Wikipedia talk:Overcategorization/Archive 6

message: Check out the cast lists posted here.  Many of these used to be the categories we worked hard to get rid of. Now many are being nominated for deletion.  Some people are saying that they should be categories!  I hope these don't get deleted.  If they do, people will start recreating the categories.  Rather than try and get rid of all the "cruft" in Wikipedia, we should be finding the most appropriate spot to put it without deleting it.  This way, we could all stop all the constant deletion discussions.  I don't know about the rest of you, but I am getting pretty tired of xFDs and find that they are becoming a bigger and bigger drain of my energy and time on Wikipedia. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 07:18, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This is not as bad as it sounds.  Some of these cast lists are redundant with the cast lists in other articles.  Still, quite a few people are advocating turning these lists back into categories, which would be highly disruptive.  Other people are strongly encouraged to comment on this.  (I will go inform User:Otto4711.)  Dr. Submillimeter 08:52, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

text: Cast lists should almost never be done as categories because it's unnecessary for navigation, potentially adds a large number of categories to actor pages and creates additional maintainence for little to no benefit to the reader.  Generally speaking the minimum bar for making something a category is HARDER than that for making something a list. So people advocating turning cast list articles into categories are misguided, and I'd suggest making that comment on afds in that regard if you see it. Dugwiki 15:56, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Former cast list categories nominated for deletion and ''Categorization''! 

message: As a recent example I just saw: Chris Jericho. He has 4 "people from" categories (and I would imagine some articles are worse. Is it really notable to list each and every place they lived in a category? If someone lived in Houston, Texas for one day: would that mean the category must be listed?  As another example: let's say a person was born somewhere, then moved throughout the world because of their parents being in the military. Would all those locations need to be listed? This seems to be clear overcategorization to me.I didn't see anything about this, but if there is something about it.. point it out to me. Frankly, something should be in place, otherwise category clutter of locations will be worse. I can understand one, possibly two locations...but when it gets to be more it's a problem. Something such as "the person must've lived there for 5 years or more" for it to be listed as a category, would be appropriate in my view. RobJ1981 20:02, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I briefly toyed with the idea of nominating the entire :Category:People by city hierarchy for deletion.  I know that a lot of people are dissatisfied with the hierarchy.  Maybe it is worth pursuing.  The category tree is so vast, however, that it is impossible to tag all of the categories.  The nomination would need to be broadcast somehow across all of Wikipedia.  Dr. Submillimeter 22:58, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

text: I think the main minimal criteria would be that the article itself has to a verifiable reasonably significant mention of the location being categorized.  So for most articles that would mainly include where the person was born and where they currently reside at the time the article was written.  In some cases, like Chris Jericho, the article mentions one or two other transitory locations where the person did something significant.  In Jericho's case, he officially bills himself as having been from both New York and Canada, and he currently resides in Florida.  Therefore he might very well be a reasonable case where you have three or four different category locations.  Note that it's unlikely you'd have an actual significant and verifiable mention of more than two or three or four locations within a single article (odds are that if the person only lived there very briefly it wouldn't even be mentioned.) Dugwiki 15:36, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Multiple location categories, is it overcategorization?

message: Just an FYI since I'm pretty sure this will be of interest to some of you I've posted a thread at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethnic groups#Occupations by ethnic or national descent proposing that some of the categories under "occupations by nationality" be moved to "occupations by ethnicity".  The reason is I noticed that, for example, things like :Category:Jewish comedians were listed as "occupations by nationality", but in this context the word "Jewish" was referring to ethnicity and not nationality.  (Jackie Mason, for example, is of Jewish ethnicity but his nationality is American.)  Therefore things like "Jewish occupations" which refer to ethnicity need to be moved out of the occupations-by-nationality schemes and into something like "occupations by ethnicity".
Currently I need to wait for the results of a merger to be resolved before I can proceed, but I'm taking feedback on titles for the new category scheme at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethnic groups#Occupations by ethnic or national descent.  I mention this here because I recall quite a bit of interest in OCAT discussions regarding ethnic categorization, so feedback from the regular posters here is most welcome. Thanks! Dugwiki 15:34, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Regarding occupations by ethnicity  

