Philatelic categorization 

Hello.  Can you please bear with me re the categories as I have a massive amount of data to input.  Unfortunately, I do not have very much time to spend on the project and all my data has to be reformatted to meet Wikipedia’s tagging standard.

I have amended the categories because they lacked structure and there is need for a systematic approach.  A friend, who is a postal expert but only an occasional computer user, told me he was going round in circles trying to tie up relevant articles.  I am an IT professional and even I struggled to make any sense of the category structure.  

There should be a single root category and in this case philately is the obvious choice since that is the umbrella term for the entire pursuit.  Philately itself is a hobby or pastime or subject or whatever so it is entirely reasonable that it should also be a sub-category of those wider categories.  I found that philately had such as postage stamps, postal markings and postal history as sub-categories but philately was also a sub-category of each of those, which is nonsense and does not help new users.  Equally, similar articles such as the postage stamps of a particular country were categorised across the board instead of being allocated to a single category within a hierarchical or relative structure which non-IT people like my friend can easily navigate.

After I made a few amendments to the philatelic/postal categories, I asked my friend to try again and he found what he was looking for immediately.  This is the benefit of a structured, systematic approach.

Whereas philately is the root, it splits into two main sub-categories.  One of these is philately ‘’per se’’ which could be defined as the study of the physical aspects of stamps (e.g., watermarks, types of paper, gums, etc.).  The other aspect is the actual issue of the stamps for postal purposes and this is all done at the behest of a postal authority (on the chicken before egg principle).  Anything to do with issuing stamps and organising collection, sorting and delivery of mail is done by a postal authority which is why we believe it must rank as a main sub-category along with “physical” philately.  The term “postal authority” is a catchall for any organisation that has issued stamps and processed mail: national government, army of occupation, foreign postal agency, etc.

Having said all that, I agree that it is a good idea to categorise types of stamp independently of a country’s issues and, on that basis, “postage stamps” should be a sub-category of “philately”.  There is a clear difference between the two disciplines.  I will endeavour to make use of that difference, especially as our inputs will fall into both of those categories.

As I say, please bear with us as we have a massive input to make and it will take some time to accomplish.