Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Carcharoth (talk | contribs) at 13:02, 31 May 2006 (Massacres categories debate). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Archives
No.	Approx. date/s
Archive 1
Archive 2
Archive 3
Archive 4	to 20 August 2004
Archive 5	to 8 September 2004
Archive 6	to 30 September 2004
Archive 7	to 22 January 2005
Archive 8	to 7 August 2005
Archive 9	to 12 January 2006
Archive 10
Archive 11	(All re professions by nationality)
Archive 12
Archive 13
Archive 14
Archive 15	mid-April 2006
Archive 16
Archive 17
Archive 18

Redirects

I'm relatively new to looking at categories, so please excuse me if this problem has been addressed before. One problem I've noticed is that redirects don't appear under the categories of the page to which they are redirected. For example, I looked for Type I error under category:hypothesis testing, but it's not there, since it redirects (incorrectly in my view, but that's another matter) to False positive. I can see the undesirability of having lots of marginal variations appearing under the category page, but there must also be a lot of cases like this. Is it possible to add categories to a redirect page? JQ 04:59, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes it is possible, and I have done so for Type I error. I believe you have to add the categorization to the redirect on the same line as the redirect because nothing is processed on the page after the first paragraph. I think this is not recommended, but I don't remember off-hand where this is discussed. I don't remember the details, but I'm guessing this should only be done for redirects that could and should eventually become articles, or in cases where there are multiple fairly different names for the same subject, and both are equally likely to be used. Certainly, most redirects should not be categorized to keep categories from getting cluttered with minor variations of the same name. -- Samuel Wantman 08:07, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I've now done the same for Type II error, and this seems like an adequate solution. I didn't know how to edit a redirect page, but now that I can do that, it's just a matter of adding the categories where necessary. I agree that this should be done where there are two alternative titles for the same article, but not for minor variations on the same name. Of course, that's a matter of judgement. Thanks for your help on this JQ 12:15, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

There are a series of templates which essentially add categories to redirects.These categories generally include only redirects though, see Category:Redirects. When creating a series of redirects it's generally a good idea to add also a specific template, e.g. {{Redir from US postal ab}}. Note that such categorization didn't work in all previous versions of Mediawiki. -- User:Docu

Subcategories

Another newbie question. At least on the skin I'm using, the number of subcategories that are displayed for a category page is quite small (variable, but as few as 10), with the rest going on to a subsequent page. I think it would be better to display all the subcategories. If there are too many, that should be addressed by changing the hierarchy or something. JQ 04:59, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

This is a recurrent issue. There are (at least) four ways to deal with this:

1. Depopulate the category into smaller subcategories so that there are only subcategories to display. Personally, I think this is the worst option, and should only be done as a last resort.
2. Display all the subcategories first by piping them with a space or an asterisk. This option is a quick fix, and I would only recommend this if there are a small number of subcategories (a dozen or so), and they are all major subcategories. There is no need to pipe subcategories when they have eponymous articles which also get displayed. Often, those eponymous subcategories do not belong and should be removed from the category.
3. Create a new subcategory to contain all or most of the articles. For example Category:Opera has a subcategory Operas so that the articles about specific Operas do not clutter the category. This is a good option if there is a natural name for the new category, but it is quite a bit of work to set this up.
4. Create one or more new subcategories to contain all or most of the existing subcategories. Categories with :more than just a few subcategories usually have some relationship to each other. They may be "xxx by nationality", "xxx by language", etc... All or most of the numerous subcategories may be organized into just ::a few new subcategories (or even just one). When each new subcategory gets displayed, there won't be any articles to break up the list of subcategories. Since there are likely many less subcategories than articles, this is an easier option to set up than the previous one.

Does this help? If you have a specific problem category, mention it so we can discuss the best option for that category. -- Samuel Wantman 07:56, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm working on Category:Economics, and I think any reasonable listing of subfields, along with some list categories that belong at the top level (economists, economic journals and so on) will get you up to around 20 subcategories. There were more top-level when I started, but I tried to put most of them under subfields As far as I can see, there's no better option that running over to a second page in this case. Your advice would be welcome on this.

I know it's easy to call for a software fix and hard to implement it, but I think displaying more subcategories on the first page is the optimal solution here JQ 20:52, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

The problem in Category:Economics isn't the subcategories, its the article pages. I think that creating a logical subcategory scheme and re-categorizing most of the articles to be under those pages would make it easier to find whatever you're looking for. Fixing your subcategory problem would be a side benefit. --JeffW 21:05, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm hard at work on that very project. I'm currently working mostly on Mathematical and quantitative methods (economics) and I'll report back here when I have something worth looking at.JQ 21:48, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Show documents that fall within several categories

I'm trying to show documents that fall within two categories, does anyone know if there is an easy way to provide this?

