Category:Human power, with subcat Category:Human powered vehicles, and articles such as Treadle pump and Malian peanut sheller? It could go in Category:Appropriate technology and Category:Sustainable technologies. The problem is that anything that which is operated by hand could be put in (such as an egg-beater). It would be more useful to have items which are human-powered alternatives to common motorized items. Any thoughts? --Chriswaterguy · talk 04:56, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Thinking about it some more, I've just added Category:Human powered vehicles to Category:Sustainable technologies. However, at some stage, it would be nice to have a category as described above. --Chriswaterguy · talk 05:16, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Adding categories to redirects

I don't see a clear statement about adding categories to redirect pages either here or in Wikipedia:Redirect. An example of where it would be advantageous is where a small topic is merged with a larger topic. However if the smaller topic would be in the same categories with the larger topic is there a point to including the small topic redirect in the category as well? So if "Smithco" is a company, and "SmithCo II" is a subisdiary that is covered in the "Smithco" article, should the "Smithco II" redirect be placed into the same categories as the parent? It'd help if there were a clear statement on this matter. -Will Beback · † · 02:14, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

I've categorised redirects several times, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Case 3 makes much more sense now that the "redirects to sections" capability has been implemented. So there are plenty of reasons for categorising redirects, but not much guidance. Carcharoth 03:36, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I too have added categories to redirects on several occasions. If I recall correctly, I've suggested adding categories to solve some problems that were presented on this talk page. Typically, I think they make sense when there is more than one distinct name for a single article and the different names are not close alphabetically. It is like looking up something in the index of a book and finding "see: xxxx". -- Samuel Wantman 03:52, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I've also sometimes applied categories to redirects instead of to the main article; my reasoning usually has to do with what title should actually be appearing in a particular category's list. To give an example, there was a Canadian comedy troupe called The Vestibules, who once had a radio show called Radio Free Vestibule. It would be difficult to justify having separate articles for those two things, so RFV is just a redirect to the troupe's main article — but Category:Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio programs needs to be placed on the redirect rather than the main article, because as a category of radio programs, that category needs to display the actual name of the radio program rather than the name of the comedy troupe who created it. So when it's necessary for a particular category to display a title other than the actual title of the article, but still get you to the correct article, I put the relevant category on the redirect page. Bearcat 00:28, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:CatDiffuse

Template:CatDiffuse has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. --Samuel Wantman 02:23, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

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