Wikipedia talk:Categorizing articles about people/Archive 2

message: The article advised making a list for "for very sensitive material (such as racial or religious categorizations of people)."  But because there are categories for, e.g., African-Americans and Baptists, and because "very sensitive material" is impossibly vague, I deleted that bullet point.  --zenohockey 17:01, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Consider making a list" 

message: I noticed recently that an article about a person, David Bowie, has been categorized by the person's name. In other words, David Bowie has been placed in :Category:David Bowie. David Bowie has not been placed in any other categories. :Category:David Bowie contains just five articles about people and things associated with David Bowie. :Category:David Bowie has been made a sub-category of fourteen inappropriate categories, for example :Category:1947 births. I believe this is illogical and have proposed the deletion of it (and another example I found, :Category:Winston Churchill). This has been universally opposed, the main reason being that the practice is well established and is widely used. Personal categories for ten US presidents was given as an example.
The implementation in the case of the US presidents is different. Take Abraham Lincoln for example. The article Abraham Lincoln is in :Category:Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln has also been placed in 16 other categories not specifically associated with Abraham Lincoln, e.g. :Category:1809 births. :Category:Abraham Lincoln contains 42 articles associated with Abraham Lincoln. :Category:Abraham Lincoln has been made a sub-category only of :Category:Presidents of the United States.
My proposals for the deletion of :Category:David Bowie and :Category:Winston Churchill are likely to be rejected and thus the categories will remain. Proponents of personal categories have indicated that they would like them to be used more extensively. It is therefore appropriate for this guideline to provide guidance about the use of personal categories to categorize people.
Personally, I think the practice should be avoided where possible. I believe (and comments in the deletions proposals support this) that it is in some cases being done to reduce the number of categories at the bottom of an article, in order to make the appearance of the article more pleasing. The real problem here is over-categorization. The solution is already in this guideline, that is, to reduce the number of categories to the 4 or 5 things for which the person is most notable. I added words to this effect to this guideline, but a user has reverted this because it had not been discussed. I've no doubt discussion can bring forth a better form of words. Whatever that is, I think this guideline needs to say something about this approach to categorizing people.
Alan Pascoe 23:19, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categorization of a person by a person's name 

message: I've been adding categories to articles lacking categories, but I'm not sure I've been doing it right.  I've been adding every category that applies, such as American people, Musician, American musician, Hip hop musician, and American hip hop musician.  But after seeing how few people are listed in the American people category, I'm wondering if the intention was to just list the most detailed categories, such as American hip hop musician.  If this is so, please respond and I'll go back and fix the ones I've added.  I also think this article should be fixed to explain this point.  --JeffW 21:22, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Why retract? The discussion or policy is not clear; if logically clear somewhere it is spread over too many pages to be clear. Categorization of people refers to articles such as nationality, and that one explains that there are multiple meanings of nation and nationality. But should every article on someone Irish be put in one or more Irish-named categories? And if so which definition of Irish should be used? Depending on the answer we may need Irish politicians and Irish American politicians? (That is nationality Irish, occupation American politican; to distinguish from both politicians in Ireland and Irish-American politicans in America.) --P64 16:11, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  National and occupational categories interaction 

