Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 17

How does it possibly improve Wikipedia to not let Template:History of Christianity be in Category:History of Christianity? tahc ^chat 03:58, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

That template is already well categorized (i.e. grouped with similar pages) by Category:Christian history navigational boxes etc (as well as wikiproject category on talk page).  Readers have no need to go to the template page (they just see the template contents on article pages) and editors can easily navigate to the template (e.g. by clicking on "V" link) - and thence to similar templates (and other pages intended only for editors to see) via categories etc.

See here for more reasons why putting wp infrastructure pages into article categories is bad. DexDor ^(talk) 07:34, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) it would go in Category:Christianity templates or one of its subcategories. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:38, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

But that only works if it is linked up to the pages it needs to be linked to. If someone starts removing a navbox from pages that need it, or just pages that I expect it, then editors cannot find the navbox to put these all back. Sometimes I hav started to create navbox only only to find someone already made a very similar navbox. There seems to be not need for this. tahc ^chat 04:26, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Just categorize the navboxes properly, as templates. If people are

competent at Wikipedia templating, they'll find them, where they belong. If they are not, then, yes, they will sometimes create redundant templates, and we'll merge them as always.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  14:08, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

I have set up Category:Category redirects with possibilities, for names that are currently redirected but where there is potential to helpfully populate a separate category.

{{R with possibilities}} can now be added to a category redirect page, and it will put the page into the above category. – Fayenatic London 09:37, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

Should Category:SpaceX commercial payloads be the subcategory of Category:Spacecraft launched by Falcon rockets? Maybe correct as of now, but incorrect when SpaceX will have more than one Falcon rocket family (BFR etc). Or it should be the subcategory of parent Category:SpaceX directly with addition of all "spacecraft/payload" articles to both categories. 91.124.117.29 (talk) 23:17, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Until it's wrong it's not wrong. (Cf.

WP:NODEADLINE).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  07:26, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

The current hierarchy looks good to me. We could create Category:SpaceX military payloads and Category:SpaceX scentific payloads in addition to Category:SpaceX commercial payloads. I will also place Category:SpaceX payloads contracted by NASA under Category:Spacecraft launched by Falcon rockets, to be consistent with the payload hierarchy. In response to IP91's concern, I have created a subcategory Category:Future SpaceX commercial payloads to accommodate missions on the manifest which have not yet been launched. We'll handle BFR the day it flies… — JFG ^talk 12:56, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

• A wrong logic. What do you say about the possible situation when "SpaceX payloads" will be launched by another rocket but not Falcon? Be sure, it will be done in the future. For example,
  Cygnus CRS OA-4 which was the "Orbital Science payloads" (possible subcategory) was not a Category:Spacecraft launched by Antares rockets because it was a Category:Spacecraft launched by Atlas rockets. So, I think, Category:SpaceX commercial payloads, Category:SpaceX military payloads should be the subcategory of Category:SpaceX and all spacecraft launched by Falcon should be listed in Category:Spacecraft launched by Falcon rockets without any subcategories. 91.124.117.29 (talk
  ) 08:04, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Again, any SpaceX payload, past or future as currently planned, gets launched by a Falcon rocket. We can revisit the issue when BFR starts flying, and even then it may still be called a Falcon rocket (you never know what may happen with Elon's naming schemes). The Cygnus/Antares/Atlas situation is different and has no bearing on the Falcon/SpaceX discussion. — JFG ^talk 09:42, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

I have made several edit requests to semi-protected

I would be curious to see any discussion in which an editor was advising you that an article could be placed in a category without there being supporting information for the category in the article itself, as, as you indicated, the very second sentence of CATV clearly indicates the information must be in the article being categorized. In short, unless I've somehow misinterpreted you, I entirely agree with your interpretation. DonIago (talk) 13:46, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

More, for the sort of category you discuss here (a religious one) we need both exactly the kind of source you describe (one that clearly states the subject's public self-identification with the religion) and a reason why the religious categorization is relevant to the subject's public life or notability; see

WP:BLPCAT. So even if a baptism (by which I assume you mean infant baptism) were documented by reliable sources, it would not be enough. —David Eppstein (talk

) 14:00, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

I can trawl through my edit history for all the examples, but the other most recent one is

WP:EGRS categories and the article never bothers to define her as a member. In fact there was previous discussion about that very issue: Talk:Andrea James/Archive 3#Mentioning "trans woman" in the lead in which it was explicitly decided as expeditious to delete all mention of her self-identification, but the commensurate categories were not removed. 2600:8800:1880:91E:5604:A6FF:FE38:4B26 (talk

) 19:02, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

For a slight contrast, I went through

WP:BOLD edits seemed to go through unchallenged, at pretty low-traffic obscure articles. 2600:8800:1880:91E:5604:A6FF:FE38:4B26 (talk

) 20:45, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

• I think for a large part this is a typical problem of Category:People by religion. Long time ago I have been trying to clean out Category:Romanian Calvinist and Reformed Christians and I think back then it contained some 20 or 30 entries, mostly politicians. All my edits were reverted. Meanwhile now in that particular category there are only 7 biographies left, but still only 2 articles really belong here. I would almost be inclined to propose that all people by religion categories to be deleted except for people by their religious occupation or their religious role, expecting that 99% of the content to be kept will consist of religious leaders (including clergy), monks & nuns, religious converts, saints, and religious writers (including theologians, religious scholars, religious poets). While the many people in these categories who are just baptized, do some voluntary work for their local church, or are buried from a church, will be purged. Marcocapelle (talk) 13:39, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

  Sounds great to me, Marco. The patent

  WP:BATTLEGROUNDing about the "Jewishness" of Bernie Sanders.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

   😼  15:14, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

If an article's content does not support membership in a category, then the category can and should be removed. If supporting content is there, but editors decide (whether for BLP or any other reason) to remove it because it is not sourced, then the article no longer supports membership in the category...and the category should then be removed. postdlf (talk) 15:40, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

I think that part of the problem here is that, once upon a time in many articles, there WAS supporting content for the category, but since the content and the categories are two different entities, they come out of sync. Someone comes along, and

WP:EGRS compliance. The creator was blocked last year for adding unsourced content to articles. 2600:8800:1880:91E:5604:A6FF:FE38:4B26 (talk

) 19:34, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

That's not so much a problem as it is just par for the course for Wikipedia. No one is compelled to finish any job, nor is it always easy to see what consequences one edit may have on other content. If you just edit one section of an article, for example, you can't even see what category tags may relate to what you just edited. Nor do all editors care about (or understand) categories. So after editor #1 removes the content relevant to the category from the article body, it often falls to editor #2 to realize there is now an unsupported category tag on the article and to remove it. Seeing an unsupported category may be reason to ask "can this be supported", but it's pretty uncontroversial that if the article doesn't even mention a category then it can just be removed. postdlf (talk) 21:02, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

I know, right? But if it were indeed "pretty uncontroversial", then I never would've needed to post here. 2600:8800:1880:91E:5604:A6FF:FE38:4B26 (talk) 21:41, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

@SlimVirgin: is having trouble coming to terms with this on Talk:Andrea James. 2600:8800:1880:91E:5604:A6FF:FE38:4B26 (talk) 21:58, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

From what I see there, there is disagreement regarding what categorization the content of the article supports, not regarding whether an unsupported category can be removed. postdlf (talk) 23:28, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

It is a very interesting case for me: the article previously supported the categories explicitly, but the editors chose, by consensus, to intentionally remove the person's self-identification entirely, and they didn't even consider that the categories would necessarily need to be removed. It seems that some are now of the opinion that hints and allusions in the article are enough to "clearly" support the categories per

WP:CATV. 2600:8800:1880:91E:5604:A6FF:FE38:4B26 (talk

) 23:33, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

If that's an accurate summary of the situation, then it's clearly not tenable.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:37, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Via edit request, I brought up a situation on Talk:Adolf Hitler and was told, quote: "Your explanations are not sufficient, and some are outright stupid. This appears to be a pro-Nazi request." by @Beyond My Ken:. 2600:8800:1880:91E:5604:A6FF:FE38:4B26 (talk) 23:48, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

That's too vague to even tell how it relates to anything.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:03, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

To take one specific example:

WP:IAR applies. Certes (talk

) 02:04, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

Why is it not a sensible option to (4) write a sentence that summarizes Hitler's anti-Catholic persecution and place it appropriately in the main article with an inline citation? Copy/paste would do the trick! The lede section is full of "gimmes". In fact, there is material in the article you mention - Religious views of Adolf Hitler - about his persecution of Freemasons too, which covers another category. Why not just adhere to CATV like normal articles do, by summarizing what the sources say? 2600:8800:1880:91E:5604:A6FF:FE38:4B26 (talk) 03:58, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes, that's also a sensible option, if you feel that anti-Catholicism is one of Hitler's defining characteristics per

WP:CATV. Certes (talk

) 10:55, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

No,

verifiable. The categories, on the other hand, do need to be defining, so the threshold for inclusion of cats is higher than that of article prose: a very unfortunate situation for Herr Hitler, whose supporters wish the opposite to be true. 2600:8800:1880:91E:5604:A6FF:FE38:4B26 (talk

) 02:23, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

The IPv6 anon appears to be entirely correct on this to me (aside from an error of omission). DEFINING has jack to do with permissible article content. The omission is that

WP:COATRACKing).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  05:49, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Does anyone else think Category:Racially motivated violence against European Americans may be a bad idea. It might be a better idea to set up a category with a clearer inclusions criteria like "Crimes committed by the Nation of Islam". For now, the category summary says This is a list of specific incidents, individual racists, or hate groups that have committed violent attacks against people because they were European American (or otherwise White people who reside in the United States of America). I find the use of the "European Americans" terminology in a racially-charged context particularly troubling. The terminology itself conflates race with nationality, and mixed race Europeans being considered "non-European" has a long and troubling history. [5] Seraphim System ^(talk) 00:35, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

[NB: I redacted my earlier comment here] Wellllll... I mean, I get pretty much what the category is trying to say... so if "European Americans" terminology in a racially-charged context particularly troubling", what would you prefer? White people? Caucasians? (Either is fine with me FWIW.)