I have a lot of design documents and want to be able to create a set of pages that contain only matches that are assigned to a set of categories.

For example, I have document types in categories of "Design Docs", "Test Docs", "V1", "V2" etc. Users want to be able to quickly bring up a list of V2 Design documents.

Is there a better way I should be categorising my documents for this type of groupings?

Apologies if this is a simple request!

(Just checked archive and will look into some more of the search options...someone mentioned using that for multi-cat searching)

• I'm not really sure what you're asking, and from your description I'm not sure that it's something that belongs in Misplaced Pages, but I'll take a stab at your question. An article is put into a category by putting a category tag on it, i.e. ], and there is no reason that you can't put more than one category tag on an article. Does that help? --JeffW 18:48, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Jeff, thanks for the reply, I actually meant to ask this in the MediaWiki site, not the Misplaced Pages site, guess a link took me further than planned! Anyway, yup I've got a lot of document that are assigned to multiple categories, but wanted a way to list documents that were in several specific categories. So at the moment I could go to the "Example Category" page to see all documents within the category "Example Category". If I say tagged 3 documents with an extra category of "Draft", I would want a page that just returned documents that contained both category tags. I could create a new tag "Draft-Example Category" but I dont really want to do this. I'm working on a few other customisations at the moment to a local Wiki, so I'll probably just make some advanced search screens for the users.

Category intersection is not currently supported by the MediaWiki software. There is a tool called catscan that runs on the toolserver copy of Misplaced Pages content, see m:User:Duesentrieb/CatScan. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:23, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Births and deaths

For the hundreds of categories that organize by year of birth and year of death, what are the membership criteria? Is it only for real humans? In other words, what about:

• organizations?
• fictional characters?
• famous animals?

--M@rēino 14:10, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Subcategories of Category:Births by year/Deaths by year are only for people. See Misplaced Pages:People by year. BTW for organizations there is Category:Establishments by year. -- User:Docu

I agree. In a stretch, I would probably allow these categories for famous animals, but not organisations, and certainly not for anything fictional. It's best to keep it for real people only. JIP | Talk 20:57, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Economics categories

As discussed above, I've been working on Category:Economics using the JEL classification codes. I've gone furthest with Category:Mathematical and quantitative methods (economics) including a lot of links to relevant articles at JEL_classification_codes#Mathematical_and_quantitative_methods_JEL:_C_Subcategories. The process showed up a lot of gaps in article coverage. Kevin kzollman made a nice template, which improved the look. I'd appreciate comments, suggestions and criticism. JQ 07:20, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Category Flattening

A good number of the above discussions involve whether articles should be placed in a certain category and its parent category or categories. This is becoming more and more of a problem for me. I recently got yelled at for removing redundant categories from some articles (i.e. I removed (real name not used) from articles that were in ).

I think that this would no longer be a problem if it were possible to "flatten" categories: to have the option to list all articles in a given category, including the ones in its subcategories. Cat Scan on the toolserver does that used to do that before it stopped being updated, but it's not a part of Misplaced Pages itself. The feature request on Bugzilla is the closest thing that I could find there. Ardric47 02:38, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Categorizing sub-lists

I think I brought this up before but I can't find it. When a list becomes too long, a natural thing to do is to make individual pages for sub-ranges and link to them from the main page. When this is done, often it is undesirable to have the subpages be categorized in the same category as the master page. Logically, they're just extensions of the master page and operationally, all access to them should be through the master page.

So, is it ok to leave the sub-pages uncategorized? If I do, they'll get picked up on someones list of uncategorized pages and someone will attempt to add categories to them. Should I create Category:Pages that purposely don't have categories? If I did, what category would I put it in? --JeffW 02:58, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Personally, I have no problem with leaving subpages uncatgegorized. They should have a link to the main article prominently displayed. Another possibility is to make it truly a subpage like List of foo/A-F. I don't know if there is any policy about this, but there are already many Misplaced Pages pages that already do this like WP:RFA. So be bold and suggest a new guideline about subpages and see what type of reaction you get. -- Samuel Wantman 07:20, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that I saw a policy stating that true subpages aren't allowed in the main space. Do you mean to edit an existing guideline page and see what happens, or create a new page and put it on WP:RFC? I'm not sure what the best way is to propose a new guideline. --JeffW 13:58, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, subpages are deprecated. I have no idea where that policy is, maybe Misplaced Pages:naming conventions. -Will Beback 20:49, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

