Wikipedia talk:Overcategorization/Archive 1

message: This is a very good start. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 09:21, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Great work. I support 100%. Kaldari 05:49, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Yes, it is. Categorization has gotten way out of hand. -- Donald Albury 13:01, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

text: This is an edit to show support for this proposal becoming a guideline. ·maclean 07:21, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Ditto. -- Donald Albury 13:01, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Great idea. I'm a bit tired of articles that have too many categories. Hopefully this clears many useless categories. Quality over quantity is the key. RobJ1981 19:29, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good idea 

message: Jc37 said on the main page about defining characteristics that it "Needs to be clearer, could include any and all categories, depending on one's perspective". I think the last line is a reasonable definition: if you could easily leave something out of a biography, it is not a defining characteristic. I'm bringing this to the talk page to get more feedback on clarifying this. (Radiant) 10:29, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds good to me so far; that's why I uncommented it. :-)  — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:38, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Sounds good to me, as well. -- Donald Albury 13:01, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Defining characteristic 

message: The point is not only that the person's opinion must be sourced - it must also be relevant to the character. If a newspaper runs an article on how Bill Gates eats a lot of spaghetti, that still doesn't make "spaghetti lovers" a good category for his article. Note that "membership of a political party" is not such a good terminology here since any minor donator can be consired a member even if he doesn't do active work. (Radiant) 10:33, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree on every point.  — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:39, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Support. -- Donald Albury 13:01, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opinion / issue 

message: I propose reverting the nominees sentence, to discourage all nominee categories.  While I think it's just the kind of thing that's suitable in article text, as a category type I think it's unlikely to be of any enyclopedic value, and especially in the case of the lead example (Oscars) it will be unwieldy to the point of collapse. At very best it is only likely to generate woefully incomplete categories that aren't actually useful or informative, just frustrating and misleading. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:49, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There is not and should not be, a category for Nobel Prize nominees because nominations are secret, and there is no way to verify such nominations. Academy Awards are unusual in that the lists of nominations are a fixed size, winnowed down from some earlier stage of nominations, and very widely publicized and easily verified. Some prizes, such as Grammys, also publicize fixed length lists of nominees, but others don't. Certainly, we should not have lists of nominees for a prize where such lists are open ended and/or not well sourced. I think part is worth more discussion. -- Donald Albury 13:01, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *I've changed it to read we should not cat by nominees period, with the oscars as the (to my knowledge) sole exception. Possibly we should look into deleting it if it's as unwieldy as SMC claims. (Radiant) 10:27, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nominees 

message: Essentially equalled reverting the page.... Any specific reasons? - jc37 11:54, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: "Tweak"

message: Circeus asks, What about subcategories of :Category:Women? That's a good question :) let's discuss it. (Radiant) 13:01, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gender 

message: *Problem:  This category is a POV magnet.  There are many differing views of what an anti-semite is, and it seems impossible to reach a consensus on a NPOV definition.
*CFD History:  Several previous discussions did not reach consensus (links here)
*Possible solutions:
**Rename to a NPOV definition :Category:People labeled as anti-semites.  Precedent: This has worked for categories such as ... (links here)
**Delete category, create a list with annotations. Precedent:  This is the solution disussed in the guidelines for dealing with POV categories.  Precedent:  :Category:Racists...
**Keep, define criteria for inclusion, and police category.  Precedent:This has worked for categories such as... (links here)
*Proposed changes to guidelines:
**None -- Precedent applies
**Allow POV categories, as long as they are labeled as such, and all articles put in the categories have citations to independent sources that document the POV.
*Extenuating circumstances:
**This is a constant source of contention between many wikipedians.  Previous CFD's have been plagued with vote spamming.
*Discussion follows:
--- etc...
:Anyone would be able to add to this template, but the discussion should be limited to discussiong which precedent applies, or whether policy should be modified and why.  Perhaps each discussion should have a moderator/facilitator.  There could be a committee of people who are moderators.  The moderators should not take part in the discussion, but they could remove comments that are outside of the framework, duplicate other comments, or go off topic.  In most cases facilitation is not needed, but in cases where there is not a clear consensus it would probably help.  -- Samuel Wantman 23:30, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[:Category:Anti-Semitic people]]