The category is kind of over-populated tho... let's see, I went thru each article, I'll give a YES if it should be in this category, NO if not. From the top:

• Murder of Christian Prince -- NO. Robbery gone bad, basically.
• Art Agnos -- YES -- Zebra murders.
• Melissa King assault case -- NO. Middle school playground incident, "the incident arose from a vendetta between two girls"
• 2017 Chicago torture incident -- YES, at least partly.
• Anthony and Nathaniel Cook -- NO, nothing in the article or refs, except one unsupported sentence in lede.
• 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers -- YES, basically.
• Felipe Espinosa -- NO. He's a 19th century serial killer, the one ref (that I can access) has "according to legend" stuff... one racial claim, that he expressed his "intention to murder 600 'Gringos', including the governor himself, if he and the other members of his gang were not granted property" is unref'd and anyway the "gringo" is mere vulgar abuse not a primary motive IMO.
• Mark Essex -- Hmnh. Arguable. He mainly was after police in general and did shoot a black policeman, but... I dunno. He was just a mean son of a bitch it looks like -- "character and behavior disorders". He did join the Black Panthers tho and was quoted (not very reliably IMO) as being "after honkies"... I'll say YES, I guess.
• Fountain Valley massacre -- NO. Weird case. The police tagged it as a robbery gone bad, but the defense (Bill Kunstler!) "argued in part that the accused were politically motivated victims of systematic race-based civil rights deprivation". I dunno if I buy that; one of the victims was black, and one of the defendants later hijacked a plane. These people were criminals first, sounds like. Anyway the jury didn't buy it either I guess.
• 2017 Fresno shootings -- NO, I think. There's a lot of refs and I didn't read them, but this guy was a career criminal, shot a guy in an argument, and then went nuts and started shooting people generally... "Chief Dyer said that the incident was 'a random act of violence'...A federal law enforcement official said the shootings did not bear the hallmarks of a terrorist attack and appeared to be more of a 'local, criminal matter'", but OTOH there was an investigation into whether it was a hate crime, but doesn't say how that came out. A lot of the article assumes quite a bit of knowledge about the guy's internal mental state -- "The driver of that truck was spared from injury, since he was Hispanic"... have to vet all the refs to be sure. Too much work for now.
• Malaika Griffin -- YES, I suppose... "Griffin became angry when [her neighbor] laid his tools on the sidewalk in front of her house after work" and then shot him... so it was really just an argument... OTOH her dairy was full of stuff like "I am so sick of looking at white people!! I am so goddamn tired of them!! I wish I could kill those no good faggot, pedophilic, rapists, thieves & make it painful, (very)". So I dunno -- racist or just crazy? Kind of odd that this is even an article, but whatever.
• Kill Haole Day -- Uhhhh, I guess NO. The article really only talks about name-calling which isn't really violence, and it's more of a schoolkid meme thing than a real thing, and it's not clear if it's a two-way street or just against whites.
• Knockout game -- NO, there's no examples of this being anti-white racial and plenty of examples of it not, if it's even a real thing rather than a meme.
• 1993 Long Island Rail Road shooting -- YES, I suppose so. I mean really this guy was just seriously batshit insane, but he did talk a lot about hating white people. "During one occasion, Ferguson complained that a white woman in the library shouted racial epithets at him after he asked her about a class assignment. An investigation concluded the incident never occurred" kind of gives you a feel for this guy I guess.
• March 14, 1891 New Orleans lynchings
  -- NO... Uh well its kind of an odd case... the perpetrators were all white, and so were the victims. What happened here is that a bunch of white people lynched some Italian-Americans largely (or anyway partly) because they were Italian-American, so if you consider "Italian" to be a "race", then on one level it would indeed be "Racially motivated violence against European Americans"... "Italian" is not a race tho, in my book, and this article is a pretty different situation from the other articles in this category.
• Marine Park, Brooklyn racial attack -- NO, and it kind of trivializes what we're trying to do here, which is to document an actual issue... Uh why is this even an article??? It was mainly some name-calling between two groups of middle school girls, altho there was some "reciprocal face smacking"... I mean I'd have to say NO based on it being a fight between some whites and some blacks, rather than a racially motivated attack by blacks on whites... "A crowd circles before calls to police and parents put an end to the 20-minute spectacle. Moments later, the white girls finger the victors to the cops and five black girls are booked for misdemeanor assault"... well yeah, that figures, but "The question of who threw the first punch, and why, is [undetermined]". Sounds like the black public school girls and the white private school girls went at each other and the private school girls' parents then got revenge by pulling strings to get it investigated as a hate crime... nothing to see here. If the article is to be kept I'd suggest moving it to The time some butt-hurt white private school moms turned a playground fight into a Federal case or something...
• Murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward -- NO, I'd say. First of all, the guy was just stone crazy ("He said Jehovah had told him to act and expressed an admiration for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who together perpetrated the Columbine High School massacre; and Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shooting" etc.), which doesn't mean it's not also racially motivated, but then "In the fax, titled 'Suicide Note for Friend & Family', he described his grievances over what he alleged to be racial discrimination and sexual harassment committed by black men and white women in his workplace, believing he was targeted because he was a homosexual black man"... so... his (imaginary I guess) grievances also including gay harassment, so... I guess not. It's a long article and maybe I'm missing something.
• Yahweh ben Yahweh -- YES, I mean "[His followers] murdered white people as an initiation rite to his cult" is kind of a giveaway, if it is true... is it? All the refs say he was "accused" of this, but I guess it's credible given that his cult was black supremacist and he was... he was... let's just say I wouldn't call this guy Mr Happy exactly...
• Zebra murders -- YES. Actually there's no discussion or indication of racial motivation in the article, beyond "a string of racially motivated murders" in the lede... Huh. But all four of the perps were black, and were Black Muslims, and all known 23 or attempted victims were white, so that can't be coincidence.

So let's see, that is 8 kept in, 11 to removed (pending a wait for objections/discussion, if any). Eight is enough for a valid category. But it these eight, rather than the full 19, that should be the focus of whether this category makes sense, I guess. My two cents is that the category makes sense. Herostratus (talk) 03:26, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

There are a lot of people of mixed descent would would not be considered "white" who have European ancestry. I agree that some of these appear to be racially motivated, though some obviously need to be removed from the cat like Felipe Espinosa — but none of the articles discuss European Americans - even the quotes you pulled out like ""[His followers] murdered white people as an initiation rite to his cult" confirm this.Seraphim System ^(talk) 03:38, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

"White people? Caucasians?"

They are not interchangeable definitions for groups:

• European Americans. People of known (or self-reported) European ancestry. In the 2010 census, 223,553,265 people claimed European ancestry, 72.4% of the American population.
• White Americans. People of known (or self-reported) ancestry from "any of the white racial groups of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Most of the Middle Eastern Americans are considered part of this group.
• "Caucasian" may refer to either the
  Western Asia, Central Asia and South Asia. By the definition of physical anthropologist Carleton S. Coon (1904-1981): "This third racial zone stretches from Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and thence along the southern Mediterranean shores into Arabia, East Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Persian highlands; and across Afghanistan into India [...] The Mediterranean racial zone stretches unbroken from Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and thence eastward to India[...] A branch of it extends far southward on both sides of the Red Sea into southern Arabia, the Ethiopian highlands, and the Horn of Africa." Dimadick (talk
  ) 12:12, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

'I agree, I think if we rename it "Racially motivated violence against white Americans" and remove the articles Herostratus listed above the remaining eight should be enough for the category - there has been some racially motivated violence against white Americans "stated he wanted to kill white people" etc. Seraphim System ^(talk) 14:51, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Tend to agree that a move to "Racially motivated violence against white Americans" is an improvement. I agree that it's a real thing that people would want to be able to read up about, so the category is helpful. Altho I think that in either case most readers will understand what we're getting at here, I guess "white Americans" is better than "European Americans" for various reasons. "Caucasians" is becoming a kind of outmoded word so that's out I'd say. However, I think that maybe "white people" would be best, as there are surely many incidents in colonial countries etc. and I can't think of a good reason why these shouldn't be eligible also. Herostratus (talk) 15:07, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

We have an article on White people, but no relevant category. Dimadick (talk) 18:13, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

We have Category:Racially motivated violence against white people - "Racially motivated violence against white people in the United States" is another option for subcategorization Seraphim System ^(talk) 14:29, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Oh, did not know that! Yes let's do this. Herostratus (talk) 19:30, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, that would be the most consistent approach.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:36, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

I'm thinking about creating a new Category:People with disputed ancestry claims to include people like these:

• Rachel Dolezal#Racial identity controversy
• Jimmie Durham
• Jamake Highwater#False ancestry claims
• Andrea Smith (academic)#Cherokee ancestry claim

I would add a note to the category page like this:

 Note:This category is for people who made claims about their own ancestry which have been the topic of substantial disputes, regardless of whether these debates have been settled.