message: I am curious to see if any editors may realize that categories like :Category:People from New York City or :Category:People from Dallas may need to be broken down in some logical way. This currently is not possible due to the intersection by location guideline, which leaves room for states but not large cities. Please see :Category:People from Cincinnati for examples on an attempt to break down the large category. The subcategories all will deleted eventually due to various nominations. All have not been nominated, but will be eventually. Since I founded WikiProject Cincinnati, I wanted to find a way to better organize categories pertaining to the city. I believed that the project would also give more weight to such categorization, but also knew I'd face challenges. If I were a researcher trying to do a book or paper on Cincinnati, such categories would be very useful for me in such a pursuit. For instance, if it was about science I would have :Category:Scientists from Cincinnati. If I was doing a paper on law in Cincinnati, there would be :Category:Jurists from Cincinnati. None of these will exist pretty soon, and they will just get merged right back into :Category:People from Cincinnati. Does anyone perhaps see such categorization as undercategorization, or am I alone in this sentiment? I'm just curious to know how I go about gaining consensus for a change to that guideline, as I think it works well for smaller cities but not well at all for larger ones. My proposal is that we allow cities with very large categories of people to be broken down by umbrella occupations. Not, ie. "Cincinnati musicians, but "Musicians from Cincinnati". This would allow for categorization of people born in Cincinnati, and those articles where that person has a very strong connection to the city. I ran into no trouble breaking categories pertaining to Cincinnati except those pertaining to persons. (Mind meal 21:56, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: One big problem with an intersection approach is that it is geometrically multiplicative in the abstract; while career and location are 2 dominant variables in biographical searches, there are plenty of others - ethnicity, gender, religion, politics, etc. You could easily end of with :Category:Jews from Cincinnati, :Category:Atheists from Cincinnati, :Category:Women from Cincinnati, etc., etc., creating truly absurd numbers of categories. Furthermore, without getting to fine detail (e.g. lumping painters, sculptors and illustrators into "fine artists"), one of the standard occupational categorization systems has over 800 occupations (see Bureau of Labor Statistics - Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) System). The intersection approach will ultimately give Cincinnati a very large number of sub-categories. Personally, I find it easier to search for such intersections with Google; for example, if I want to know if there are any notable gay architects from Cleveland, I search Google with: "People from cleveland" LGBT architects site:en.wikipedia.org. It would be nice if there was a Wikipedia Special page for searching on intersections, unions, and other set relations of categories, but I'm not aware of one - yet. It would also be nice if the [[WP:PDATA|Persondata system] had more attributes (and was more heavily adopted), but single attribute categorization works well enough for me. Studerby 00:23, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia:Category intersection is a proposal for a category intersection system. Carcharoth 00:25, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Intersection by location

message: There is a bit of controversy at the moment about such articles as List of Rajputs and List of Poles. What do we think, would this be better represented as a category, or as a list, or both? Perhaps we can add something to either this page or OLIST. >Radiant< 11:21, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I won't go into the details on this page, but I posted a fairly lengthy reply on what I don't like about the current OLIST proposal (which was pretty much every section).  I would in fact say that there were almost no sections I agreed with on OLIST when it comes to handling lists. Dugwiki 14:46, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lists of... 