message: Human nature, as it shows daily on CfD, is to create non-defining categories again and again. I am afraid it is uphill battle to get rid of them, even with support of an official policy. 
I suggest to distinguish categories into primary and secondary, where the primary are strictly regulated as proposed here and the secondary could be used for the less important classification (e.g for the "recipient of ... award" categories). The primary and secondary categories would be visually distinguished (secondary could be hidden by default). It should be possible to add context information like reference to support inclusion of an article in a category.
Example: Josip Broz Tito (the Yugoslavian leader):
* primary categories are: birth and death year and :Category:Yugoslav politicians,
* secondary categories would be all other (12 now),
Having different types of categories would require support by MediaWiki, though. Pavel Vozenilek 15:25, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *Special:Newpages now allows you to choose between namespaces, so you can see new categories, the last 2000 were created in the last four days... Tim! 17:59, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *Out of those 2000, how many (on a rough estimate) would you consider useful? Do we need a "New Categories" patrol? (Radiant) 10:33, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *I find almost it impossible to tell, considering the range of types of categories: user categories, assesment categories e.g. :Category:FA-Class Chinese cities articles, "normal" (article) categories, maintenance categories. I think a new categories patrol is desirable, any volunteers? Tim! 17:53, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *I've already been doing this, from time to time. -- ProveIt (talk) 14:10, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The urge to put everything into categories 

message: Why do we need a guideline to say a category is likely to be deleted? This just a fork of Wikipedia:Categorisation. Tim! 15:41, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The same as the value of any essay or guideline. It's something someone can point to and say "this is what I mean", so that it doesn't have to be written out every time when commenting in CfD, for one thing. - jc37 15:44, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Why do we need this specific guideline though? Wikipedia:Categorisation should be a single comprehensive guideline to categorisation. Fragmenting it obfuscates any benefit of a guideline. Tim! 15:47, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

text: I think this compares to WP:PEREN, only as Perennial (re-)creations. - jc37 15:52, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

text: WP:CAT doesn't address the same ideas as this proposal does. It is also long and sprawling, resembles a scribble pad with all those lines struck out. It needs shaping up and a partial re-write if it is to make this page redundant. Unless and until that happens, this proposal will be useful to have as a guideline. This proposal reflects current practice, clearly explains common category downfalls, and does it succinctly. While possibly too detailed and not worded towards being a policy, this would make an excellent guideline in my opinion and (possibly) a good addition to the manual of style. And yes, it is sort of analagous to WP:PEREN for categories instead of policy proposals. BigNate37(T) 19:21, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

text: *The more obviously bad examples such as Arbitrary inclusion limit would make good examples in the when to use categories section. Tim! 17:56, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why is this needed? 

message: I don't think triple intersection per se is the problem, more intersection of unrelated topics. Obivously the more intersections you do the more likely you are to result in a silly category, but there are quite a few examples of useful triples: American film actors is fine, because film  and acting are very closely related. Tim! 17:55, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This popped out at me as well.  The problem with intersections is not so much that they exist, but that the parents often get diffused into them.  Instead of having meaningful topic indexes we end up with oodles of subcategories that are more esoteric and obscure.  This weakens the usefulness of the entire categorization structure.  So the important criteria is usefulness.  This would be less of an issue if multiple intersections did not diffuse their parents. The other problem with multiple intersections is that they can add a very large number of categories to an article.  So as long as there is a possibility of making an exception to the precedent of triple intersection in cases that clearly have utility, we should do everything we can to discourage them. -- Samuel Wantman 18:33, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: And myself as well. I can think of several cases where triple intersection is not only viable, but badly, badly needed. I realize many of these cases fall into "narrowing of a trait", but that gets fuzzy very quickly. Instead of setting the bar there, I'd like to see it changed to something similar to "arbitrary intersection". Crystallina 19:48, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Reworded, please tell me what you think. I can't think of any useful triple intersections myself (off the top of my head) but there are several things that may look like triples but in fact aren't (I'd consider "film actor" to be a single profession, not two). "arbitrary intersection" as Crystallina suggests is also something to avoid. (Radiant) 10:36, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I would like to hear more opinions on whether "Italian-American <foo>" is all that useful a categorization. Maybe it is in fact a triple intersect (1.foo, 2.in America, 3.of Italian origin). (Radiant) 16:25, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I consider film actors to be an intersection of actors and film or film people, but it is a bit fuzzy, maybe a 2.5 intersection :) Tim! 17:49, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

text: *Perhaps we should say that triple intersections are usually not a good idea, but in the proper setup they can be useful. After all, nobody's proposing to speedy the lot of them. (Radiant) 08:47, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *I think in some cases they are useful.  However there should be a clear reason, and a consensus to keep them. -- ProveIt (talk) 14:15, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm very skeptical of this proposed principle (and my inner pedant wants to point out that these are really "double intersections", given that an intersection necessarily involves two sets).  Guidelines are supposed to codify existing practice, and I see no groundswell against  (obvious NC issue aside) or .  The logic of particular intersections should obviously be justified, though.  Degree of intersection and whether or not to "diffuse" also seem to me to be entirely separate questions, but while categories get ever-larger, and while the software doesn't support intersection, diffusion seems to me to be a practical necessity.  (On the latter, while arbitrary user-queried intersection would probably be the straw the melted the server backbone, some sort of software support would be both feasible and desirable, though it would probably not not entirely eliminated the need for "manual intersection", unless you're going to have union categories in software, too.)  Alai 23:53, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Triple intersection 