I reckon this may be a controversial category, so I wanted to check here if anyone had input on inclusion criteria or had an idea for a better category name. Daask (talk) 20:16, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

What's the encyclopedic purpose of this? I just wrote

racialist thinking, which a category like this is apt to encourage.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  01:36, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

There's a lot of instruction about where Paris belongs, but nothing really about where Category:Paris belongs. Because that category contains people, sport, crime, buildings, history, and a slew of stuff that are clearly not Category:Cities in France, ought Category:Paris not be included in Category:Cities in France, or frankly any of its current parent categories? Obviously, that's not what's intended (or is it?) but having categories having both articles and identically-titled categories included isn't ideal, especially when the categories are supposedly diffusing: contrast Category:States of the United States with Category:Ceremonial counties (of England). Which of these approaches is correct per WP? Or are we to assume that those looking for subdivisions of one country want one thing and those looking for subdivisions of another aren't? Harmony may never be achievable, but I would hope that we could come to consensus and, if necessary, amend the page to reflect the consensus. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 21:03, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

There needs to be structure in the categories. "people, sport, crime, buildings, history, and a slew of stuff" relate to Paris in specific ways that need to be captured, e.g., "people :verb Paris", "sport :verb Paris", "crime :verb Paris", "buildings :verb Paris", " history :verb Paris", "slew of stuff :verb Paris" etc. where :verb is some kind of relation between :topic_noun and Paris. I propose that the structure be of the form S v O, an English sentence with subject S, some kind of relation v, and object O. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 21:44, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

Sometimes, putting a child category C into a parent category P implies the very useful information that all Cs are Ps. (All Scottish musicians are British musicians.) Sometimes it doesn't. We desperately need the missing piece of metadata as to whether the implication is true (or at least intended) in each case. I don't think there's currently a syntax for doing that, though we can do some heuristics (e.g. it's likely to be true if P is diffusing). There are several similar discussions in this talk page's archives. Certes (talk) 22:10, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

• Ought we venture to craft some language to include on the page to capture this. I participate at
  WP:BLPs where such implications may be contentious and unsupported by reliable sources. Should the page say that "all Cs are Ps" is the norm at WP, unless the category page advises otherwise, or some language to not parent categories in such a way that implies the contrary. That way could make use of a Category:Categories named after cities in France (P) and advise that Category:Paris (C) belongs there and on P's page state "that not all C's daughters (and sub-, etc.) are P's"? Carlossuarez46 (talk
  ) 19:45, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Category:Set categories is one attempt to do the job. If it were used universally, editors and tools such as PetScan could limit their search to set categories. For example, we could safely conclude that Nancy, France is a French city via set Category:Prefectures in France without also concluding that Nancy Mitford is a French city via non-set Category:Paris (and set Category:People from Paris: any non-set link breaks the chain). But there may be a million set categories to label. Certes (talk) 20:39, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

That would only work if articles are non-diffusing from set categories to child non-set categories. E.g. if our article for Paris is not listed in the set category for cities in France (because it is in non-set subcategory Category:Paris instead) we would not be able to conclude that Paris is a city in France. I think the real problem is not distinguishing between two types of categories, but between two types of category membership: some subcategories indicate that the articles in the child category are a subset of the articles of the parent category, while others indicate only that the main topic of the subcategory belongs to the parent category. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:51, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Is it valid to diffuse to a non-set, or does diffusing a set mean moving articles into subsets? The general solution is certainly to mark the membership rather than the category but, as we have many more memberships than categories, marking categories would be easier if it works. Certes (talk) 21:20, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

What about using the quantifier (logic) annotation — ∀ meaning "For all", ∃ meaning "For some" and "There is a". A default categorization might have to state ∃P "There is a Paris", meaning the eponymous category based on the main article about Paris (a non-set category). Later, as more articles about P arise, and more experience is gained, it might be valid to assert ∀P (a set category).

In other words, we could distinguish

relates-to "∃P" categories, using the quantifiers. There could many more kinds of "relates-to" categories than "set membership" categories, because the "relates-to" categories would be more general sentences than "is-a" sentences. The relation could be stated in words on the sub-category page. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs)

11:02, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Yes, set categories do correspond to is-a. I've not looked into the nuances of other types of category but the important thing is that they're not "is‑a". Only with is-a categories can we validly use set logic such as ${\displaystyle \forall C\subset P:a\in C\implies a\in P}$ to conclude that article ${\displaystyle a}$ qualifies for parent category ${\displaystyle P}$. It's not yet quite clear whether is‑a‑ness is a property of C, P or category membership (${\displaystyle \subset }$). But I was trying to stick to English! Certes (talk) 16:51, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

There is a discussion ongoing at Template talk:Main#Category namespace that may have relevance to certain sections of this guideline. Any constructive input would be appreciated. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 04:13, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

I've had a disagreement with one editor who is very keen on project tagging large numbers of category pages, so I'm coming here for wider input. Should the mass creation of talk pages of categories (containing only wikiproject tags) be encouraged or discouraged?

The only advantage of tagging I could think is that the category will show up in the project's article alerts systems if the category is nominated at CfD, but I believe it's much more efficient to tag categories only if (and when) they do come up at CfD. Other than that, are there any reasons a project might want to track its categories? Given the large number of categories out there, and the lack of distinctions in quality or importance ratings, I'm not sure I see any point.

On the other hand, the existence of a category talk page can be a minor maintenance nuisance. First off, it adds an extra step in the process every time a category is renamed or deleted, though that's not really significant. A more important consideration is in the same direction as the reason why the {{WikiProject Disambiguation}} banner should not be placed on dab pages: when making major changes to a category, it's helpful to see if there have been previous discussions on the talk page, and if talk pages aren't generally project tagged, then this involves simply glancing at the talk page link: if it's blue, then there might have been a discussion, if it's red, then there isn't. This wouldn't work if all these links are blue.

What should be the relative weight of the disadvantages and the benefits? Are there any considerations I'm not aware of? – Uanfala (talk) 09:41, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

I would recommend that users take a look at Category:Category-Class articles and its subcategories (e.g. Category:Category-Class Architecture articles). Category tagging has happened on over 100,000 talk pages and has been happening for at least 12 years. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:47, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

A difference that I can see in the case of disambiguation pages is that there's already a template to mark them, making WikiProject Disambiguation tagging redundant. I've tagged categories for

WP:SKEPTIC at times myself, although not massively. Some categories are obviously of interest to some projects and I don't see a problem with marking them if done correctly. —PaleoNeonate

– 16:04, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

{{WikiProject Disambiguation}} is often used to mean "this page intentionally left blank", especially when the corresponding mainspace page has changed from a redirect into a dab. We rarely create talk pages just to hold that banner. Of course, category pages can't get repurposed in that way. Certes (talk) 16:28, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

I've generally added wikiproject tags where I've come across a category page with a redlink talk page (including category pages I've created) - partly to "fix" the redlink (category pages, unlike articles, don't normally have redlinks). Of course, if consensus is that it's better to leave it as a redlink then I'd stop. DexDor ^(talk) 19:44, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Whether to add a WikiProject banner template to a category talk page (or any other kind of talk page, for that matter) is a decision that each WikiProject reserves for itself. If a WikiProject tells you (either directly, on your user talk page or through the edit summary of a revert; or indirectly, by having a "Project scope" section (or similar) on their main WikiProject page) that they don't want cat talk pages to be tagged, it's best to honour their wish. This is one of the few areas where

WP:OWN does not apply. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk

) 20:29, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable. But what should be the default choice if a wikiproject hasn't stated a preference? – Uanfala (talk) 20:43, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

One thing I would try is to add the WikiProject template and preview without saving. If one of the rows in the banner begins with a yellow rectangle containing the word "Category" in blue, followed by the text "This category does not require a rating on the project's quality scale", you're probably safe. But if it shows a white rectangle, with "NA" in blue followed by "This category does not require a rating on the quality scale.", I would omit the banner template. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:55, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! I've just had a look at {{WikiProject Languages}}, and the behaviour on previews seems to suggest tagging the category is fine. But then I wasn't able to find anything in the template's code that explicitly does anything for categories, so does that mean that this behaviour is the default of the metatemplate? That is, a white rectangle with "NA" will only show if the specific banner template has been specifically tweaked in a way that discourages categories? – Uanfala (talk) 21:34, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

The code for Template:WikiProject Languages includes |QUALITY_SCALE=subpage, which means that the various page types are defined in the custom class mask. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:47, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Uanfala wrote "I believe it's much more efficient to tag categories only if (and when) they do come up at CfD" – but who would tag the categories? IMHO it's unrealistic to impose this as a duty on nominators. Like DexDor, I make it a habit to add project tags on redlinked category talk pages, mainly in order to generate future alerts, and regardless of whether projects currently make other use of the info. I believe that assessment as "class=Category, importance=NA" is automated in most cases. – Fayenatic London 23:17, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Yes, class and importance are autodetected for all namespaces except Talk: (the talkspace of article space). Class and importance are also autodetected for the talk pages of redirects in all namespaces. The preceding two sentences apply for all WikiProject banners that are built around {{WPBannerMeta}}, which in practice means all except about six of them. In short: you only need to worry about these two parameters for the talk pages of articles and the talk pages of disambiguation pages. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:58, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Just to note that one of the examples in the Non-diffusing subcategories section appears to have been changed since the documentation was written. Category:Western Europe does not include the countries - they are within the Category:Western European countries subcat (although the {{All included}} template is still present). Nzd (talk) 04:45, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

I have changed the example to Category:Mountains of Switzerland (more or less randomly). Happy for anyone else to change this if there is a more appropriate example. I've also removed the {{All included}} template from Category:Western Europe. Nzd (talk) 09:42, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

I've also just noticed that this is used as part of the main example in the

Guidelines for articles with eponymous categories section, which is obviously now incorrect. Nzd (talk)

21:40, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

We have standard templates to display links to decade and year categories for (dis)establishments, e.g. see Category:20th-century disestablishments in Germany.

Hike395 (talk · contribs) recently deleted some of these tailored part-century tables with the edit comment "rm odd formatting in category space using AWB". I reinstated some of these, but then experimented with combining the years for different country names into one template to be used on the century category for both names.

Do editors find the partial-century table [6] or the multi-name table [7] more useful, or have any other suggestions for improvement? – Fayenatic London 20:37, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

The multi-name table is more informative, and it keeps navigation more consistent than the partial-century table. Thanks for your efforts! — JFG ^talk 20:45, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Your feedback is requested regarding a possible issue of over-categorization. Please discuss at Talk:The Aversion Project#Over-categorization. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:30, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Hello.

As an example, say a rapper Soulja Boy. Should he be included in all three of:

• Category:American rappers
• Category:African-American rappers
• Category:African-American male rappers

Or just the last one? The project page is a little vague in it's wording about this topic of diffusion, I wish it were more straightforward.

Then there's also Category:American male rappers as well. There's just way too much redundant categorization for a lot of subjects. Is this encouraged or discouraged? DA1 (talk) 14:02, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

WP:DUPCAT. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk

) 20:45, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

In general ethnic or gender-based subcategories should be marked as non-diffusing, to avoid ghettoizing members of those categories and keeping them from being visible in the main categories. I don't understand why Category:African-American rappers etc haven't been marked in that way. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:14, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Thanks for the response. I also agree that "African American male rappers" should be a diffused subcategory of "African-American rappers". There just seems to be an excess of redundant categorization among articles of hip hop artists. Since the "American rappers" article is already marked with diffused, that means that most rappers should only be included at Category:American male rappers or Category:American female rappers. So let me ask you, should [Soulja Boy] be included in both "American male" and "African-American male" or just the latter?

