philatelic categorization hello can you please bear with me re the categories as i have a massive amount of data to input unfortunately i do not have very much time to spend on the project and all my data has to be reformatted to meet wikipedia s tagging standard i have amended the categories because they lacked structure and there is need for a systematic approach a friend who is a postal expert but only an occasional computer user told me he was going round in circles trying to tie up relevant articles i am an it professional and even i struggled to make any sense of the category structure there should be a single root category and in this case philately is the obvious choice since that is the umbrella term for the entire pursuit philately itself is a hobby or pastime or subject or whatever so it is entirely reasonable that it should also be a sub category of those wider categories i found that philately had such as postage stamps postal markings and postal history as sub categories but philately was also a sub category of each of those which is nonsense and does not help new users equally similar articles such as the postage stamps of a particular country were categorised across the board instead of being allocated to a single category within a hierarchical or relative structure which non it people like my friend can easily navigate after i made a few amendments to the philatelic postal categories i asked my friend to try again and he found what he was looking for immediately this is the benefit of a structured systematic approach whereas philately is the root it splits into two main sub categories one of these is philately per se which could be defined as the study of the physical aspects of stamps e g watermarks types of paper gums etc the other aspect is the actual issue of the stamps for postal purposes and this is all done at the behest of a postal authority on the chicken before egg principle anything to do with issuing stamps and organising collection sorting and delivery of mail is done by a postal authority which is why we believe it must rank as a main sub category along with physical philately the term postal authority is a catchall for any organisation that has issued stamps and processed mail national government army of occupation foreign postal agency etc having said all that i agree that it is a good idea to categorise types of stamp independently of a country s issues and on that basis postage stamps should be a sub category of philately there is a clear difference between the two disciplines i will endeavour to make use of that difference especially as our inputs will fall into both of those categories as i say please bear with us as we have a massive input to make and it will take some time to accomplish