message: Looks good overall. Some specific comments - 
*Non-defining or trivial characteristics - My only concern here is that "non-defining" is somewhat vague.  Certainly only facts verified in the article itself should be considered when categorizing, so if a fact isn't even worth mentioning in the person's article it likewise shouldn't be used to categorize them.  But on occasion I'll see a category that some claim represents an important, defining trait while others don't. As an example, :Category:Fictional mutes came up recently. I would consider muteness to be a pretty significant, defining characteristic for a fictional character, putting me in disagreement with Radiant in that cfd.  The point, though, is that the phrase "non-defining" might be overly vague, and perhaps there is a more specific, objective set of criteria that could be used to narrow down the concept.
*Award winners and nominees - The proposed guideline says that the rule of thumb is if an award doesn't have an article, then a person should not be categorized by receiving it.  I would go a step further, and say that most awards should probably use lists instead of categories.  There are many, many awards in the world, all of which consider themselves notable and which contain a great deal of overlap and redundancy.  From a search standpoint, a user can just as easily find a specific award winner from a list article as from a category page, and likewise can tell by looking at someone's article if they won a specific award.  So for the most part, categorizing by awards isn't actually needed, and might possibly create a problem with redundant or less significant awards creating excessive categories on a biographical article.  Therefore I'd suggest considering limiting award categories to only those awards which are particularly prestigious and represent pinnacle lifetime achievements for the winners.  (In other words, use similar guidelines for awards as for "Inclusion in a published list")
*: I strongly concur that the categories for "winner of X award" just add unnecessary clutter. Especially with, for instance, prolific actors, prestigious scientists, and so on, they will have lots of awards.  Lists are much better -- the person can have the list of their awards, and the awards can have the list of their award-winners.  --lquilter 14:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good overall. Specific comments 

message: If each section were to be linked to a few CfD discussions which resulted in deletions for the reasons stated in each section, then this would not be the creation of anything new, but a statement of current practice.  As such, it doesn't need to go through any community approval process, because the page would simply be a guideline based on past precedent.  I think this can easily be done.  I'd do it myself, but I'm leaving town for 10 days in a few hours.  -- Samuel Wantman 07:51, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Turning this into a guideline 

message: We are presently having an awfully chaotic discussion on :fr about the sole question of overcategorization linked to nationality or ethnic origin. Not so broad as your debate, but we lost much more energy. Still running at :fr:Wikipédia:Prise de décision/Catégories par nationalité, identité régionale, ethnie... French Tourist 23:07, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, don't be so rude! The discussion has flown from misunderstanding about what is relevant in fr.wikipedia in term of national categorisation. Hard to find a consensus! There is a major word: relevance, but without a conclusive definition. So let's see if we can decide. Gwalarn 12:50, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  For those who can read French (and are quite masochist) 

message: Just learned about this proposal today, and I really like a lot of what it says. The only thing is I worry a lot about the raw number of guidelines we have on things. The most obvious thing to do would be to merge with Wikipedia:Categorization, but that's a large guideline in itself. I suggest that we do merge the guideline and proposed guideline (once accepted, that is), but also simplify a lot of stuff in Wikipedia:Categorization or at least move the non-vital things to a second page. The points made on this proposal are so good that I think they shouldn't be on a second page, but rather on the first. Thoughts? -- Ned Scott 22:05, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible merge to avoid instruction creep 

message: "non-defining characteristic" should not only apply to people. Added "sexual preference" to race/religion section. Changed "triple intersection" to "overly narrow", and reworded. Added two specific examples. Please copyed. (Radiant) 13:14, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A few additions 

message: I really thought that this one needed to be added to WP:OVERCAT.  It is one of my favorite silly categories so far (although "Religious leaders in 1852" and "Red-haired kings" are also very silly).  Dr. Submillimeter 23:30, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That one is quite silly. It's very obvious that Black African-American DC animated Superheroes with the power to manipulate electricity are fictional. -Freekee 19:55, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category:Fictional Black African-American DC animated Superheroes with the power to manipulate electricity 

message: I have started my own silly category collection here.  This is a POV collection, although I generally select only categories that are deleted by a near-unanimous vote.  It may be useful for gathering ideas on what not to do when creating categories.  Dr. Submillimeter 00:32, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Silly category collection 

