"Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/botanists by nationality lists a 4-4 vote, which is hardly a consensus to make the changes you did. Some of the categories you emptied have been around for six months at least, such as British botanists, so it wasn't just an anon (who was most likely  18:29, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)"
Hi Stan - several points; first, neither was there any consensus for Pcpcpc's (if they were his) changes in the first place; I was restoring the original status quo, not making a change. And no request for comment had been made at either WP:TOL talk or from regular botanical contributors, as should have been done, before making that change. Second, botanists are fundamentally different from (almost) all other kinds of people when it comes to nationality; e.g. uniquely only botanists and ornithologists working in Britain and Germany among all people maintained friendly communication and exchange of scientific information throughout the second world war. Third, yes, botanists are too small to subdivide; all but 4 or 5 of the new subcategories created had less than five entries, which is pretty ridiculous; it is not comparable to actors at all. Fourth, and most important of all, is the need to have all the botanists at a single source for reference. There are thousands of plant articles that are being written or having their taxoboxes updated; both involve adding the line {{Taxobox_section_binomial_botany | color = lightgreen| binomial_name = | author = }} ; one takes a species, and looks up the botanical name and author citation to enter there, e.g. {{Taxobox_section_binomial_botany | color = lightgreen| binomial_name = Pinus ayacahuite| author = Ehrenb. ex Schltdl.}}; this gives you two authors to link in, with no information on their nationality. One can then get their full names from the [http://www.ipni.org/ipni/query_author.html IPNI author query page], but that still leaves the article writer with the task of finding the botanist's wiki page - does the botanist Diederich Franz Leonhard von Schlechtendal have a page at all? Is it at [[Diederich Franz Leonhard von Schlechtendal]], or [[Diederich Franz von Schlechtendal]], or [[Diederich Leonhard von Schlechtendal]], or [[Diederich von Schlechtendal]], or [[Diederich F. L. von Schlechtendal]], or [[Diederich F. von Schlechtendal]]? The simple way to do this is to look up in [[:Category:botanists]]. If you have to search through 30-odd subcategories and sub-subcategories - it takes an hour to do something that should take 2 minutes. So you don't, you give up in disgust. Or else start a new duplicate page about the botanist. It is quite clear from both 82.35.37.118's and Pcpcpc's contributions lists, that they've not had any experience at all of writing plant articles, and I think they should listen to those who do. - ~~~~