Wikipedia talk:Category names/Archive 6

message: *As a guideline it puts quite some weight on the "by country" problem - since that was obviously the problem that needed solving I want to give this proposal that part of "community blessing" (however small) I can give it. --Francis Schonken 06:29, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: New comments

message: No substantive edits have been made to this discussion in a few weeks - can it be brought to a close? -- BD2412 talk 00:42, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can we bring this discussion to a close? 

message: I point out a renaming vote is in progress at WP:CFD#Category:Images of United States (SEWilco 15:30, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem is that 48 out of 49 national categories are in "X images" format, while the subcategories of :category:Images of places are in "Images of X" format. But apart from the categories for U.S. states "Images of places" is almost empty. Thus we have two different standards and :Category:Images of United States is the intersection point. I favour "Images X" because not all the images in these categories show the whole of the place named. To me, "Images of the United States" only completely appropriate for satellite photos. An image of say a Harley Davidson is an image "from" or "taken in" the United States. Thus it's easiest to stick to "United States images" to cover all types of images, and all the continental and US state categories should be amended to reflect the convention used for countries. CalJW 01:52, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Please see Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2005 September 30#Subcats of Category:Images by country for discussion about creating a convention for its subcats. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:40, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Renaming in progress of Images of United States 

message: Could someone tell me where there was a debate about renaming these all to include "soccer". I believe this is U.S. centric. If there was a debate, how many non-North Americans were involved? There is a clear precedent for not using the word soccer in that it is not used in the vast majority of national venue categories at present and it is not used for players/managers/clubs/competitions categories either. CalJW 03:39, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The discussion is presently occurring at Wikipedia:Categories for deletion#Subcategories of sports venues by country categories (non-speedy).  This discussion (at CFD) is precisely about changing the convention from "fooish football venues" to "football (soccer) venues of foo".  CFD is the proper place for this discussion, in accordance with  Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories). -- Rick Block (talk) 04:26, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Football venues

message: I point out that a rename is proposed for CFD:Category:Afghanistan images. (SEWilco 19:25, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category rename Afghanistan images to Images of Afghanistan 

message: Do people agree the page asserts nationality is to be used with regards to categorisation of people? 
Hiding  talk 10:16, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Over 80% of the categories use "American", and that is the form we should be working towards. This is the English language Wikipedia and it should use normal English. CalJW 11:44, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Nationality

message: The categories in :Category:Ships by nationality need to be sorted out. Most are in the X ships form, but there are also some "Ships of X" - including some duplicate categories for prominent countries. CalJW 05:53, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Ships categories are a mess

message: This guideline says: "Category names for lists of items should be plural. Examples: "sports", "writers".". But here is the problem. As explained in this discussion, both sport and sports could refer to all the athletics in the whole. So I suggest fixing this in guideline. --Monkbel 12:13, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Good eye.  I've gone ahead and substituted in a different example, "sports venues."   I trust this is acceptable to all? -The Tom 05:59, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure. It seems that sport venues could be used as far as sports venues, as per above... see :Category:Sport venues in Northern Ireland, for example. May be you should change it to something like.. :Category:Cathedrals by country, or Rivers, or whatever. --Monkbel 06:42, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: So it is, too. I thought we had agreed back on CFD that "sports venues" was correct regardless of the sport/sports divide.  Rivers it is. -The Tom 21:53, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sport or sports; should change the guideline 

message: I've been noticing a lot of edits lately to biographies to add categories to list people from certain cities.  The category that these sub-cats can be found in is :Category:American people by city.  They usually read "Akronites" or "Chicagoans" or some such thing.  Shouldn't these be named "People from Akron, Ohio" or "People from Chicago, Illinois" respectively?  Thanks, Dismas|(talk) 17:00, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  People from "City X" or "City X'ers" 

message: I noticed, when looking at :Category:Maps, that there are a number of very poorly grammatically constructed cats there, such as :Category:Asia maps (instead of either :Category:Asian maps or:Category:Maps of Asia),:Category:Greece maps, etc. Almost all of the pages in the Maps cat were in the ungrammatical form of noun modifying noun, rather than adjective modifying noun, and I imagine that this form exists in other cat titles as well. Is there a reason that this is the case? Is there a convention somewhere which I'm missing? I've searched, and couldn't find anything. I did see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (adjectives), but that refers to pages about adjectives (such as eloquent), not all pages with adjectives in them. If there isn't already a convention about this, then I'd like to propose one: When creating page titles, use correct grammar unless by doing so you would contradict other WP policies or violate common sense. Any thoughts? Anyone know the current rules? --Blackcap | talk 01:23, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adjectives vs. nouns in category titles? 

message: Currently categories that group ethnic groups by country generally use "of country" in their name.  For example, :Category:Ethnic groups of Canada.  However, there currently is no listed guideline at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories) of how such ethnic groups by country categories should be named.  For several reasons, I am proposing that ethnic groups by country categories be named "in country", such as :Category:Ethnic groups in Mexico.
The existence of some ethnic groups, such as indigenous peoples, pre-date the formation of the countries that they are now located in.  For example, see the First Nations or Inuit in Canada, or the Awá in Brazil.  If the ethnic group existed prior to the formation of the country, then the word "in" is more accurate than the word "of", and avoids implying belonging.  A Google search also confirms that generally "in" is more widely used than "of" in describing ethnic groups by country.  See Google searches for "ethnic groups in Australia" vs. "ethnic groups of Australia", and "ethnic groups in France" vs. "ethnic groups of France". 
The choice of "in" instead of "of" has also been made through debate or has not been objected to for several ethnic group articles including Aboriginal peoples in Canada, Indigenous peoples in Brazil, and Indigenous peoples in the United States. Kurieeto 21:07, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This strikes me as a reasonable proposal, although personally I think making sure that the "Ethnicity" and related articles makes these points clear in their contents is more important than naming conventions.  Be that as it may, I can't object to this proposal though I hope many others weigh in. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 22:20, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