message: Does anyone object to adding a note to the performer by performance section to clarify that people shouldn't be added to project-specific categories? In other words, if we don't have :Category:TV Show X people then the people from TV Show X shouldn't be added to :Category:TV Show X? I would've thought that this would be self-evident but apparently it's not, so, any problem with it? Otto4711 01:31, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Probably a good idea, though it strikes me that several of the OCAT sections should have something similar. I'll see if I can come up with something generic for the introduction. - jc37 08:56, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I added a sentence to the specific section. Otto4711 03:15, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Performer by performance 

message: These categories group closely related items and are useful for readers. The campaign against them seems to aim to reduce the number of categories as an end in itself. The number of users who have created such categories is vast, but only a few users (only one principal) are regulars in the deletion process. Thus it is evident that the many who create these categories represent the consensus, while those who delete them are a minority who have enjoyed success simply due to persistence. This reveals a key weakness of Wikipedia, ie that power goes to those who are most active, not to the majority or to those with the strongest arguments. Postlebury 13:17, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The fact that hundreds of people make bad articles or categories doesn't make them any less bad.  People make mistakes all the time but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be corrected.  So rather than counting the number of such categories that are erroneously created, it might be better to consider how many such categories have been deleted and their deletions supported by the admins.  In the case of eponymous categories, the reasoning behind the guideline is fairly clear, and it has been held up numerous times on cfd. That consensus of actual cfd results and the rationale behind it is what forms the basis for having the eponymous section in this guideline.  Dugwiki 16:25, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

text: Or to put it another way, the people who nominate eponymous categories for deletion are not the people deleting them.  Rather the deletions are carried out by the closing admins who aren't taking part in the cfd discussion itself.  So if the arguments against these eponymous categories were without merit or significantly disputed, it's quite likely the admins would likewise not delete them. The fact that so many of them get deleted is further indication that the people who actually control the delete button are accepting the deletion arguments. Dugwiki 16:32, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you are over-stating the role of admins here and assuming they are infallible and that admins never let their own opinions sway their judgement (they shouldn't, but it happens). Admins should use their experience to point out when policies should over-ride a consensus, but to say the deletions are "supported by the admins" sets them up in the role of judges. In fact, the community is doing the judging, and admins should close as "no consensus" when there is no consensus. Carcharoth 09:34, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Families and bands

message: I noticed a few actor-by-film-genre categories today that seemed a little questionable.  Specifically, I noticed :Category:Action film actors, :Category:Western film actors and its subcategory :Category:Spaghetti Western actors.  Each of these includes actors who are in a lot of movies of that type.  So Clint Eastwood, for example, appears in all three since he's done action movies, westerns and spaghetti westerns.
It's the Clint Eastwood thing that makes me wonder if this actor by film genre scheme is a good idea.  Prolific film actors are going to appear in many different film genres, or even possibly all the major film genres.  I'd be worried that if this caught on with, say, "Sci-Fi film actors", "Horror film actors", "Comedy film actors" and other things it might be a bit of a clutter.
However I didn't feel quite strongly enough about these to immediately recommend deletion.  It's more of a gut feeling.  Since you folks tend to have strong opinions on performer-by-performance type categories, I thought I'd put these categories here for feedback.  Do you think they're worth keeping, or should they be looked at more closely for possible deletion? Dugwiki 22:30, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: *I think your instinct is right. Actors cross genres from film to film and just with the two you mentioned there's already sub-genre fragmentation. Categorizing them by genre is going to lead to untold numbers of categories that add little nagivational or organizational value. Otto4711 03:58, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

text: This would seem to be quintessential list material to me. Not only to reference the term in question (such as Spaghetti Western), but also to verify each actor's inclusion, and even to list the including films. - jc37 12:52, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

text: I'm with y'alls in saying this is overcategorization.  The CfD Otto pointed to narrowly came down to a keep (by no consensus), on the basis that it is similar to :Category:Musicians by genre, which also strikes me as potential overcat, though less so; it is much easier to jump from a soap opera to an action film to a sitcom, than to go from playing classical to jazz to speed metal.  Even so, the propensity to invent new sub-sub-sub-sub-genres every other month it seems, vs. the rate at which new musical instruments are invented, suggests to me that :Category:Musicians by instrument would be a better subcategorization scheme. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont]  ‹(-¿-)› 00:14, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Actor by film genre categories? 

