Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Category:Fictional gods and Category:Fictional goddesses

Category:Fictional gods and Category:Fictional goddesses

These were merged into Category:Fictional deities.

We already had the category "Fictional deities" that could contain the elements of both these categories -- especially since those categories weren't that thickly populated (4 or 5 elements in each, I believe). Moreover the rest of the whole Category:Fictional characters structure doesn't tend to use different subcategs to contain male and female characters. Therefore I merged the few elements of Fictional gods and Fictional goddesses back into "Fictional deities" (noone objected since yesterday in their Talk pages I posted comments in either), and here ask the deletion of these two. Aris Katsaris 21:52, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I object (darn, I wasn't watching those pages). Why not split into male & female categories? The sex of pantheistic deities is pretty fundamental to their nature, IMHO. Also, these categories make it easy to distinguish between deities who have a sex and those who don't.

Seems to me that they had a decent amount of articles, especially when you consider their subcategories (gods & goddesses of D&D).

I don't understand why people are so keen to delete categories, when they have a clear purpose.

Oh, and also, from the top of this page: Do not depopulate the category (delete category tags from articles) until it has been voted for deletion. ··gracefool |☺ 22:05, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The gender of *any* character tends to be very fundamental to their nature also, but nonetheless we don't split categories into "Fictional male aliens" and "Fictional female aliens" or "Fictional female detectives" and "Fictional male detectives". Moreover you'd have the additional problem of not knowing whether to put the divinity of a character before its gender (as was now when Fictional deities was split into fictional gods and fictional goddesses) or put its gender before its divinity (Aka have categories of "Female characters" and "Male characters" and then have categories in those that say "Fictional Female deities" and "Fictional Male deities" -- in which case there'd be neuter deities left out.

Interjecting a gender into the category is practically a can of worms, especially since many fictional deities don't have a specific gender. As I said --- no other "fictional" category is segregated into male and female subgroups.

Apologies for depopulating the category -- the change in the rules of category deletion were only recent and I didn't notice them (earlier on depopulation was recommended). But as I said there were only a handful of specimens in each category to be removed. Most gods and goddesses had already been in [:Category:Deities]] already -- that should perhaps tell you something.

Lastly for gods and goddesses of D&D -- don't you think that a single category about these also (Deities of D&D) might even be a way around the naming problem mentioned in those pages? Aris Katsaris 23:27, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sorry for the harsh tone of my above comment - I was annoyed at something else when I wrote it ;/

Re the potential problem, the answer is simple: Make "Fictional goddesses" a subcategory of "Fictional deities" and "Female characters".

Fictional deities without a specific gender are no problem, they just belong in "Fictional deities". ··gracefool |☺ 00:52, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

There's currently no categories for "Male fictional characters" and "Female fictional characters" -- nor do I believe we need to have ones, same way I don't believe we need to categorize deities by gender.

As a sidenote another problem is that several of the subcategories (e.g. Category:Middle-earth Valar don't care to make that distinction between male and female deities either -- and such is the case with pretty much *all* the fictional characters listed -- e.g. there's no "female Friends characters" and "male Friends characters" there's just Category:Friends characters -- and so forth. I really don't think that's a scheme we need to change. Female characters" would a very horizontal category -- such a thing would include about 50% of all fictional characters and become *very* unwieldy. Aris Katsaris 01:41, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I was responding to a hypothetical problem... To continue, you don't need Category:Female Friends characters, you just add the article to both Category:Friends characters and Category:Female characters. However, this is kinda useless at the moment, since there's no "intersection" tool for categories with which you could do something like "list all fictional female characters who are also Friends characters". So no, Category:Female characters shouldn't be made, at least not yet.

However, I don't think these problems apply to Category:Fictional goddesses, since it is unlikely to ever be the parent of many (if any) categories. ··gracefool |☺ 02:21, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Let them stay Merged into Category:Fictional deities, and delete these. -- Netoholic @ 02:27, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

• Delete. We don't classify other articles using gender (Category:Stage actors vs. Category:Stage actresses as one of many examples). —Mike 04:40, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)