text: I prefer "in" over "of", but not because of any politically correct issues over historicity.  There are a number of ethnic groups who as of today are not confined to a single country, such as the Iriquois, Rroma, Tutsi, and Punjabi.  Such groups can't really be described accurately by the preposition "of", but "in" is accurate. Caerwine 07:19, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Support for the reasons Caerwine mentions — ethnic groups often span more than one country. Luigizanasi 21:10, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

text: A week has passed since the last comment about this proposal, and overall there have been no expressed objections to using the wording "in country".  I've therefore made a formal proposal at Wikipedia:Categories for deletion to make "in country" an official guideline, and to rename all the "of country" worded ethnic group-country categories to use the wording "in country". Kurieeto 18:02, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ethnic groups by country categories 

message: At the moment, categories for countries can be speedily renamed to follow frameworks. Similar categories for parts of countries and for cities are taking up a lot of WP:CFD. Should speedy renaming be extended, and should “same spelling” also include “same disambiguation”, which is rarely an issue for countries? Susvolans ⇔ 20:27, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Relating to this proposal I've put in a request at today's CFD to rename some 'ethnic groups by region' categories to follow the naming conventions of the 'ethnic groups by country' categories as established here.  Should our naming conventions as established here have a scope of for categories by region, instead of categories by country?  Changing to "region" would allow for the application of naming conventions to entities that are above and below the country-level. Kurieeto 20:44, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal: Extend per-country conventions to parts of countries 

message: Articles that are lists are named "List of..." to eliminate ambiguity. Why isn't the same practice followed for categories that are lists? This article points out that :Category:Opera and :Category:Operas are distinct categories. That is ridiculous! It's way too easy to make mistakes. In the article namespace, Operas redirects to Opera. The list of operas is at List of operas. To be consistent, and much less confusing, :Category:Operas should be renamed to :Category:List of operas. In general, any category which is a list should use the "List of..." convention, just as articles do. Mirror Vax 17:13, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: All categories are lists, so naming them "list of" would be redundant.  Specifically, :category:opera is "list of articles about (the generic topic of) opera" while :category:operas is "list of articles about (specific individual) operas".  Perhaps :category:opera (and similar categories) could be renamed something like :category:opera (topic). I think by quite a large margin most categories are lists in the sense you're thinking of, so at this point it would be highly impractical to rename them.  There are fewer topic categories, but still likely so many that renaming all of them is also likely to be quite impractical.  Perhaps there are few enough cases like :Category:Opera and :Category:Operas that something could be done where both exist.  -- Rick Block (talk) 19:13, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure, but my guess is that most categories are not lists (as in, category Z is a "List of Z"). Of the eight top level categories, only one (:Category:People) is a list. Many categories have list-like names but are not lists (perhaps they were originally intended as lists - who knows? - but people placed related articles in them, because it was the closest category fit). The main point is that the meaning of categories is often not clear, and depends on subtle grammatical distinctions. Mirror Vax 19:52, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I'm not arguing this is a bad idea, simply that it's not practically possible (so it doesn't really matter whether it's a good idea or not).  If you want to pursue this, you might want to try to drum up support at Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories.  I certainly agree that the meaning of categories currently depends on subtle grammatical distinctions.  -- Rick Block (talk) 01:06, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As it stands, most people don't worry about topic/list distinctions. If there's a plural "list" category available (e.g. :Category:Operating systems), they hardly ever create a singular "topic" version (e.g. :Category:Operating system). It's not a natural and intuitive thing to do. So categories that begin as lists inevitably mutate into topics. Maybe that's okay? Mirror Vax 04:52, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Since categories don't have any formal semantics, yes I think it's okay.  There's no real enforcement for what goes into what category, and I think there is even fairly widespread disagreement about the fundamental purpose of categories, which leads to a variety of what I suspect are unresolvable issues (like whether "list" categories can/should contain only articles that are members of the list - for example, there is sometimes contention about whether an article list of things should be in category: things).  I think the root issue might be that some users want category membership to have a precisely defined meaning in a theoretical database or ontological sense while other users view categories simply as a navigational convenience, and allowing anyone to edit means the first camp has an uphill fight.  -- Rick Block (talk) 15:35, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the insightful comments. Mirror Vax 19:54, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Naming convention for list categories 

message: Several of my attempts at Cfr's to follow this standard were struck down (Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2005 December 22#Category:U.S. aircraft to Category:American_aircraft and other sections).  I guess these need to be reconsidered?  wknight94 17:39, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The computer program named User:Kbdank71 renamed some of them, but not others. So it's nice and random. Mirror Vax 18:32, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I assume you realize User:Kbdank71 is, in fact, a person.  He's one of not very many people who carry out the consensus decisions made at WP:CFD - the randomness is not due to him but to the nature of CFD consensus (different people vote on different days, etc.).  If Kbdank71 got to make the decisions himself my guess is that they'd be a whole lot more consistent.  -- Rick Block (talk) 01:13, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, that process seems to need a lot of help.  Not the carrying out of the consensus but the process of gathering a consensus.  There's not much point spending time coming up with naming conventions - like on this page - only to have one of the categories sneak back in to Cfr or Cfd and get overturned by people who didn't participate in this page to begin with.  Total waste of time and I'm unlikely to continue participating in cleanup and consistency efforts in the future.  wknight94 02:25, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Renames struck down