message: (I found my previous suggestion here)
:Persons by <creative work> 
:"Persons" in this context are those who create the creative works. Examples: Artisans, blacksmiths, violin makers, bakers, artists, sculptors, producers, cinematographers, jewellers, engravers, brewers, etc. 
:"Creative work" examples: a sculpture, a painting, a diagram, a blueprint, a theory of mathematics, a novel, a dictionary, an article, a blog, a web site, a cake, a carpet, a bookshelf, a bridge, a galley, a pocket watch, a bell, a computer, a video game program, a programming language, a television show, a slide show presentation, a log cabin, an igloo, etc. 
Thoughts? - jc37 09:04, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think my recent futzing with the performers by performance and vice versa section obviate the need for this, though I can't think of any particular reason to not generalize the language, and use performers as an example.  Doesn't seem very crucial to me, though.  :Category:NASCAR sponsors will almost certainly be successfully CfD'd on the basis of P-by-P, even without the broadening I introduced to that part of WP:OCAT. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont]  ‹(-¿-)› 00:20, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Persons by creative work

message: Here is a proposal for a fundamental principle to be followed when categorising a topic:
In a dispute as to the correct way to categorise a page or subject, the considered opinion of the relevant wikiproject should have priority over the categorisation guidelines.
This states no more than that the folk who are interested in a topic are in the best position to decide how that topic should be categorised. I suggest that this, or a similar wording, be incorporated into this guideline. Banno 10:09, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, no. I'd say that those who are knowledgeable in an area should have more latitude in categorizing, but WikiProjects are sometimes just enthusiasts without knowledge (though many do include experts). There is often a tension between category specialists and those with knowledge in a subject area. In reality, Wikipedia should have no experts, in subject areas or in Wikipedia specialities, like categorizing. But in reality both exist. Carcharoth 17:14, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It would be a profound error to allow "experts" on categorisation to determine the category structure - on a par with having the librarian take sole responsibility for the curriculum. An enthusiast is more likely than a disinterested passer-bye to have a grasp of the overall structure of a topic, and to be willing to put the time into getting the categorisation right. In the end, this is the premise on which Wikipedia is founded. When there is "a tension between category specialists and those with knowledge in a subject area", the later should have right of way. Banno 20:58, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. I just don't think that WikiProjects are always the best way to find those with a knowledge in a subject area. Those enthusiastic about a subject area, sure, but not always those with a good grounding in knowledge. Some WikiProjects are very good in this respect, some aren't. Carcharoth 23:59, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: As far as knowing what a logical arrangement for a topic's categorization system is, I don't think there really would be a difference between an "enthusiast" and an "expert", since both are going to be informed about the topic a lot more than outsiders to it will be. --tjstrf talk 00:05, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

text: If you agree, perhasp you might set out an alternative wording, to the effect that the opinion of wikiproject members should receive due consideration? We might be able to reach a compromise position. I think that something along these lines is needed, in order to avoid "top-down" (mis)management of categorisation, in which the opinion of category specialists is inflicted on an unwilling community. Banno 05:16, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

text: PS - Imagine, for example, Wikiproject:Supercentenarians, or Wkiproject:Prelates. Nuff said.  Johnbod (talk) 03:21, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: The priority of wikiprojects in deciding categorisation issues.

message: From the debate  here it has emerged that we don't yet cover such categories in the  guideline.  Not many come up, but it is probably worth including a section.  My shot at it (to go after "Unrelated subjects with shared names"):
Negative qualities
:Example: European countries that never qualified for a major football tournament. 
:Avoid categorising by something that has not happened, or other negative qualities of the members of the category.
- comments, and other examples, please! Johnbod (talk) 17:38, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, that's all good. Johnbod (talk) 02:47, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Negative qualities" 

message: I can see not adding every award category to an article, say on Mother Theresa. But for minor people, I see no reason not to have their awards in categories, it ties them to similar people, and is an excellent navigation device. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 06:28, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: But then there'd be debates about who's minor enough to warrant this. The articles for the specific awards allow for this type of navigation. –Pomte 06:50, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Awards