See Misplaced Pages:Subpages, True subpages are not functional in the main namespace. However, you can have article with slashes in the title, which can look exactly like a sub-page, but without the associated functionality. older ≠ wiser 21:01, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Ethnic categorization and ethnic cleansing

I would like to know where it is possible to discuss the policies about ethnicity? Categorizing the French people as an ethnic group, although it clearly is not (see the entry and the talk page: France is a nation-state historically founded on various ethnic groups and which considers this indifferent; it only cares about the individuals', not about their alleged memberships to this or that ethnic group). This is plain confusion between nationality and ethnicity. Such confusion may lead, in certain type of situations, to ethnic cleansings. Therefore, I think we should discuss this, and limit the ethnic categorization stuff to articles in which it is really necessary. Concerning biographies about living people, I'm sure many living people dislike being categorized like this. To categorize people is to divide them, this is not a goal for an open society like Misplaced Pages. We must be careful, lest an encyclopedia, instrument of enlightenment, becomes a hate-monger propagandist. Lapaz 02:28, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Page split of Category:Misplaced Pages categories in need of attention

I've proposed we split some of the text for the header of Category:Misplaced Pages categories in need of attention into a Misplaced Pages: page. Please discuss or leave your oppinions at the talk page. SeventyThree 01:14, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

cat vs. article in cat

If an article has its own category, should that cat always be put in a higher level cat, in place of the article itself? For example, if Mick Jagger were to have his own category, should the category or the article go in the Rolling Stones's cat? Would this rule always apply, or only in certain circumstances? Like, would we also put Mick's cat in the English singers cat, or might it be more appropriate to use his article in this (or any) instance? Is there consensus (or even majority) opinion on this? -Freekee 01:20, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

This causes many disagreements. Unfortunately, I avoid messing with things like that, because people who have been working with certain subjects have their own special way of doing things. Often, I get reverted or yelled at when I try to change something. See Misplaced Pages talk:Categorization#Category Flattening above, too. Ardric47 02:09, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Categorising redirects

Has categorising redirects been discussed here? I've started a debate on this at the Village Pump. Please add your comments there, or ask for the discussion to move here. Thanks. Carcharoth 13:15, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Naming categories help

I would like to subcategorize the entries in Category:Newspaper publishers (people) by nationality. What is the proper name for the resultant categories? Would it be Category:Newspaper publishers (people) by nationality with subcategories such as American newspaper publishers (people)? The idea of the "(people)" part is, presumably, to separate these categories from publishing companies, which are categorized under Category:Publishers and its subcategories with no disambiguator. This leads to the question of whether the "(people)" disambiguator is necessary on further subcategories of Category:Newspaper publishers (people) at all, as these will, if I'm not mistaken, follow the Fooian foos convention, whereas categories for the companies will follow the Xes in Foo convention. Is this correct? — BrianSmithson 19:17, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Re Category:Newspaper publishers (people), I'm not sure that disambiguation parantheses are encouraged... in which case, perhaps names such as Category:People who publish newspapers and Category:Newspaper publishing companies needed...?  Regards, David Kernow 01:46, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Categories to delete

On the 'categories to delete' page, I see what I view as abuse of the page. An editor list one category name, says he does not like it, proposes to delete an entire class (perhaps hundreds) of categories that are named in the same fashion. A half dozen or so editors come on the page to agree; a few disagree and then presumably all the hundreds of categories will soon be deleted. Some of the dislike of these categories are stated in POV terms--no matter, right? Is this how things are supposed to be? Thanks Hmains 02:14, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Harold!  I think deleting a whole raft of categories must be very rare; I don't recall such an event since I began following WP:CfD a few months ago. But I guess that, yes, if such a vote was successful, that's what would happen. There could always be a subsequent vote to reinstate deleted categories if/when people realised what had happened, which yes, if successful, would nullify the original action. I guess that's Misplaced Pages's "modified consensus system". If such an event perturbed enough people, I'd hope it would then become less likely to be repeated; also, there are people like yourself trying to flag potentially undesirable outcomes before time and effort is spent on them. Thanks!  Regards, David Kernow 14:29, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Deaths by cause

Input is requested in a discussion taking place on Category talk:Deaths by throat cancer, which was created as a subcategory of Category:Cancer deaths. —Viriditas | Talk 12:10, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Most deaths are not important enough to warrant categorisation. Please see my responses on that talkpage. JFW | T@lk 12:20, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Massacres categories debate

In case anyone else is interested, there is a debate on categorising massacres (or not) going on at Category talk:School massacres. Thanks. Carcharoth 13:02, 31 May 2006 (UTC)