@David Eppstein: In the case of rappers, the overwhelming majority of rappers are actually African-American, so the risk of "ghettoizing", I assume that means marginalizing, isn't a risk on this particular topic as it is in others. DA1 (talk) 11:26, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

I think that Soulja Boy should be in the most specific category, no need to put them in parent categories too. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:05, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I only used his name as an example BTW. He's not even the one effected but there's hundreds of rappers articles that seems to be redundantly categorized. DA1 (talk) 22:33, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

I realize that this has been brought up previously but I thought that I would bring it up again because I want to see some consistency on this project. There are a select few subcategories within Category:Unincorporated communities in the United States by state that only contain subcategories (NJ, RI, NY, MA) For Category:Unincorporated communities in New Jersey, is it wrong to place all entries within this category, like all of the other 46 states have included (2 redirects are currently within this category). My reasoning is that these unincorporated communities can be categorized both by county and state. So the reader has a choice of searching through either by the communities specifically sorted just in that county, or have a whole list within the entire state. See Category:Unincorporated communities in Pennsylvania that contains over 1400 entries. Each of these entries contain both the county category and state category. How come NJ and others should be treated differently? Tinton5 (talk) 21:28, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

@

WP:MULTI. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk

) 22:25, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

Well because nobody answered there. I moved it to one place, here. It’d be nice instead of pointing out I posted something twice, that we can hear your feedback on the topic of categorization. Tinton5 (talk) 07:53, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

So nobody answered after nineteen hours. Boo-hoo. Remember that 02:30 (UTC) is the middle of the night in Europe and late evening in the eastern United States; some people only edit in the early evening, between evening meal and bedtime. We have discussion forums where it is considered good practice to wait a whole week before assuming that nobody will be answering. I am not obliged to give feedback on the topic of categorization; and nor is anybody else: we are all volunteers here. Maybe other people saw your original post, and are even now considering the best reply before posting it. Maybe they saw it but don't know the answer. Maybe the people who actually care about this haven't seen the post yet - perhaps they only check their watchlists once every 24 hours (or longer); maybe they only log in once a day. Maybe they're Jewish and refuse to use a computer on Shabbat. Maybe they participated in those previous discussions and are sick to the teeth with the whole thing and the thought of hacking it out all over again has made them turn away to something more rewarding. Maybe people simply don't care. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:23, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

This giant paragraph to say what? Would save everyone's time to just have said "Wait a few more days for a possible response". DA1 (talk) 13:47, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Agreed, Red Rose is just plain sarcastic and unhelpful. I will just sit patient until others are willing to chime in. Tinton5 (talk) 12:41, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

@Tinton5: See if you want to post a redirect message at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject New Jersey. DA1 (talk) 22:37, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Opinions are needed with regard to the disability categories that were recently added to the Health and appearance of Michael Jackson article, as seen here, here and here. Discussion is at

Category:Non-empty disambiguation categories is a theoretically useful maintenance tool. It groups together all the disambiguation categories which are not currently empty (they should be empty).

However, there is a technical hitch. Non-empty dab categories are added to Category:Non-empty disambiguation categories only when the category page is purged. That doesn't happen unless the page is edited, which is rare.

So yesterday morning,

I have been busy fixing the pages in ambiguous categories, so over 60 of them are now empty ... but they are still listed in Category:Non-empty disambiguation categories.

The only way I can see to make Category:Non-empty disambiguation categories a usable maintenance tool is to have a bot regularly purge all 1660 category pages which transclude Template:Category disambiguation. I suggest that a weekly purge would be good.

I am sure that if I put in a request at

So what do others think? Would you support such a bot? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:43, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

This is a problem that also affects the redirect categories. Timrollpickering 16:47, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

@Timrollpickering: yes, Category:Wikipedia non-empty soft redirected categories also relies on purging. However, the problem there is much less severe, because @R'n'B runs his Russbot at least once a day bypassing the redirects. The only pages which remain in soft-redirected cats are those where the categories are generated by some template which is generating the wrong category name.

There is no bot emptying the ambiguous categories; the nature of the cats is that they need to be diffused manually. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:57, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

This sounds like a task for

talk · contribs) - Joe Decker (talk · contribs), please confirm. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk

) 20:39, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, @Redrose64. I have posted at User talk:Joe Decker#Purging_Category:Non-empty_disambiguation_categories to ask Joe to pop in here. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:24, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

I've only taken a very quick look at this, but in general problems like this should be extremely easy ... I would imagine that Category:Disambiguation Categories would provide me the set of categories to traverse. Does that sound right to y'all? --joe decker^talk 05:47, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

@Joe Decker: Thanks. Category:Disambiguation categories should define the set, or alternatively it could be defined by category pages which transclude Template:Category disambiguation. Those should be the same, but there might be glitches. Would it be possible to build your set as the union of those two sets?

Do you need to make a BRFA request to add this to your bot's task list? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:56, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

I do need to BRFA and I will today. If I can just work from an existing category it's likely the request will be quick accepted, because it'll just be literally changing parameters to an existing script. --joe decker^talk 19:41, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

Filed, see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Joe's Null Bot 14 --joe decker^talk 20:37, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Stand-alone lists#RfC about redirects to categories. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 13:21, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Looking for some feedback on when the proposed ω sort key would be applied. E.g. does this mean that categories like Category:WikiProject Volleyball would be under Category:Volleyball with this sortkey? If so, what does this mean for the division between administrative and content categories in the encyclopedia? Clarification would be handy here. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:17, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

• @BrownHairedGirl: as she was interested in the same discussion and can provide perspective. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:18, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

As discussed on Justin's talk page, there are some circumstances where a WkiProject is placed in a non-project administrative category, e.g. Category:Sports-related WikiProjects in Category:Sports and games Wikipedia administration. It may be aimed at that.

But whatever its purpose, administrative categories do not belong in content categories. This discussion arose out Justin's repeated attempts to add Category:WikiProject Volleyball to Category:Volleyball :( --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:33, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

I strongly support BHG's view here. My essay at User:DexDor/Administration pages are not articles discusses this further (including sortkeys). Perhaps a note should be added at SORTKEY clarifying that the existence of a special character (e.g. Greek) sortkey doesn't override normal categorization rules. DexDor ^(talk) 07:33, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Wikipedia talk:Stand-alone lists#RfC about redirects to categories
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:43, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

At Wikipedia:Categorization#Sort keys it says in point #5 that hyphens should be kept in sort values, so for -30- (The Wire), would the current {{DEFAULTSORT:30}} be incorrect? --Gonnym (talk) 22:55, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

I don't think that's what they had in mind when they wrote that hyphens should be kept. I would sort that article without the hyphens.--Srleffler (talk) 17:54, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

Editors interested in categorization are invited to comment at Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board § Categorisation of Heritage listed buildings in Melbourne and SUBCAT. Mitch Ames (talk) 08:48, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Can someone just confirm that articles such as Boriša Đorđević should use {{DEFAULTSORT:Dordevic, Borisa}} rather than {{DEFAULTSORT:Djordjevic, Borisa}}? Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 07:18, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

@

WP:SORTKEY item 1, also Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 16#OK to switch English Wikipedia's category collation to uca-default? and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 149#Sorting in categories unreliable for a few days), you no longer need special provision for diacritics. Use {{DEFAULTSORT:Đorđević, Boriša}} and see the category page. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk

) 17:23, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Makes sense - happy days, my question was more Đ vs Dj rather than Đ vs D, but either way you've answered my question... GrahamHardy (talk) 17:30, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

I think at this point there's a real need to provide some guidance about how this guideline should be enforced, specifically with regard to this section:

Apart from certain exceptions (i.e. non-diffusing subcategories, see below), an article should be categorised as low down in the category hierarchy as possible, without duplication in parent categories above it. In other words, a page or category should rarely be placed in both a category and a subcategory or parent category (supercategory) of that category (unless the child category is non-diffusing – see below – or eponymous).

We have a recurring problem in my part of the world with one editor interpreting this to mean that he should, in each and every situation and without looking at the categories he's dealing with at all, remove every article this applies to from the parent category. This is frequently resulting in category changes that, if considered in context, objectively don't make sense, and for which literally the only possible justification that can be given is "but

This is frequently emerging in cases where an article is in both a parent and child category because there's some sort of issue with the category tree, probably requiring discussion as to what to do with it. These cases absolutely need sorting out - but they don't get sorted out without working out what the problem is and what the best way of dealing with it is, and probably a trip to

Are you able to link to any edits showing that editors disagree about how the guideline should be interpreted? We might then be able to decide which interpretation is correct and how the guideline can be clarified. DexDor ^(talk) 12:44, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Recent examples:

• [8][9] (Heritage listed buildings... is a diffusing subcat of Buildings and structures...) and related discussion
  WP:AWNB#Categorisation of Heritage listed buildings in Melbourne and SUBCAT
  .
• [10][11] (Journalists from Melbourne are Journalists from Victoria (Australia), Australian journalists by state or territory, Australian journalists, Australian non-fiction writers) and related discussion User talk:Mitch Ames#Subcategories.
• [12] (Australian columnists are journalists, are non-fiction writers. Australian sportswriters are sports journalists, are journalists, are non-fiction writers), related discussion: User talk:Michael Bednarek#Category reversions.
• [13] (Chiefs of Staff to the PM are public servants)
• [14][15] (21st-century New Zealand writers are New Zealand writers)
• [16][17] (Australian police officers are Australian public servants)

Mitch Ames (talk) 02:31, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Here's just a sample (though there have been many, many more - this is just the most recent):

• We've seen Mitch pull all historic buildings in Melbourne out of the "buildings by type" category tree because of a random outlier heritage-listed buildings article that was in there (no one agreed that was a sensible thing to do)
• We've seen him pull bestselling non-fiction authors out of the non-fiction writers category and solely categorise them as columnists because they had side gigs as columnists
• We've seen him pull the former head of the Australian Border Force (a bit like the Secretary of Homeland Security in the US) out of the "public servant" category because he had also been a police officer before he got the job
• We've seen him pull public servants who had held six different notable public service offices out of the "public servants" category because there was a subcategory for one of those offices.
• We've seen him remove people from "People from [State]" categories because they were in "Alumni of [University from that State]" categories, though people don't necessarily go to university in their home state

These edits don't make sense in context: the only reason for them, and the only reason Mitch has ever tried to advance, is "but

WP:SUBCAT

says I can do it]". This is not helpful. Every time the specific edits have actually been discussed so far, "always remove the parent without any consideration of what the articles are, what the categories are, or why they're there" inevitably gets zero support, and the discussion inevitably focuses on the more sensible possible outcomes in that particular context that Mitch chooses to ignore every single time.

