Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories

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FYI Template:Cat topic year (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been nominated for deletion -- 65.92.244.143 (talk) 04:10, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I just had this note connected with an edit reversion. "Undid revision 1231303175 by Johnpacklambert (talk) It is standard practice to include all such categories for professional athletes. Abbott played for 18 professional teams and they can't all be expected to be mentioned in this article. His teams are easily verified via the external links at the bottom of this article." I am sorry. This is just plain wrong practice. If we cannot be bothered to mention something in the text of an article, it is too trivial to categorize by. Categories are supposed to lead people through somewhat similar articles. A minimum expectation is that the information be mentioned in the article.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:09, 9 July 2024 (UTC) I recently had 4 articles I had edited get revered. This is the general tone of the edit summaries. "Undid revision 1231303175 by Johnpacklambert (talk) It is standard practice to include all such categories for professional athletes. Abbott played for 18 professional teams and they can't all be expected to be mentioned in this article. His teams are easily verified via the external links at the bottom of this article." I am sorry, this is just ludicrous. First off, external links are not always reliable sources, so just using them to push categories directly is problematic. Beyond this, categories are supposed to link something that means something. They need to be "defining". If playing for a team was so non-defining to a person that we do not even mention it anywhere in the text of the article, not even in a table, we should not categorize by it. This makes me think that at some level team played for becomes to close to performance by performer categories. I am sorry, but we should not be categorizing anyone by 18 different teams played, especially with the amount of other categories sports people are placed in. At least not when we do not even mention in any way all 18 teams in the article.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:18, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• To be fair the word "professional" above means any level of paid baseball, even in this case A level minors. We have never even agreed that all these levels of playing baseball are notable, even when we were our most generous in granting notability to sportspeople. 18 different teams is just ludicrous. It comes very close to performer by performance level of teams. I am thinking at some point this violates the rule against categorizing performer by performance.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:21, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• The Abbott article is 16 paragraphs plus tables and other things long. It still does not mention Winston-Salem Warthogs or several other teams that he is categorized by. I am not sure why all 18 teams cannot be expected to be mentioned in his article, but if we cannot expect them to be mentioned in the article, I am not sure at all why we should categorize by them.~~~~~
• I think we should limit categories to things that are mentioned in the article. If it is not defining enough to mention in the article I do not think it is defining enough to categorize by.~~~~

John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:35, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• I'd agree: categories should only reflect information which is present, and sourced, in an article.PamD 14:41, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• @Johnpacklambert: You brought up exactly the same matter at Wikipedia talk:Categorization#Overcategorization; please respect WP:MULTI. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:35, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• How would I place notices of the discussion in other places?John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:38, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • It actually seems to have gotten the most attention at [Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons].John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:39, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  @Johnpacklambert All you need to do is to add a section with the same informative heading "Overcategorization by things not mentioned in an article", and say "There is a discussion at .... which may be of interest to readers of this page / members of this project".

  I've just come here to make exactly the same point: please do not open duplicate discussions in two (or more) places at the same time as it doesn't help anyone and just wastes other editors' time (and yours). A single concentrated discussion is going to be more productive. Thanks. PamD 15:41, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • I will keep this in mind in the future.John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:43, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