message: I have just discovered that there is a piece of software (Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser) which is being used to put the categories in alphabetical order. This also means that the years of birth and death come first. I don't think it is even possible to make any sort of sensible case that years of birth and death are the most important or useful categories for a person, so they should not go at the top of the list. The most relevant categories should come first, eg for a President of France, it would be :category:Presidents of France, not :Category:1837 births or :category:1902 deaths. 
The great iniquity here is that a few users who support this policy are able to wipe out vast amounts of effort put into presenting categories in the most useful way using automated software, while doing the opposite takes much more effort. The programmer of this software is taking a hardline, so I think we need to amend policy to have something to challenge him with. I would like to add something along the lines of:
:The categories in a biographical article should be organised by degree of relevance. Thus the first categories should be those which define the main reasons why the subject has an article, or contain those people with whom he or she shares the most defining characteristics. Thus the first listed category for a President of France would be :category:Presidents of France, rather than a year of birth category, or say :Category:Recipients of the Royal Victorian Chain (which is one of Charles de Gaulle's categories). When an article is in many categories it may not be straightforward to choose the best possible order, but think about what is most likely to be useful to the reader.
Any comments? Osomec 23:09, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Look at virtually any biography, birth/death categories going first is by far the most common, this is a clear fact and it has been since way before any software was made to do anything. Martin 23:13, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Even looking through the histories of the articles in the quoted category :category:Presidents of France, it is clear that birth/death cats first has always been the most common format. This is not a "hardline" it is plain common sense. Martin 23:16, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Let's not confuse writing the article with adding the categories.  Putting the birth date first in the article is fine, but that doesn't mean that the category should be listed first.  Ordering the categories by importance has a certain appeal, but it is such a judgement call that it is a recipe for POV edit wars.  I suggest we just order categories alphabetically.  This is easy to-do, easy-to-understand, easy-to-fix if it gets out of order.  It is also "bot-friendly".  A bot that is automatically adding categoires will be able to put the category in the proper place.  A bot can also be written to easily standardize the categories into alpahbetical order. Johntex\talk 18:44, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Wonderful idea with the bot. Agreed on what Johntex said. JackO'Lantern 18:46, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I think that overwhelmingly the Wikipedia custom is birth/death categories first, with subsequent categories grouped according to content (so, for example, categories relating to a person's acting career should go together, as should categories relating to her singing career, and so on. This makes more sense to me, too.  With regard to Osomec's idea, which category is more relevant to a person is sometimes clear but sometimes not, so making it a guideline could give rise to much (pointless) disagreement (I'm in agreement with Johntex on that).  As for bots, though — I think that it's generally a bad idea to set Wikipedia guidelines around them rather than around human editors (and users). --Mel Etitis  (Μελ Ετητης) 22:52, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I just want to voice my objection to the custom that birth/death categories are usually placed first.  I think they are the least useful and should always be placed last. -- Reinyday, 06:48, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Order of the categories

message: * As in our discussion, alphabetizing categories is NPOV.  Deciding ordering of categories based on "relevance"/importance can be POV.  Added comment - and it seems from the discussions above that I'm not the only Wikipedian with this opinion. Seems to be readily recognized that there is an inherent danger of POV problems when deciding on relevance. In addition ("good new articles"), the quality of an article and the categories are really separate issues.  —ERcheck @ 11:24, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Inherent difficulties with sorting by "relevance"

message: I recently came across  and .  I'm rather curious about the utility of these templates.  I don't see how they are helpful to either readers or editors.  Since there is no way to determine which inclusions are disputed, the reader gains no knowledge from the template except that Wikipedia is unreliable.  It's also useless to most editors of the disputed pages.  Apart from the fact that many editors never bother to look at the categories in which a page in included, once again, there is no way to know which pages are disputed.  I don't see these templates supplying any useful information.  It just accepts low quality standards by throwing in a disclaimer.  You might as well add these disclaimers to very page on Wikipedia.  Guettarda 00:05, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Re. "utility": the guideline (Wikipedia:Categorization of people) describes when and how to use these two templates. Did you have any trouble with these descriptions? --Francis Schonken 08:57, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes - I don't see how they are useful.  They don't convey any information other than "our process is unreliable".  That's true for any category.  If someone has a problem with inclusion of an article in a category, they should take it up at the article, and failing a resolution go for WP:DR.  Adding a template to a category isn't helpful - it doesn't identify which articles are disputed.  If a template conveys no useful information, why does it exist?  On the other hand, if a category is inherently problematic, then there should be a clear explanation of the problem on the category page, not boilerplate.  Guettarda 13:56, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disputed cats 

message: Francis recently did a bit of reorganization, and re-added some text that is similar (yet not identical) to text on the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories) policy.  While generally supportive of his changes, there is still too much duplicated between the two.  I tried a more Wikipedia:Summary style approach. 
I'm still not satisfied with the By gender, religion, race or ethnicity, and sexuality section.  I combined the previous terms ("By religion, race or ethnicity" that Francis changed to "By gender, race and sexuality").  The text actually references categories "People by religion" and "People by race or ethnicity", so these should be mentioned in the section header.  But all encompassing is rather long.  Perhaps this could be split?
:--William Allen Simpson 14:12, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Split between policy and guidelines 