This desperately needs to clarify that editors need to look at the categories, look at the articles, and why the articles are categorised how they are, and to start a discussion if there's any doubt about what to do. There are cases where "automatically remove the parent" is perfectly sensible - to use a minority example of Mitch's recent edits, removing "People from State" from people who were already categorised in "People from Town [in that state]" - but adopting that as a universal strategy seems to just make an absolute mess a significant proportion of the time when a discussion would resolve the actual cause of the issue rather than removing correct categories and leaving people nonsensically categorised because there was a problem with the category structure itself.

I've noticed Mitch has now stopped starting discussions about his edit sprees when reverted because those discussions have comprehensively gone against him every time it's happened. The miscategorisation of thousands of articles is effectively doing severe damage to the Australian category tree unless all his edits are checked and undone in the significant amount of occasions where they just don't make sense. The Drover's Wife (talk) 03:01, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Over-categorisation where parent and child categories cohabit survives around the whole of wikipedia despite whatever drovers or mitch might get caught up in. The problem is neither of the protagonists - but the whole category system and the guidelines given. Drover's interpretation and Mitch's interpretation are not adequately accommodated or explained in the current framework of what has been 'set' on fixed policy pages.

I had serious doubts about the edit history of category modifications by former now blocked editor User:Wwikix as I could not understand why some editors had not seen the labyrinthian parallel and intertwined categories he was creating (and in which in a lot of cases have never been corrected since the blocking). From the no-show of anyone to check the Wwikix alterations across a large range of edit, we have the more finer focused items by mitch and drover's. I do not think either help. Drover's notion of 'sense' is not a useful guideline, nor is Mitch's subcat rule editing. I do believe that the combination of parent and child categories needs to be re-examined and turned into more of a higher level review most peoples misunderstandings of what the parent/child category combination constitutes. Keeping it at this level of conversation between or about Mitch or Drovers is missing the point - the policy and explanation need review. JarrahTree 03:25, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

It's just a matter of encouraging discussion instead of formulaic mass edits where there are issues with the category tree. There are poorly-organised category trees all over the encyclopedia, many times due to examples like the person JarrahTree noted, where new editors have not known what they were doing and linked or created categories in a way that has made a mess. Randomly removing categories that make sense in context doesn't help these cases - it just adds to the mess. If we discuss it and proceed with consensus where the answer isn't clear and obvious, or encourage people to consider being

WP:BOLD in fixing actual category tree issues instead, we can organise the category tree in a way that makes sense and reduce unnecessary parent/child categorisation with a minimum of drama. The Drover's Wife (talk

) 03:41, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Agree with this—I have generally been pretty careful about overcategorisation, and keep

WP:SUBCAT in mind when applying categories. A recent mass AWB edit was removing the "Australian public servants" category where there was a lower level category such as "Australian diplomats" on the article. This was fine in many cases, but in some cases the subject of the article was a public servant in another area other than in the child category (e.g. worked at Department of Treasury, then transferred to Foreign Affairs and became a diplomat and ambassador), I don't think that this rule should apply when it was chronologically correct and not redundant at a stage of the subject's career. For example, I created most of the articles on the Directors General of Security (heads of ASIO)—if the subject worked in several departments in the APS, I included the "Australian public servants" category, otherwise the "Directors General of Security" categories sufficed (and public servants in External/Foreign Affairs were not always diplomats) and these were all removed. Same with Ainsley Gotto, who worked for several APS departments, but because she was in the PM's chief-of-staff category this was removed with the reasoning that the PM's CoS was a public servant—I agree with that, but not in the case where the subject was only in the parent category for some time. --Canley (talk

) 08:26, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Which is why I am in firm support of the exceptions to the rule rather than blanket rule as in [18] - there is a very strong argument for stating that where a person has been something as part of their career, that removing a category in application of the rule is where everything fails in the application of the rule. Understanding the context of an article or its contents is far more important than application of a rule - and this needs to be incorporated into the categorisation process - I do not agree with the amount of categories at Jimi Hendrix - I believe there is something seriously wrong there, regardless of exceptions to the rule - as a counter argument - but Ainsley Gotto does deserve the complexity. Just my 1 dollars worth, there could be more compelling arguments from others, in relation to the difference between Hendrix and Gotto. JarrahTree 08:48, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

The theme I see above is that we should only diffuse if the subcat adequately describes the subject's whole relationship to the parent cat. If a public servant is a diplomat and serves publicly in no other way, diffuse to diplomat. If they also serve as a treasury official (and there's no subcat for that) then keep the public servant category. Do others agree with this guideline and, if so, is it written down anywhere? How would if vary there were a subcat for treasury officials: diffuse to both and remove from main category? Certes (talk) 12:34, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I think you've articulated that point better than I did. I'm not sure that it's written down, but if it isn't, it should be. And in your treasury example - yes, in that case, diffusing to the hypothetical treasury officials category and removing from the main category would be the way to go in my book. IMHO, creating missing categories is often a great way of solving these problems - allowing for higher-level categories to be fully diffused while resulting in more helpful categories on individual articles. The Drover's Wife (talk) 20:36, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

I cant see how these issues can be resolved other than by asking people to exercise their judgement. Rathfelder (talk) 22:19, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

I mean, even stating that editors should do that (in those words) would help stop the blanket-not-exercising-judgment approach. The Drover's Wife (talk) 09:28, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Certes proposes that "we should only diffuse if the subcat adequately describes the subject's whole relationship to the parent cat", e.g. that if an article belongs in "cat:diplomat" (a sub-cat of "cat:public servant") but also nominally in the parent "cat:public servant" for reasons other than being a diplomat (and there is no other appropriate sub-cat) the article should be (directly) in both the parent "cat:public servant" and the sub "cat:diplomat", and asks whether this is written down anywhere. The Drover's Wife agrees, and says that it should be written down.

In fact the current guidelines explicitly and unambiguously say that is not the case, multiple times:

WP:Categorization § Categorizing pages: "if a page belongs to a subcategory of C (or a subcategory of a subcategory of C, and so on) then it is not normally placed directly into C."

WP:Categorization § Subcategorization: "an article should be categorised as low down in the category hierarchy as possible, without duplication in parent categories above it. In other words, a page or category should rarely be placed in both a category and a subcategory or parent category (supercategory)", and – paraphrasing to match Certes' example – the article "Foo" need only be placed in "Category:Diplomats", not in both "Category:Diplomats" and "Category:Public servants". Because the first category (diplomats) is in the second category (public servants), readers are already given the information that Foo is a public servant by him being a diplomat.

There are explicit exceptions to the general rule -

WP:EPONYMOUS - but they don't apply in the examples I cited above

.

If there were only a few special cases where editors thought that the guidelines were not appropriate in those particular cases, then we could simply

WP:EPONYMOUS

, is required. Certes' example is an obvious starting point.

Bear in mind that while the discussion above regarding people's occupations (public servants, non-fictions authors) covers some of the examples I cited, it is irrelevant to others, eg

• [19][20] (21st-century New Zealand writers are New Zealand writers).

Editors who still think that articles should be categorized as both "21st-century NZ writers" and its grandparent "NZ writers" should consider how those cases might be included in the proposed changes to the guidelines. It might be difficult to find examples of "NZ writers" who cannot legitimately be completely diffused by "cat:NZ writers by century".

Mitch Ames (talk) 08:16, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

There is nothing in the current guidelines which mandates these edits - it's just that people are interpreting them in ways that lead to ridiculous outcomes. It shouldn't be a controversial statement to say that the point of having categories should be to help readers find what they're after - but we've got editors making mass category decisions not on that basis, but on trying to categorise articles as far down the category as they can without any regard for whether that leaves articles categorised in any remotely logical way. Readers should not have to know that the former Commissioner of the Australian Border Force began his career as a police officer to be able to find him in the public service category tree. For a non-fiction author who writes in numerous areas, or a public servant who has held significant roles in multiple areas, the lowest they can logically go down the tree is the category for that area (non-fiction writers or public servants) unless sufficient subcategories exist to cover it - even if there might be one or two niche subcategories that they can be placed in for small parts of their story. It doesn't follow from a description that normal practice is to place them as low down the tree (which is almost always an obvious practice with uncontentious results outside of articles on people, and often even there) that one must always try to place articles at the absolute lowest it even where it results in a stupid outcome.

As for the NZ writers one: the problem with making masses of edits that are frequently wrong is that editors making the individual checks on those edits have to make the calls about whether those edits actually should have been made that you didn't do. I reverted them because it not clear to me that "NZ writers by century" intended to diffuse "NZ writers", If I'm a reader looking for an NZ writer, does it follow that I should know I need to look in "NZ writers by century"? I'm not sure it does. If it was, then that particular edit is unobjectionable (and I'm not going to argue if any other editor thinks, looking at the category in context, that it was), but when I'm checking the edits of someone with a mistake rate in an editing spree of anywhere between 40-100% (as opposed to just blanket reverting sprees with bad edits) I need to quickly second-guess edits to try to filter the good from the bad in hundreds of edits rather than being able to give them the benefit of the doubt. The Drover's Wife (talk) 09:28, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

it not clear to me that "NZ writers by century" intended to diffuse "NZ writers", – Sub-categories quite commonly diffuse their parent categories. This is explained in

Diffusing large categories

.

