UESPWiki:Archive/CP User Age Categories

Back in February, rpeh removed categories from the   userbox, and rightfully so. I really don't see the point in having a category for "Users born in January" or "Users born in 1982" or whatever. I've recently come up with a really elegant solution to have age-based categories like "Users in their Teens", "Users in their Twenties", etc., and it would completely ignore over-the-top answers like "Users in their 1500's". Do users want categories like these or no? I have absolutely no opinion on this at all, other than I'm really proud of my solution and want to show it off :) ... but I can do that on the talk page as an "In case anybody ever wants to implement this, here's the method I was thinking of" post if nobody feels the need to implement these categories.

If users do want it, are there any opinions on which groupings to use? My personal thoughts would be: "children" (or whatever diplomatic name we use these days for 0-12), "teens", "twenties" through "fifties" and "senior citizens", with ages 0 and under or over 100 being ignored. As I'm thinking of it, age ranges would not be allowed to overlap, though the solution might be able to handle overlaps as well...I'd have to experiment if that were desired.  ‒ Robin Hood    21:04, 5 August 2010 (UTC) 

:What if you have someone who's 99 and turns 100? Are they assumed to no longer be in a category simply because it's uncommon for someone to live that long?--       21:45, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

:: What makes you feel this is necessary?

:: I'm on Facebook, you're on Facebook, and I'm going to make a wild guess and say that most of the people using this site are going to be on Facebook. If you want to know somebody's age, musical taste, preference in fabrics, ideal garden design or anything else, you can contact people through Facebook or your social networking site of choice. Given that my full name is on my user page and that my approximate age and location have been referenced several times (37, London, England, to save you all looking), there is absolutely nothing to stop somebody on the site adding me to their friends list and interacting with me on their social networking site of choice. The same is less true of many other members, but that's probably because they don't want to be contacted.

:: If it's not for contact purposes, why do you want to categorise people by age? What conceivable use does it have?

:: It's also worth pointing out that pages that don't get viewed don't get updated. That means if, today, you create a userpage that says you were born in 1973, and nobody views it, it will stick with an age of "30s" until the page is regenerated for some reason. Personally, I'd love to be able to say that I'm 30-something for the rest of my life, but unless somebody knows of a way around this problem it means this idea is a waste of time. rpeh  22:55, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

::: To answer Albino's question: yes, I was assuming that someone who turns 100 is no longer in a category, though the categories could very easily be extended should that be necessary. Given that I can count the number of users over 40 on one hand, I just didn't see it as a big issue.

::: And to address rpeh, as I said in my original post, I don't want to do anything here. I had a good idea for how to do it and put it to the community whether or not they want to do it. I wasn't sure about the re-generation issue, but I don't see that as a huge issue, since someone who's browsing the categories will presumably at some point browse some of the users' pages, triggering a re-generation. It's not perfect, granted, but the fact that the list may be out-of-date for any given person could readily be noted on the relevant category pages if people want them created.

::: But let me answer your question of "why" with another series of questions: Why categorize the country the person is in? Why categorize the gender or sexual orientation of a person? Why categorize what ES race or birthsign they happen to identify with? That series of questions goes on for some time, and the simple answer is this: some people like using categories that way. Personally, I don't use them that way, but neither do I object to using them that way.  ‒ Robin Hood    03:36, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

:::: The country categories have some use in that you can tell when people are likely to be editing, but I'd be very happy to see the others removed, because you're quite right - they're totally pointless. rpeh  10:46, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

:::::I asked those very questions a while back, but they only resulted in a heated debate. Just like the question of welcoming which users, this is one of those things that people have a strong opinion on one way or the other. The location question can help you determine the active hours of editors, and the gender makes it easier to refer to an editor in third person. The others have no use, at least from a very practical point of view. --Timenn-  11:02, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

::::::I don't remember the specifics of that (though I may well have been involved for all I remember). Do you have a link? I'm wondering if it might be beneficial to create a list of all user categories and selectively get rid of the ones nobody uses (e.g., people would be free to move any category they use to a "Keep" list, then the remainder could be deleted). Or was there some support for the idea of keeping all user categories, no matter how impractical they may seem?  ‒ Robin Hood    22:36, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

:::::::The previous debate is here, and you can get a list of the user categories (pretty much) here. In addition to location and gender, the PC/Playstation/Xbox Users cats are also useful and a couple of the others would be useful if people didn't just add lots of userboxes to feel l337 (Artists, Cartographers, Loremasters). The "Users Knowledgeable About xxx" series are... sort of useful, although they suffer from the same problem. I can't see any conceivable use for the ones that remain. rpeh  11:52, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

 I agree with most of the opinions here; if the categories have no possibility of aiding in editing the wiki or communicating with other editors, there's no reason for 'em.  --GK  19:13, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

:Thanks for the link, rpeh, I'll go through it now and see what was presented. What I was thinking of was making a page (probably just in one of my sandboxes, since it would only need to be around for a week or so) listing all those categories as well as any in sub-categories, plus trying to find any that were missed by using HotnBOThered to look at calls to Userbox Category for categories that haven't been created yet (though some may be more difficult to figure out because they're based on parameters and such...I'll find out if we decide this is the way we want to go). Then once that list is generated, creating a "Keep" section on the page that people could move things to that they'd like to see kept. The one problem with this method is that it doesn't show obvious consensus: a single editor could move all of them to the "Keep" list when in reality, the entire rest of the wiki might be against keeping some or most of them. Personally, though, I tend to agree with the gist of what rpeh and GK have said. I can definitely see uses for some of the categories, but not for most. Using the "What Links Here" for a Userbox would probably do just as well in most cases anyway.  ‒ Robin Hood    20:46, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

:Added note:  ,  ,   and   were the only ones that were parameter-based, so that's not too bad.  &ndash; Robin Hood    21:34, 7 August 2010 (UTC)