Wikipedia talk:Categorization

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Hello! I initially posted this on the Help desk. I'll copy my original text here.

While doing some stubsorting, I encountered a curious paradox. From WP:SUBCAT: If logical membership of one category implies logical membership of a second (an is-a relationship), then the first category should be made a subcategory (directly or indirectly) of the second. When making one category a subcategory of another, ensure that the members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions) to belong to the parent also. So autobiographers is a subcategory of biographers (they write biographies), and biographers is a subcategory of historians (which is logical, since they deal with a history of other people), then autobiographers is a subcategory of historians - and this is where it falls apart, since almost all autobiographers do not study history, they just write a biography about themselves.

If this were to be changed, then all categories like autobiographers by nationality, by century etc. needs to be recategorized, so it would be a major change across many categories which I don't want to do without discussing it first. And I don't feel like nominating them to CfD since I think it is for deleting, merging and all that stuff and here it is just about changing the parent category.

So, should autobiographers not be considered a subcategory of biographers? What do you think?

As to why I think that Category:Biographers should stay subcategory of Category:Historians, my logic is as follows (also copied from the Help desk thread):

I would think that, from purely logical perspective, while autobiographies should be considered a subset of the biographies, autobiographers might not necessarily be a subset of biographers because all autobiographers need is a good memory of their life and biographers need to work with documents and other stuff to reconstruct the life of other people, and this is pretty much what historians do. On the other hand, it seems counterintuitive to just exclude autobiographers from biographers.

Deltaspace42 (talkcontribs) 16:20, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I can see a higher-level problem with this scheme. If an historian happens to write an autobiography and is categorized accordingly, then they will end up being removed from Category:Historians, because they are already in a subcategory of that category. That can't be right. BD2412 T 16:50, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
They are not removed from Category:Historians, they are in it via the subcategory, and could well also be in it via one or more other subcategories. That is how subcategories work. A similar effect would occur if someone was categorised in any other subcategory of Historians. A scientist who is a physicist and a chemist and a geologist would still be a scientist, via three subcategories. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:40, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
However the process is described a historian who is also an autobiographer may well be removed from relevant supercategories and merely categorized with everyone else who is an autobiographer in that time and place. BD2412 T 17:48, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, they would surely also be categorized by what kind of historian they are; most editors wouldn't even realize that autobiographers is a sub-sub-cat of historians in the first place.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  10:37, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Biographers being a subcategory of Historians seems precarious. Some biographers might be, but all? The bar for being a biographer is very low, unlike the bar for being a historian, which usually comes with connotations of authority, scholarship and professionalism. Many popular biographies are informal affairs - autobiographies doubly so. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 17:41, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe what we need is a categorical distinction between historian biographers and lay biographers. BD2412 T 17:49, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Precisely, are there any professional organizations of biographers? I'm not aware of any and just about anyone can write something and call it a biography. olderwiser 17:49, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What then is a biography, if it is not a history of a specific person? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:50, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Even if we accept that a biography necessarily contains history (arguable, IMHO), that’s a step removed from its author being a historian, particularly in a Wikipedia context where WP:CATDEF asks that subjects be commonly and consistently referred to as such. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 18:45, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, there's at least one such organization; search engines are your friends. :-) [1] Any topic with devoted professional writers is apt to have one, e.g. there's a professional organization of billiards/pool writers, for example, and a former one and now what amounts to a current one for writers about tartan and Highland dress (postnominals of FSTS in the former case, and most of the writers now using FSAScot or FSA(Scot), though the latter also includes some other Scottish history specialists).  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  10:49, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is this actually a problem? Although not marked as one, Category:Historians is in practice a Wikipedia:Container category: it has very few individual articles. The true historians are found among its subcategories. They could still be found there, among the same subcategories, even if they are also autobiographers. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:53, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@David Eppstein: Yeah, I think there is a problem because not all autobiographers should be considered historians. For example, yesterday I made a search in the intersection of Category:French people stubs and recursive in Category:Historians and replaced "French people stubs" template with "French historian stubs" and what ended up happening is that Louis-Joseph-Narcisse Marchand got the historian stub template, even though he wasn't a historian, he just wrote some memoirs. Deltaspace42 (talkcontribs) 18:01, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would note that the problem extends to subcategories. For example, Category:Australian historians contains Category:Australian biographers, which contains Category:Australian autobiographers, which means (1) all Australian writers of an autobiography are presently in the "Historians" category tree (including, e.g., celebrities like Paul "Crocodile Dundee" Hogan, Flea and Portia de Rossi), and (2) an Australian historian who happens to also write an autobiography would solely be contained in Category:Australian autobiographers. BD2412 T 18:03, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed with Barnards.tar.gz. I don't think biographers are historians. They are writers. Frenchl (talk) 00:38, 6 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Want to flag this issue and ping @Gonnym and @Mvcg66b3r. This category has seen two speedy renames in a week, and I'm not sure whether a full discussion is merited. The parent category is Category:Public Broadcasting Service, but the subcategories all use PBS. I suspect a CfD discussion is coming one way or the other, but first I think it's worth talking through where this one cat should be. Sammi Brie (she/her • tc) 22:39, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sub-categories should match the parent category. There is really no valid reason to deviate from it. If the consensus is to move the category to the primary name, then it should be moved, but having a mixed tree isn't helpful to anyone. Gonnym (talk) 12:11, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Categories about countries[edit]

Hello, I think categories like "Countries in Europe", should be renamed to "Sovereign states in Europe". At the very least, if not re-named, then limited to having only independent countries in them. The terminology "country", has multiple meanings & so may be confusing. GoodDay (talk) 08:26, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This could be clarified in the cat description. Semper Fi! FieldMarine (talk) 13:34, 26 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Establishment categories[edit]

I have two questions, which are not really related:

  1. Should things like Troms og Finnmark, Vestfold og Telemark and Viken (county) be categorized as 2023 or 2024 disestablishments? I also asked this on Wikidata.
  2. Should a country, territory, or administrative division be categorized as being (dis)established within itself? An example is New Mexico Territory, which is in Category:1850 establishments in New Mexico Territory.

Kk.urban (talk) 20:34, 25 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Mis-corrected blank sort key: how much of a problem is this?[edit]

I'm not that much of a CAT-gnome, and I recently ran into a problem with a blank sort key that had been properly used in an article, until a well-meaning editor incorrectly "fixed" it by removing the blank, who I guess figured that a blank param is meaningless, so why not get rid of it. I undid their change, but I can understand why an editor might do that. I wonder how frequent a problem this is, because I've got an easy fix. The solution would be simply to create a template, maybe to be called {{Cat sort top}}, that resolves to a space. Nobody is going to remove a template call embedded in a Category item who doesn't understand precisely what it's doing there, so that will stop it from happening. But is it a problem that's frequent enough or annoying enough to bother with? Even if infrequent, it could be the kind of thing that would slip by without anyone noticing for quite a while. Mathglot (talk) 03:55, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]