If I'm a reader looking for an NZ writer, does it follow that I should know I need to look in "NZ writers by century"? – The blue box at the top of Category:New Zealand writers, that says Pages in this category should be moved to subcategories where applicable. This category ... should directly contain very few, if any, pages and should mainly contain subcategories. does suggest that the editors might not leave the articles directly in that category, and that the reader may need to look in subcategories. Mitch Ames (talk) 11:00, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

This is very disappointing - it is still an on-going discussion between the two main protagonists - I had sorely hoped that someone other than these two enter into the conversation within the larger editing community. There were a few editors who came in on the Wwikix case who seemed to have a handle of the issues - it would be so useful to have fresh faces in this discussion to offer perspectives from out of the confines of the current on-going discussion. Thanks to them (the two main protegonists) for continuing the discussion, I hope you understand the desire for others who not part of this discussion to join in with more than just a fly-by comment...

On-going conversation is now sufficiently elaborated, long and dense - it really needs examination by someone not currently involved, a review or overview would be very useful. JarrahTree 11:08, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm going to argue that the good points above apply to each reason for notability separately. If our diplomat were also notable as a pianist (not just playing for the family in evenings) then we'd follow the logic once to add them to a public service category and a second time to add them to a musical category. It's the same with diplomat and treasury official. We follow the logic once for diplomacy to add to Category:Diplomats from Wherever, then a second time for the treasury to add to Category:Public servants from Wherever because there is no treasury subcat. Of course, this supposes that service at the treasury is notable: if the subject wouldn't have an article but for the diplomacy then we don't make that second addition. Certes (talk) 11:52, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

If our diplomat were also notable as a pianist ... It's the same with diplomat and treasury official. – It's not the same; the important difference (in the context of the WP:CAT) is that pianist is not a sub-cat of public servant, whereas diplomat and treasury official are.

add to Category:Diplomats from Wherever, then a second time for the treasury to add to Category:Public servants from Wherever – Without prejudice to the merits of your proposal or WP:CAT, this is explicitly contrary to the existing WP:CAT guidelines, so could you please state explicitly whether you think we should:

• Ignore the guidelines (here and in the many similar cases)
• Change the guidelines to reflect the categorization as you would do it

Mitch Ames (talk) 12:30, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

I think we should

• Clarify whether the consensus is to follow your suggestion or mine, or whether it's a judgement call for individual editors, as we both seem to be offering reasonable but incompatible interpretations of existing guidelines. Certes (talk) 13:26, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Could you please link to and quote the specific part(s) of the guidelines that you are interpreting (eg as I did here). Mitch Ames (talk) 13:50, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

WP:CATDD advises us to Add pages to multiple overlapping categories, and WP:Categorization#Categorizing pages says that each categorized page should be placed in all of the most specific categories to which it logically belongs. I think we all understand the guidance but are unclear as to whether to apply it to each notable attribute individually or once to the subject as a whole. So far we've found nothing in writing to decide that question either way, so I'm hoping that a consensus will establish new guidance on this point. Certes (talk

) 14:34, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

WP:CATDD advises us to Add pages to multiple overlapping categories – Interesting. CATDD is an information page not a policy or guideline; it's a very short summary of the guidelines, which take precedence. The link from "multiple overlapping categories" is to Category tree organization

, whose first sentence is "Categories are organized as overlapping 'trees'", so I suggest that CATDD should probably say "multiple overlapping category trees".

So far we've found nothing in writing to decide that question either way – The three sentences from the guidelines that I quoted or paraphrased in my post of 08:16, 20 January 2019 (UTC) ("not normally placed directly in [parent]", "without duplication in parent categories above it", "not in both [child] and [parent]") seem fairly unambiguous to me. Mitch Ames (talk) 12:32, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure if I count as "uninvolved" or not, as I initiated one of the example conversations linked early in this section. I believe that Mitch's edits are intended to be helpful. However, they look to be done based on formulae and algorithms, not on reading individual articles. For example, Tony Ayers[21][22] has been secretary of five departments according to the succession box at the bottom of the article, and of course had a career before reaching that level. Very few people would argue for a line in a succession box not indicating that a category would also be appropriate. Only the last two lines have categories specific for those roles. The other three are represented only as category:Australian public servants. Perhaps the "solution" was not just to remove the higher category, but to create and add the missing three categories for secretaries of Aboriginal Affairs, Social Security and Community Services. Reading the rest of the article, perhaps it should also be categorised as Teacher in Victoria and Prison officer. SO instead of just removing one category, the "solution" was to create two or three new ones and add all of those and two others to the article in exchange for the one to be removed. The problem was not that one high-level category was on the article, but that there were several gaps in the category structure. --Scott Davis ^Talk 14:02, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

• Question - Reading through the above, I get the impression that the debate is ultimately between those who see categorization as an identification (or classification) tool vs those who see categorization as a navigational tool (for finding other, similar, articles). The former want categorization to be as narrow a as possible, while the latter want categorization to be as broad as possible. Does this accurately describe what underlies the debate? Blueboar (talk) 15:17, 20 January 2019 (UTC)
  • I've largely bowed out of this so other voices can be heard, but since you asked: no, I don't think so. Misclassifying articles to get them as low down the tree in its present form results in worse outcomes both for identifying article subjects and for navigating to article subjects. The narrow/broad thing is a red herring - in my book, categorising as narrowly as possible is fine as long as it's done correctly and not just for the sake of it (which may require, for example, creation of new categories so subjects can be both narrowly and correctly classified). The Drover's Wife (talk) 00:05, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

From my perspective, the issue is simply whether we follow the MOS guidelines or not, or change them if they are not working. (If there were only a few specific articles, we could

ignore the guidelines

in those specific case, but this is clearly a systemic problem, not just a few individual cases, so I'm talking about the many general cases here.) The guidelines unambiguously say – in three separate sentences, which I have cited and quoted repeatedly – that articles ought not be in both child and parent categories (with certain well-define exceptions, none of which apply here). There is no mention in any of those three sentences of "inclusion in both child and parent category is OK if there's a separate subcategory missing".

• If those guidelines are wrong – don't "make sense", and/or don't help the reader – in so many cases, then we should change them so that they are right/sensible/helpful. Anyone is free to propose changes and see if there is consensus for that change. Otherwise, in the majority of cases, we should follow the existing guidelines.
• If an editor thinks that one or more new specific sub-categories are required, then that editor should create the sub-categories, put the article(s) in those sub-categories – and leave the article out of the parent category, per the guidelines.
• In those cases where duplication child/parent categories is appropriate, mark the categories as {{Non-diffusing subcategory}} or {{All included}} to indicate that intent.

In some cases the existing category hierarchy may be wrong, so obviously we must fix the category hierarchy first, then revisit the duplicate and/or missing categorization of the articles. Mitch Ames (talk) 13:35, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

The "issue" seems to be in how people are reacting to an acknowledged problem. I don't think anybody has attempted to assert that the category graph is perfect as it is, nor that every article in Wikipedia is categorised perfectly. We all know that the category graph is not perfect, has extra bits that should be pruned, and bits missing that need to be added. It seems that at least one editor (you –

WP:AWNB (assuming it's another Australian categorisation problem). It may be that you have found a cluster of articles that together should be in a new (sub-)category, but none of the individual article editors wanted to be the first to make a new category and only put that one article in it, or didn't think they had the skill or time to connect it properly. Canley said above that he/she was creating and editing articles with a particular focus, and included them in the higher-level category as a placeholder for missing finer categories based on other aspects of their career. It serves as a reminder to themselves or anyone else to come back later with a different focus and build those categories. --Scott Davis ^Talk

23:40, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

I think Scott has nailed it there, and I think this would be a good way forward. These are absolutely issues that need resolving, and are often the kind that get missed (and stay that way) because category structure issues are rarely a topic that gets Wikipedia editors excited. Mitch is also right about the last point in his last comment ("In some cases the existing category hierarchy may be wrong, so obviously we must fix the category hierarchy first, then revisit the duplicate and/or missing categorization of the articles") - the issue is that that there are so many of these issues that it is absolutely impossible for any editor to pre-emptively address them so that mass edits on this basis can be made without doing damage, and the assumption that any issues should already have been fixed by someone else is just not sound. The Drover's Wife (talk) 23:51, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Presumably at the point that an editor thinks that one or more articles are missing a 2nd (3rd, etc) subcategory of the recently-removed parent of an existing (1st) subcategory, that editor could create/add the subcategory, and/or start a specific discussion about the missing subcategory, instead of simply re-adding the redundant parent. Mitch Ames (talk) 12:53, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

This is absolutely not a workable approach - it is already a lot of work checking edits that have been made en masse without any regard as to whether they should have been made. You are picking up legitimate issues with categories - no one disputes this - but your universal solution is broken in a great many of them and you know this - so flag them as you go and then everyone wins, rather than continuing making mass edits you know are largely flawed and expecting people already cleaning after you to do quadruple the workload. The Drover's Wife (talk) 21:45, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm going through Category:Album covers and assessing non-free soundtrack cover images being used in various articles. The parent category is quite large; so, I'm wondering if it might be acceptable to create a new subcategory titled Category:Soundtrack album covers or something similar to make it easier to find these files. Apparently, non-free album cover filess are added to the parent category each time {{Non-free album cover}} is used. Will this be affected is a new subcategory is created for specific types of album cover art? -- Marchjuly (talk) 04:24, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Have you proposed this at

WT:ALBUMS? If so, and there is consensus, then you would need to either amend {{Non-free album cover}} to have a new parameter - say |soundtrack=yes; or create another template to be used instead - say {{Non-free soundtrack album cover}}. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk

) 09:03, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Can't a new subcategory be created and existing files simply manually added to it? For example, there exist subcategories of for album covers by artist in Category:Album covers by recording artist. I wasn't proposing that the files should automatically be added to a new subcategory for soundtrack; I was just wondering if doing so would affect how the copyright template works in adding file to the parent category. Apologize if I wasn't clear about that in my OP. -- Marchjuly (talk) 11:19, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

A follow-on from this discussion, here.