    So it's at Wikipedia_talk:Biographies_of_living_persons#Do_biographies_of_living_people_need_categories_supported_by_the_text too! Please don't ever do this again: it's disrpuptive editing, forum-shopping, and generally a Bad Idea. Thanks. PamD 15:44, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This category appears in all stub-class biography articles, and in my opinion, it is unnecessary. I don't see the necessity for it because there are other more focused categories. I came here to seek community consensus before proceeding with my plan. Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 19:41, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Wolverine XI: I don't see any articles in Category:Stub-Class biography articles, I see only talk pages. Which articles have you found in that category? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:24, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64: Sorry, I meant talk pages. Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 03:55, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No response after 8 hours, so I'm going to assume that it's no big deal. Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 12:54, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Which plan do you want to proceed with? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:16, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Wolverine XI: Beg pardon? Eight hours? I posted at 21:24, 11 August 2024 (UTC); you replied at 03:55, 12 August 2024 (UTC) and in theory that means I had to wait for six and a half hours for your reply. I, like many Wikipedians, am not logged in constantly. Please review my contributions: you will see two big gaps there, which may be explained as follows: between 22:15 and 06:25 I was in bed; between 07:00 and 15:30 I was either travelling or working. For those 35 minutes this morning where I was logged in, I was not able to visit every page on my watchlist where I was looking for a reply. I had other things to do as well, such as fixing up malformed RfCs. At the exact moment you posted your second reply (12:54) I was giving my end-of-shift handover report to my manager. Some people only log in for a couple of hours each day; some only log in once or twice a week (but put in several hours at the time). If everybody gave up after eight hours, Wikipedia wouldn't function. This is why WP:XFDs last seven days minimum. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:46, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Now, to your original post, where you wrote I came here to seek community consensus before proceeding with my plan. - what plan is this? You have not described a plan, or even linked to a page about it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:46, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What plan? You have not told us yet, so you cannot assume that lack of opposition = consent. PamD 20:58, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, there are editors who are fond of invoking WP:SILENCE as a means to push their agenda. Anyway, it appears that Category:Stub-Class biography articles comprises over half of Category:WikiProject Biography articles. Does this plan entail actually improving that content, merging, redirecting or nominating for deletion content with little realistic chance for improvement, or assessing whether the articles are actually still stubs? To the first item, there are too many members of the community who do a disservice to readers by aggressively scrubbing certain biographies and treating any other biographies as though their merely some individual editor's vanity project. Why are we not discouraging that behavior? RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 18:53, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I was planning on removing the category but that seems impossible for some reason. Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 03:56, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Wolverine XI: If your intent is to remove all pages from Category:Stub-Class biography articles, leaving it empty, this is the wrong process. You should follow the procedure described at WP:CFD for category deletions. For normal categories, if the CFD discussion concludes as "delete", we send in a bot to remove the pages from the category and then delete the category pages. Depopulating a category manually is not a good idea, and doing so before consensus at CFD has been obtained is a Bad Thing.

But this is not a normal category. Pages are placed in this category by use of {{WikiProject Biography}}, either by explicit use of |class=stub in that tag, or by the same parameter being used on an enclosing {{WikiProject banner shell}}. So, in addition to a CFD, you would, at the very least, need the consensus of WP:WikiProject Biography to make the appropriate change to their template. Moreover, the category is part of a set, one of the eighteen subcategories of Category:Biography articles by quality, and one of the 1,985 subcategories of Category:Stub-Class articles. You really need an overwhelmingly-good reason, and a huge amount of support, to delete this category. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:57, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Scandinavia's subcats' subcategorization is inconsistent and problematic, because sometimes people use Scandinavia as a synonym for the Nordic countries and their dependencies (Category:Nordic countries), meaning that sometimes "Scandinavia" is used when referring not just to Denmark, Norway and Sweden but also to Finland, Iceland, Åland, Greenland, etc. See those linked articles for more info on the subject.

For example, Category:Scandinavian political parties' description says Political parties of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and their dependencies, but the Finland and Iceland cats were removed from that parent cat back in 2012.

Also, Category:People of Scandinavian descent is very inconsistent whether its subcats include Finnish/Icelandic etc. people, because those are constantly removed and added, and back and forth, back and forth; some examples: special:diff/1240214770, special:diff/1205905952, special:diff/711820747, special:diff/728558000, special:diff/760514474, special:diff/833471486.

Furthermore, Category:Scandinavian diaspora's main article is Nordic diaspora and includes Category:Finnish diaspora, but Category:Scandinavian people doesn't include Category:Finnish people.

You can find plenty of other similar examples, if you take a closer look at that Scandinavia cat tree.

Some possible solutions:

• 1) Maintain the current situation having two separate cat trees for the Nordics and Scandinavia cats

• 1a) Remove all Finland/Iceland etc. cats from the Scandinavia cats (at least 44 cats at the moment)
• 1b) Create missing Nordics/Scandinavia cats
• 1c) Need to continuously re-arrange cats, because people *will* keep adding the Finland/Iceland etc. cats into the Scandinavia cats; thus categorization *will* be inconsistent from time to time
• 1d) The structure would be in most cases something like:

• Nordics

• Bouvet Island
• Faroe Islands
• Finland

• Åland

• Greenland
• Iceland
• Jan Mayen
• Scandinavia

• Denmark
• Norway
• Sweden

• Svalbard
• Then there's Category:Sápmi which is part of Scandinavia, Finland and Russia (i.e. Fennoscandia), so I'm not sure how its cats would be categorized