message: Earlier I nominated Category:Joey (TV series) for deletion as an unnecessary eponymous category.  Tim! argued that the WP:NOT Wikipedia is not paper policy meant that there is no reason to limit the number of eponymous categories.
I realized that eponymous categories in general might be a good topic of discussion on this talk page.  I think most of us would agree that it would be silly for most articles to have their own category (eg. Category:Dandenong Southern Bypass, Category:Ken Duken, a category named after every film and tv show and stage show and book, etc.).  At the same time, there are some exceptions involving articles that are particularly notable and/or have articles that span multiple types of topics or genres (eg :Category:James Bond, which covers multiple movies, books, actors and other items from different areas of knowledge.)
So in general, it's a bad idea for most articles to have their own unique eponymous category, but under what circumstances should exceptions be made? And would this be something useful to outline in this guideline? Dugwiki 20:24, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: P.S.  Feel free to give your feedback on the Category:Joey (TV series) cfd I mentioned.  In that case, the category has only one article and one subcategory for episodes, and the episode subcategory is already categorized under :Category:Episodes by television series so doesn't need another unique parent.  On top of that, anybody seeking articles related to Joey can simply visit the main article and click on the appropriate link; there is no perceivable need to visit "Category:Joey" when you can simply go to "Joey" instead. Dugwiki 20:29, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

text: My main criteria for categories is "are they useful and is the topic studied".  So for an eponymous categories, there should be books about the topic, or academic courses taught for them to be "studied".  The "utility" part implies that the category should have some utility that is not found elsewhere.  The measure for this, in my way of thinking is "are all the articles related to this topic already cross linked to the eponymous article?" and if they are not "Can a short list of 'See also' entries be added to the article instead of this category?".  The other consideration is "Are there articles that are only belong in the eponymous category and nowhere else?".  So if the topic is studied, there's a reasonable number of articles, that might be difficult to find from the eponymous article, and/or there are orphans that have no other category to reside in, keep the category. -- Samuel Wantman 22:12, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Eek! Sorry I missed this one. I would have strongly advocated "delete".  I've requested the closing admin to change it to "no consensus" and I'd support more "cfd-ing" of these categories.  I think they frustrate users when they entice you away from an article with numerous links to a category with few.  They have negative utility. -- Samuel Wantman 21:15, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Eponymous categories 

message: The project page has the following section
;Arbitrary geographical grouping
:Examples: Roman Catholic Bishops from Ohio, Quarterbacks from Louisiana, Male models from Dallas, Texas
:Avoid subcategorizing items by geographical boundary if that boundary does not have any relevant bearing on the items' other characteristics.  For example, quarterbacks' careers are not defined by the specific state that they once lived in (unless they played for a team within that state).  However, geographical boundaries are useful for dividing items into regions that are directly related to the items' characteristics (for example, Roman Catholic Bishops of the Diocese of Columbus, Ohio or New Orleans Saints quarterbacks).
The exceptions given to this principle are not geographical units, per se. The 'Diocese of Columbus, Ohio' is an administrative unit of the Catholic church. While it may have defined geographical boundaries, I don't think you would say that someone lives in the Diocese, but you could say that someone is a member of a parish in the Diocese (I'm speaking of usage in the U.S. here). 
The 'New Orleans Saints' is definitely not a geographical identifier. It is a team name. At the most, team names represent primary media audience regions.
Of course, I can't think of any pertinent examples to substitute here. Maybe there are no valid exceptions. -- Donald Albury 12:57, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the geographical boundaries of the example exception categories are not "real" geographical boundaries.  However, the point is perhaps to show how place names should and should not be incorporated into category names.  (Part of the purpose of this section is to deal with problematic categories on clergy created by one specific user.)  Maybe the language in the section can be rewritten to reflect this.  Dr. Submillimeter 14:19, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Examples that are beside the point 

message: Tim! made a recent change in that section that made sense, so I altered the wording of the provided example. The previous example talked about bands or record labels, but Tim correctly pointed out that records-by-artist is probably an exception to the potential growth rule.
I revised the wording in that section to specify that one exception to the rule is when you have a well accepted categorization scheme, such as :Category:Books by author, which subdivides large numbers of articles into categories, some of which might be small.  For example, even if an author only has one or two books, it would still make sense to create a category for his books to fit within the Books by author sorting scheme.  
Obviously if there is a problem with the wording I used feel free to correct it or comment on it here. Thanks. Dugwiki 18:30, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I put in the specific example :Category:Songs by artist, whose category description emphasizes that all songs should be subcategorized there, regardless of how many songs the artist has recorded (meaning that some subcategories contain only one or two songs). Dugwiki 21:27, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  No potential for growth change