Briefly: given the relative stability in recent months of Category:20th-century male writers and similar categories for writers (and the longstanding stability of categories for male actors by century), I've begun creating and populating similar categories for male musicians and artists by century. My argument is one that's been kicking around for a few years now, in some guise or other; we have women categorized a certain way, and there's no reason we shouldn't be treating male subjects the same way. I've been treading relatively slowly, but haven't really met much formal pushback before the linked discussion. Hence opening this discussion here.

My feeling: we should have men-by-century categories for many of the professions for which there are women-by-century categories. We've got categories for men by profession and country, at least in many of the cultural disciplines, and I don't see any reason why we shouldn't extend it to by-century as well. Others may disagree: I'd be interested in hearing more discussion. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 21:56, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I have just created Template:Uw-redcat, and added it to Template:Single notice links.

This is to warn users who add pages to no-existent categories (see

I'm sure this has been discussed before (and I've read the recent discussion above), but I can't seem to find a good answer. My specific question is whether the kebab article should be in Category:Levantine cuisine, and/or the geographical subcategories Category:Lebanese cuisine, Category:Syrian cuisine, Category:Jordanian cuisine, etc. It's also a general question about how to categorize food items and dishes, and similar things that are found in multiple geographical areas.

This guideline says each categorized page should be placed in all of the most specific categories to which it logically belongs and

It seems more likely that it means that a dish should be included in all "Category:Country cuisine" categories that notably feature it, and not in any "Category:Region cuisine" categories that are supercategories of those countries. In other words, the kebab article should not be in Category:Levantine cuisine. It should also be taken out of Category:Balkan cuisine and added instead to each of the 11 geographical subcategories (Albanian, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Kosovan, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Romanian, Serbian, and Turkish), and similarly for Category:South Asian cuisine. What about Category:Arab cuisine?

This would imply that Category:Levantine cuisine shouldn't have any articles about specific dishes listed in it, and that the 100+ dishes currently in the category should be duplicated and moved down into each of the constituent country subcategories. The same would apply to all "Category:Region cuisine" categories; for example no specific dish articles should be present in the categories Category:Mediterranean cuisine, Category:Middle Eastern cuisine, Category:Asian cuisine, etc., or even in Category:World cuisine.

Is this correct? It doesn't seem to reflect current practice very well, as most of the "Category:Region cuisine" categories have many dishes listed directly under them, and often at the same time in the subcategories. It would be a big change to actually enforce the without duplication in parent categories above it part of the guideline. I'm also not sure how desirable that is. But it's inconsistent; looking at the list in Category:Middle Eastern cuisine, one would certainly expect to see the kebab article in there (there are a number of specific types of kebab listed). I can't figure out if I should add it, or remove all the specific dish articles.

It might also cause issues with verification, as the articles may have references to a dish being "Levantine", but not specifically mention the constituent countries. Are we sure that all such dishes are present in Cypriot cuisine for example? This is even more troublesome with the larger categories - do we actually have "Category:Country cuisine" categories to cover every country in Asia? Can we accurately determine to which specific countries in Asia that oolong, cocopandan syrup, and mochi - and kebab - do or don't belong? What countries exactly make up the Middle East?

One more example,

There's also the question of categories themselves, for example Category:Syrian cuisine is a subcategory of Category:Levantine cuisine, which is itself a subcategory of Category:Middle Eastern cuisine. It would seem then that Category:Syrian cuisine should be removed from Category:Middle Eastern cuisine. Currently Category:Lebanese cuisine is not in Category:Middle Eastern cuisine; again I can't figure out whether I should add it, or remove the other Levantine countries instead. Also, Category:Kebabs is in Category:Middle Eastern cuisine, but not in Category:Asian cuisine or any of the south/central/east Asian cuisine subcategories. Should it go in any of those, or in Category:North African cuisine, or should it be removed from Category:Middle Eastern cuisine and placed "as low down as possible" in each and every of the Middle Eastern (and Asian, African, European, and even the Americas') "Category:Country cuisine" categories?

Any comments or pointers to previous relevant discussions or consensus are appreciated, thanks. --IamNotU (talk) 17:20, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

This geographical categorization can get out of hand. We should be categorizing articles (based on the definining characteristics of the subject), not attempting to use categorization to create lists of what people eat in each country. I'd suggest not categorizing a food for more than one geographical area (based on where the food originated) - e.g. kebab may belong in Category:Middle Eastern cuisine (or a subcat of that), not in categories for Lebanon, Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq ... DexDor ^(talk) 18:05, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

DexDor, thanks for your comment. I've never paid much attention to categories, so these are probably rather "newbie" questions. Do I understand correctly that you'd suggest not being strict about the "as low down in the category hierarchy as possible", and instead put the kebab article in Category:Middle Eastern cuisine, and remove it from the lower categories like Category:Levantine cuisine, Category:Lebanese cuisine etc.? Or do you think that sometimes being in multiple parent/child categories is ok? It feels odd to remove kebabs from Category:Turkish cuisine for example...

Your comment brings up another question that I didn't want to add to my already long post - should categorization be primarily about the origin of a dish, or where it is a significant part of a particular cuisine? For example, should the kebab article not also go in Category:Central Asian cuisine, or Category:South Asian cuisine (and then, be removed eg. from Category:Pakistani cuisine)? --IamNotU (talk) 02:25, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

The rule about being as low in the category hierarchy applies after you've determined what the definining characteristics of the topic are. In the case of kebab: Jordan (for example) isn't a defining characteristic (the article doesn't even mention Jordan); that's someone (wrongly) using the category to create a list - information about the popularity/history of kebabs in Jordan belongs in the text of articles/lists (e.g. Kebab and Jordanian cuisine) where it can be referenced (similarly for Turkey).  Otherwise it could lead to people creating categories such as "Cuisine of Omar's cafe" and putting the Kebab article in it. DexDor ^(talk) 06:39, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Regarding origin - absolutely. For example, we (now) categorize weapons (e.g. missiles) only by country of origin; not by every country that uses them, every war they have been used in etc. DexDor ^(talk) 06:39, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Is there any specific policy or protocol for placing pages within a parent category and subcategory? For instance, you'll see in Category:Public high schools in the United States by state, where N.J. is the only state that does not contain ALL public high school pages (only a subcategory of them broken down by county listing), along with categories with places of worship, municipalities, unincorporated communities, etc. They are only organized by county. Shouldn't all pages be included in these categories (hence this template) since pretty much all of the other US states follow this practice? Only a couple of editors are against this since it was discussed previously. I find it useful for the reader to have the option to view listings by both county and statewide. Tinton5 (talk) 04:14, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

WP:DUPCAT says "some [subcategories] are simply subsets which have some special characteristic of interest". It doesn't provide an exhaustive list of what constitutes a "special characteristic of interest", although it does say that "gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality should almost always be non-diffusing". Mitch Ames (talk

) 11:41, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

The general principle is to diffuse, per

WP:HOTCAT

gives no warning.

I don't see any particular reason for a DUPCAT here. The by-county subcats of Category:Public high schools in New Jersey by county all look quite well-sized.

By contrast, some of the undivided categories for other states could do with subcatting, for example Category:Public high schools in California (957 pages), Category:Public high schools in Texas (757 pages). --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:14, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

As someone who has had a lot to say about over-and-inappropriate-diffusion, I have to say I agree with BrownHairedGirl on this specific one - I can't say I see a benefit to having undiffused categories here. The Drover's Wife (talk) 01:09, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

As someone who thinks about diffusion and occasionally rants about it, some properties lend themselves naturally to diffusion and some don't. The acid test for me is: does each article fall naturally into exactly one subcategory? By that yardstick, schools by county seem perfect for diffusion. In contrast, to take another example from above, ethnicity doesn't diffuse neatly: many notable people have multiple, unclear or disputed ethnicity. Certes (talk) 01:36, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Shouldn't this encyclopedia follow some consistency? General practices are to diffuse and subcategorize each page and/or topic within its parent category, at least that is what I've been told and have seen. I have witnessed categories all over the place which sometimes don't even belong in their present subcategories. Tinton5 (talk) 03:54, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

I've submitted an RfC re: the categorization of all works (albums, songs) by artists by genre.

Please see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Music#RfC_on_categorizing_all_works_by_an_artist_by_genre.

Thanks! ---Another Believer _(Talk) 17:02, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

One of the may deficiencies of Wikimedia's crude category system is that it does not automatically generate a table of contents for the category. Editors have to manually add a TOC if it is needed.

So a few weeks ago, I created Template:CatAutoTOC, which generates a table of contents on a category page if the category size exceeds a certain threshold. It is now used on about 35,000 categories, nearly all via category header templates.

The size thresholds I applied are:

1. < 100 pages = no TOC
2. 100–1200 pages = {{Category TOC}}
3. > 1200 pages = {{Large category TOC}}

However, I just noticed that {{Category TOC}} says it should not be used for categories containing less than 200 pages.

One way or another, that discrepancy needs to be resolved.

I can see the case for the threshold of 200, because it is one pageful, and a TOC is arguably un-needed on one page. Personally, I think that a TOC is still useful on categories in the 100–200 page range, but that may just be an oddity of mine.

What do others think?

