User talk:Alai/Archive 8 - Misplaced Pages

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by South Philly (talk | contribs) at 02:39, 24 July 2006 (→Pages listed on []). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Archive 1 - Archive 2 - Archive 3 - Archive 4 - Archive 5 - Archive 6 - Archive 7

Category:Automotive companies to Category:Motor vehicle industry

I am asking you to rethink your position on this one. If any category is to be renamed Category:Motor vehicle industry it should be Category:Automotive industry and not this one. Caerwine Caerwhine 07:33, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

The difference between industry and companies in existing Misplaced Pages categories (and this distinction goes way beyond the automotive/motor vehicle sector) is that industry categories deal with the process while companies categories deal with individual firms. Thus an article that for example dealt with how the assembly line changed how cars/motor vehicles were assembled would go in the industry category while an article about the Fnord Motor Company would go in the companies category. Caerwine Caerwhine 07:57, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

I've editted by response slightly to make it clear that if the rename is to Category:Motor vehicle companies, I'm neutral. I find both Category:Automotive companies and Category:Motor vehicle companies understandable, so I'll leave it up to those who have an actual opinion between the two alternatives to make it known. Caerwine Caerwhine 08:13, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Possibly, but since I can't say that from first-hand knowledge, and I'm not interested enough to acquire the first-hand knowledge, I'll leave it to those who do to debate the point. Caerwine Caerwhine 08:22, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Good News/Bad News/Ugly News

Good News: I've started sorting the US-writer-stub with the new stubs and it looks like by the time I'm done, it might actually be all way down to less than overlarge.
Bad News: It's going to take a while to slog through all 15 pages, especially since I'm taking the time to add categories.
Ugly News: A fair amount of double (or more) stubbing, and I'm trying to be conservative. Caerwine Caerwhine 11:44, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

Re: Scope

Ah, I was hoping you'd ask ;-)

The formal scope is actually right on the project page: "any article related to the history of warfare or of military affairs" (emphasis mine). There are two basic ideas that are used to interpret this statement in practice:

Anything not a current event can be considered, for our purposes, to fall under "history".
Anything related to either the (formal) military or to warfare in general (but not necessarily to both) can be considered, for our purposes, to fall under "military".

Obviously, the vast majority of topics will be things like Napoleon or Battle of the Bulge: nice, traditional military history. However, there are a variety of fringe cases that we're also including; for example, the Iraq War (arguably not history yet), or Abraham Lincoln (not formally military—or at least unlikely to be found under Category:Military—but certainly related to warfare in a very major way).

Various other names have been suggested at times—"Military and warfare" was a recent one—but the consensus within the project has been that (a) "military history" is clear enough, at least to the people who'd be interested in taking part in the project and (b) the practical costs of renaming the project aren't worth the minimal semantic gains.

One point that I think should be stressed here: WikiProject scopes and stub or category scopes are subtly different. With a stub or a category, precise definition is beneficial; there is no gain in creating vaguely-defined categories, and no loss in splitting categories apart. With a WikiProject—when dealing with people rather than with articles—the opposite is true: a broad and somewhat hazy-around-the-edges scope is actually a good thing, since it prevents dozens of tiny projects springing up in semantic gaps between existing ones and allows people to join without worrying whether their subject fits within a precisely limited scope. Indeed, there are substantial benefits to having large but active WikiProjects over more narrow—but consequently perpetually undermanned—ones.

But not too broad, of course. All I have in this regard are individual data points: "military history" (by our interpretation of the term) works as a functional project, while something even broader, like "history", doesn't seem to.

There's little reason, in my opinion, to try and make the two types of scopes match exactly, because they're trying to group different things (articles versus people) that don't act quite alike. Kirill Lokshin 06:38, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, that's something you're probably in a better position to answer: which of the relevant stub types (if any) would you say exclude fictional topics? Those are the only significant group of articles that could be tagged with the various mil-*-stubs but wouldn't be in our scope. (It's possible that there are other articles there which are simply tagged with a wildly inappropriate stub type; but there's no real way to predict these, I think.) Kirill Lokshin 06:50, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't really think that's a significant issue. If it's not actually a current event (as in a few days old), we'd have no problems tagging it into the project (or haven't in the past, anyways). Kirill Lokshin 15:01, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Pages listed on Categories for deletion

Discussion on CFD - proposal to merge all subcats of Category:Members of the United Kingdom Parliament from Scottish constituencies up into the main cat. Relevant categories which would be deleted are:

I think that this is a rather important discussion for editors interested in Scotland-related articles, especially Scottish politics and Scottish biographical articles (particularly local history). Please have a read and ponder, and contribute to the debate if you like. Thanks. --Mais oui! 17:39, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

It would also be relevant in this context to consider the discussions in the parent category for the UK parliament: Category talk:British MPs. I find it regrettable that Mais oui! has engaged in a restructuring of that category without entering into the discussions there. --BrownHairedGirl 17:57, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Don't be a WP:DICK

For the record, I have changed no one's comments. I did change the way the stub was listed in the chart. No one in Pennsylvania, that I know of, was notified about the impending deletion, so in fact I was making the change to note that people from PA want the template. I hadn't stumbled across it, it might have gone unnoticed. Civily yours. --South Philly 02:39, 24 July 2006 (UTC)