• 2) Combine most of the Nordics and Scandinavia cats by renaming them from "Category:People of Scandinavian descent" to "Category:People of Nordic and Scandinavian descent" and from "Category:Nordic literature" to "Category:Nordic and Scandinavian literature" etc. - already used in the articles Nordic and Scandinavian Americans, Nordic and Scandinavian Canadians and Nordic and Scandinavian diaspora in the United Kingdom

• 2 a) Much easier to maintain than the option #1 as there's no need for continuous re-arranging and back-and-forth ~"edit-warring"

• 3) Delete most of the Scandinavia cats or rename them to Nordic X if there's no similar Nordics cat yet
• 4) Delete most of the Nordics and Scandinavia cats and use Category:Northern Europe or just Category:Europe instead

2001:999:508:2B63:B073:E408:CCB:37DA (talk) 13:16, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The editor @Apple15367: has recently added this category to a large number of articles. Out of curiosity, and because I'd come across them misapplying (in good faith) another category, I had a look at some of these articles. They don't seem to mention the Diamond League, which is a complex of different athletics events. The two I looked at in detail don't even seem to mention the Diamond League component events in which the person was a winner.

I started to word a WP:CFD, but then realised that the category, which has existed since 2020, may not be inherently deletion-worthy, although I think that it is being misapplied. Athletics is not my natural habitat, so I'm asking categorisation geeks here for a view on this.

The text I had written before stopping the CfD nomination (I'd argued myself out of it) was:

This does not seem to be a useful category. I noticed it being added to a large number of articles recently. The Diamond League does not appear to be mentioned in their articles. Consider Pamela Dutkiewicz: yes, she is listed in 2018 Diamond League, but there is no mention in her article of the Diamond League or of the Birmingham 2018 British Grand Prix (athletics) event, within the Diamond League, corresponding to that table entry. Similarly Ihab Abdelrahmans article doesn't mention the 2014 Shanghai event, or the 2015 Doha and Rome events, or the 2016 Eugene event, which are the Diamond events in his "What links here", though it does have a Diamond League entry in his External Links. Perhaps someone has gone through the Diamond League events pages and added the category for all the names mentioned there, but is this sufficient? If a category is significant for a person, the relevant events should be mentioned on their page. Perhaps this is not so much a case for deletion of the category but for caution in its use?

Any views on the use, or existence, of this category? is it WP:Overcategorisation? Is there a relevant guideline? PamD 21:41, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

PS I am not Pamela Dutkiewicz: it's just that face with a list of names from which to pick an example I tend to gravitate towards similar names! (Just in case anyone wondered). PamD 21:46, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings. I have one question:

A few months ago, Edenvale, Gauteng was renamed to Edenvale, South Africa and Kempton Park, Gauteng was renamed to Kempton Park, South Africa. So, should I request for Category:People from Edenvale, Gauteng to be renamed to "Category:People from Edenvale, South Africa" & should I request for Category:Suburbs of Kempton Park, Gauteng to be renamed to "Category:Suburbs of Kempton Park, South Africa"? GeographicAccountant (talk) 19:16, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed a category loop. Specifically, Category:Primatology ⊂ Category:Biological anthropology ⊂ Category:Human biology ⊂ Category:Humans ⊂ Category:Hominina ⊂ Category:Hominini ⊂ Category:Homininae ⊂ Category:Hominidae ⊂ Category:Apes ⊂ Category:Primate taxonomy ⊂ Category:Primate taxa ⊂ Category:Primates ⊂ Category:Primatology ⊂ Category:Biological anthropology ⊂…, which has length twelve. (There are also overlapping loops, such as one using Category:Biological anthropology ⊂ Category:Anthropology ⊂ Category:Humans instead of Category:Biological anthropology ⊂ Category:Human biology ⊂ Category:Humans.) How shall we fix this? I personally favor changing Category:Primate taxonomy ⊂ Category:Primate taxa to Category:Primate taxonomy ⊃ Category:Primate taxa, but because the category loop is so long (twelve members), there are many other possibilities for others' consensus to settle on. Care to differ or discuss with me? The N^th User 20:07, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Check the discussion I started at Wikipedia talk:Shortcut index#CAT decapitalized. Web-julio (talk) 06:02, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]