message: As I categorize more articles, I see more and more clearer how much careful work was casually wrecked by the alphabeticising bots. There are many examples where people added hidden text to encourage people to sort the categories (nearly always with occupational categories at the top) which have been made a nonsense of the bots. Then there are all the cases where hidden comments have been added to explain individual categories, but these have been sundered from the relevant category. This applies to hundreds of Oscar winners and a good number of other articles. Chicheley 12:42, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There was discussion  at Wikipedia talk:Categorization (now archived) about alphabetizing of categories.  The consensus seemed to be that there was no policy to alphabetize, and we requested on the AWB talk page that it not be used.  However, once something is in a piece of software, it is hard to get people to refrain from using it.  Perhaps the maintainers of AWB could be persuaded to do  a new version that doesn't have it. --Samuel Wantman 19:21, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: From what you say there also was no consensus not to alphabetize, correct? So this means that consensus must be gained on each article? The archive link goes to a page which does not seem to have archives past mid April and I can not find this discussion. Thanks. Doc 21:54, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

text: If you click on the "discussion" link above, you'll see the discussion.  There was only one person who was advocating a policy to alphabetize.  Everyone else seemed to agree that it wasn't always the best idea, and often not a good idea to alphabetize.  There was some agreement to let this be decided case by case, or subject area by subject area.  That said,  I think it is useless to talk about this unless AWB alphabetizing is either removed, or there is a warning whenever it is used.  The warning could be, "CAUTION, there is no established consensus for the widespread alphabetizing of categories.  This should be discussed before implementing.  Alphabetizing categories withoug discussion may upset many editors.  Remember, you are responsible for any edits made with AWB, so discuss alphabetizing with others. Are you sure you want to alphabetize categories?" -- Samuel Wantman 05:35, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

text: The alphabetising option was removed from AWB ages ago, so no warning is needed. Martin 08:50, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for drawing my attention to the correct link for the archived discussion. Since there is no consensus on dates at the beginning or the end and alpha vs. weighting categorys by importance which has, in my opinion POV problems, it would seem to me that if an article is already in alphabetical order with dates at the top, that the burden should be to bring up the discussion on the talk page first before changing an existing order. If after several days no objection is obtained on that article, change away, but consensus on each article should come first. There are clearly strong feelings on both sides of this issue and all parties should try to avoid edit wars. To make a change from existing order, based on one's own POV, without first gaining consensus, is just setting people up. Doc 16:06, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's ridiculous in my opinion. There are around a quarter of a million biographical articles, I am working to improve categorisation of them on a large scale and the rate of objection or reversals of sorting by relevance is miniscule. There is no more need to bring such edits up on the talk page than for any other small edit. Chicheley 13:40, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: From the comments here there seem to be a considerable number of editors that still believe that the alphabetical order with birth and death at the top is preferred. So in my opinion to set up edit wars is also ridiculous. The community here is built on consensus and until we have this to be making massive changes is unreasonable, in my opinion. Your effort will be for nought if the final guideline comes out with alphabetize. I, for one, have held off rv some of your orders solely to not start edit wars, hoping for some consensus to be gained. So far we don't have that. In my opinion you are not improving them when you remove alphabetical order Doc 21:49, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You seem to me to be opportunistically proposing mechanisms to support the status quo because you happen to agree with it. I'm suspect your approach would be very different if they prevailing situation was different. But then the prevailing situation isn't really what you think it is. Across all biographical articles - not just those for prominent people, but all of them - the percentage with pure alphabetical categorisation is small. Even where the bots did there damage alphabeticisation is usually ignored when new categories are added. And as for the prominent people, well very few of those I amend are reverted. I am utterly convinced that I am doing good work and dismiss your attack on my efforts as nothing but a reflection of your poor judgement. Also your ignorance of all the incidental improvements I make as I go along, in terms of setting up new categories, sorting names alphabetically and so on.Chicheley 06:15, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Wikipedia policies are more descriptive than proscriptive.  That means that policies don't come first.  At first, people just do things the way they think makes the most sense.  At some point someone disagrees, and then you need to discuss the problem and come up with some sort of consensus.  When the solution is widely adopted you write a policy.  In this case, since everyone seemed to agree that there is not yet a standard way of ordering categories, there needs to be discussion at the appropriate forum.  In most cases, I think that means discussion in WikiProjects.  If there is a controversy on how to order categories for people, the WikiProject on biographies should be the place to discuss it. -- Samuel Wantman 01:28, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, this is the place to discuss it. I have never looked at the WikiProject on biographies and don't wish to. I can see little point in such an amorphous project and prefer to get on with improving Wikipedia rather than chatting in smoke filled rooms. Chicheley 06:17, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The damage that was done by alphabeticizing bots