What should the size thresholds be? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:37, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

So, I'm thinking particularly of categories like Category:Canadian expatriates in the United States (sorted with the key "-") and Category:Canadian emigrants to the United States (sorted with the key "+") that are subcategories of Category:American people of Canadian descent, even though a significant portion of those expatriates and immigrants aren't/weren't U.S. citizens. Should the subcategorization be replaced with {{category see also}} instead? Or maybe it's enough that they all share the same parent category Category:Canada–United States relations? During the years I've noticed lots of reverting categories back and forth ([23], [24]), which is why I'd love to see a conclusion to this inconsistency. --Kliituu (talk) 20:15, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

• Who counts as an American person? Rathfelder (talk) 08:29, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
• It makes it much easier to retain the current tree, given many (if not most) of these people do take citizenship and you don't actually have to have citizenship to be regarded as American (or any other nationality) in anything other than a strictly legal sense in any case. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:28, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
• It's certainly very unusual for biographical articles to say anything explicit about citizenship or nationality, and I think the reality is that for articles about people who migrate attribution of nationality is just guesswork. Rathfelder (talk) 20:36, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

@Kliituu, Necrothesp, and Rathfelder: I think that there are three issues here:

1. Is there is a useful distinction between emigrants and expatriates?
   Rathfelder and I had that discussion elsewhere, and we disagree: I think the distinction is worth retaining, Rathfelder thinks not. I don't think that can be resolved without an RFC
2. Should expatriates be categorised under descent categories?
   e.g. should
   WP:DEFINING
   distinction between an expat and emigrant is that the expat does not take up the nationality of the host country. So whenever I encounter an expat category parented in a descent category, I remove it.
3. Navigation between the various categories.
   That is the only plausible argument I have seen for categorising expatriates under descent categories. I don't that navigational convenience justifies such miscategorisation, but it is a reasonable approach. However, I have a solution to that: {{FooBarHumMigNav}}, which I have been intermittently working on for a few months as a Lua module.

There's still a little tweaking to do, but it's nearly ready for rollout. It takes no parameters, and when placed on a bilateral human migration category, it creates a navbox for the categories for descent, emigrants, expatriates and expatriate sportspeople between the two countries.

To demonstrate it I did a few tests on some pages, and self-reverted:

• Category:American expatriates in Japan
• Category:Irish emigrants to New Zealand
• Category:Chilean people of Irish descent
• Category:Spanish expatriates in the United States
• Category:Japanese people of American descent
• Category:Japanese people of American descent
• Category:Finnish emigrants to South Africa
• Category:Ivorian expatriate sportspeople in France
• Category:Venezuelan expatriate sportspeople in Portugal

I'd really welcome feedback on whether this is a good idea, and if so whether it needs tweaking.

Also pinging some other editors whose feedback I'd value: @

I think this is a matter of definitions. If an expat is defined as a citizen of A but not a citizen of B living in B and an immigrant is defined as a citizen of B living in B who previously was (or still is) a citizen of A and who previously lived in A, then the distinction makes sense. (Note that by this definition, most immigrants have been expats first - I myself was a citizen of one country, lived for 15 years in another country, and then applied for the citizenship, meaning I was an expat for 15 years and then became an immigrant). This is not a definition everybody would agree with, and one would certainly need an RfC to move forward. Also, in many cases it is impossible to determine who is a citizen of what country - for example, the edit-warring in Maryam Mirzakhani probably costed my a year of my life, driveby editors would come, change her definition into "Iranian mathematician", and all my explanations that she was educated in the US, had a job in the US, and only published with the US affiliations - would be disregarded because people would insist that I prov she is a US citizen. May be one needs a much broader scope RfC on in which situation can one define a person (and, in particular, a living person) "an American (Canadian, Finnish etc)...".--Ymblanter (talk) 14:38, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

I would be happy with a rule that we forbid categorizing people with a nationality or nationalities unless we have explicit and reliable documentation of their citizenship, and that when we do have such documentation we merely include as categories all documented citizenships rather than trying to decide for ourselves how one of those citizenships relates to another. But too many editors and readers are too invested with waving their flags to make that likely. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:32, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

And I would very strongly oppose that, David Eppstein.

Nationality is one the two basic traits of en.wp's categorisation of people, but it is very rare to have an explicit source declaring citizenship. If we applied David's rule, we'd have to rip apart most our categorisation of people. At a rough guess, that principle would mean that 95% of our biographical articles would cease to be categorised by nationality.

Categories exist to provide navigation between related articles, not to serve as a legally-verified database of citizenship. Our readers are best served by categorising people according to the nationality with they have a clear association. We do not need to concern ourselves with whether they legally became citizens. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:20, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

• I dont regard the distinction between emigrants and expatriates as worth a detailed discussion, because I think it is too messy to be resolvable. There is a great deal of subjective local usage because being an ex-pat is frequently seen as more respectable than being a migrant. You can only definitively distinguish the two in retrospect. Legally there isnt a distinction in most places. My guess is that there is explicit mention of nationality or citizenship in fewer than 5% of biographical articles. For most the best you get is places of residence. So to that extent our categorising by nationality is almost entirely suppositious. We could get round that problem if we categorised biographies by place of residence, but I dont think there will be much appetite for that suggestion.

So I am quite content with BrownHairedGirl's approach, which certainly seems to be an improvement. Rathfelder (talk) 16:49, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

• Agree with BrownHairedGirl on the principle that expatriates and emigrants are different, however in practice it will be difficult. We can probably only be certain that someone was an expatriate in case he/she meanwhile moved to another country or moved back to his/her original country, but if we would stick to that we would be limiting ourselves quite a lot. So I am actually uncertain whether it is useful to keep separate trees for expatriates and emigrants. On the other hand descent is something really different, that should only apply to children and (possibly) grandchildren of emigrants insofar they who were born in the new country. Also I agree that we should not bother about legal citizenship (as mostly unverifiable), the key criterion should be the country of living. Marcocapelle (talk) 19:34, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
• I support all the conclusions and suggestions of BrownHairedGirl. The new human migration nav template should have a longer name for clarity. I would place it below any category description line. In the case of expatriate sportspersons, it can be included at the end of {{Fooian expatriate sportspeople in Bar cat}}. – Fayenatic London 11:26, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

• If we are going this way then expatriates should not be included among people of Fooish descent. They are still Fooish people.
• I've had a little trial categorising expatriate Georgian sportspeople and I think this is the way to go. But had forgotten that sportspeople move about so much. One person may be categorised as an expat in a dozen countries. Ideally I'd like to take them out of the countries they have left, but think that is probably impractical. Rathfelder (talk) 22:20, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't actually see a lot of point in retaining the expatriate categories. As far as I'm concerned, an emigrant is someone who moves to a country and intends to stay there permanently or more or less permanently (e.g. some people emigrate to Britain from the Caribbean, stay for decades and to all intents and purposes become British, but then retire back to the Caribbean; they're still emigrants, even though they eventually return to their country of birth), even if they don't actually do so, or who ends up staying permanently even if they didn't originally intend to. It has nothing to do with actual citizenship. I'm not sure what an expatriate is, as it has different definitions depending on context. Is it a person who lives in a country for a bit? So what? The trouble is, the term "emigrant" often tends to be used of people from developing countries and "expatriate" of people from developed countries, even if their situations are pretty much identical. If we do retain the two separate types of category, however, then I definitely don't think it's worth using both on one article. If someone ends up staying in a country then the emigrant category is sufficient. I also do think both emigrants and expatriates should be categorised under descent for navigational reasons. -- Necrothesp (talk) 07:40, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

• Expatriates are mis-classified by descent at present. The French ambassador to Belgium is not "of French descent". He is just as French as the inhabitants of France. Rathfelder (talk) 08:24, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
  • It's simply for ease of navigation and because so many emigrants have been miscategorised as expatriates. But why's it even worth categorising at all? So he lived in Belgium for a while. So what? Unless he lived there in any sort of permanent way (i.e. was an emigrant) why is that notable? -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:57, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm quite happy to keep the expat categories if they are clearly distinct from the migrants. Ambassadors, governors of colonies and the like with a significant part in the history of the place. I guess we have to accept the sportspeople, but generally we should be looking for people who played a significant part in the place where they were an expat. And if its clear that they were really a migrant then they should be in that category. Rathfelder (talk) 13:45, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I have opened an RFC about whether to standardise on the "Z" spelling in descriptive category names, i.e. to use "Organization" in all cases. I estimate that this affects the naming of about ten thousand categories.

See Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RFC:_spelling_of_"organisation"/"organization"_in_descriptive_category_names. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:07, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

I am trying to create a redirect category page, but it doesn't work. The redirect page is Talk:Whites only, but the category that is displayed is Category:NA-Class Civil Rights Movement articles instead of Category:Redirect-Class Civil Rights Movement articles. What am I doing incorrectly? Mitchumch (talk) 23:48, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

@Mitchumch: I don't think that specific template works with class=redirect. You just need to add the functionality to Template:WikiProject Civil Rights Movement --DannyS712 (talk) 23:59, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

What do I need to do to modify the template to recognize redirects? Mitchumch (talk) 00:15, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

@Mitchumch: See the instructions at Template:WPBannerMeta#Assessment --DannyS712 (talk) 00:22, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

The following parameter appears to be set-up for "extended" in Template:WikiProject Civil Rights Movement.

|QUALITY_SCALE = extended

|class =

Do I need to use "inline" or "subpage" parameters to employ "redirect class"? Mitchumch (talk) 00:50, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

@

Template talk:WPBannerMeta? --DannyS712 (talk

) 00:52, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

I will do that. This is more involved than I thought it would be. Thanks. Mitchumch (talk) 01:03, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Using |QUALITY_SCALE=extended won't make the template recognise |class=redirect, because it's not one of the seven classes listed at Template:WPBannerMeta#Assessment. It needs to be either the subpage or inline method; I can do it for you, if I have a clear mandate from the WikiProject. However, I go out to work soon, I can pick this up at (say) 16:00 (UTC), bot not likely to be any earlier. BTW it shouldn't be necessary to explictly set |class=Redirect because the class is autodetected - if the WikiProject banner is not set up for Redirect-class, it defaults to NA-class. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:43, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

@Mitchumch: OK, this is ready to go. There are two edits required, both very simple: (a) on the main template, alter |QUALITY_SCALE=extended to |QUALITY_SCALE=subpage just like this; (b) on the documentation, alter |QUALITY_SCALE=extended to |QUALITY_SCALE=subpage (so that it matches the main template). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:06, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Redrose64 Everything is good. Thank you. Spoke too soon. The project template for Talk:Whites only now displays as "Redirect". However, the talk page does not display in Category:Redirect-Class Civil Rights Movement articles. Any ideas what is going on? Mitchumch (talk) 19:26, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

You can either wait for the

WP:NULLEDIT. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk

) 19:48, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Everything is good. Thank you. Mitchumch (talk) 22:19, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

For