Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Category:Fictional characters belonging to minorities

The following discussion comes from Wikipedia:Categories for deletion, where it is currently listed as unresolved. It may be reviewed again in the future in the light of evolving standards and guidelines for categorization.21:42, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Category:Fictional characters belonging to minorities

Including subcategories, Category:Black fictional characters, Category:Fictional gays and lesbians, Category:Fictional Jews, and Category:Fictional Native Americans. We don't classify individuals by their race or ethnicity, real or not. I really think we need a strict category policy that limits categories for people to what they've notably done and where they've notably done it. Postdlf 19:22, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I created the Category:Fictional characters belonging to minorities only in the attempt to group the other four (already existing) categories you mention. I have no objection at all to the whole substructure being deleted, but in that case I think it'd be good if individual cfds were placed in the four subcategs. Other than that I'm okay with delete for the bunch of them. Aris Katsaris 20:25, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

One thing that immediately springs to mind is Fagin in Oliver Twist is a Jew, and Dickens calls him "The Jew" etc throughout and he is a stereotype. Dunc_Harris|☺ 23:38, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Do you mean minority in the real world or minority in the fiction? Is Hiawatha in Longfellow's poem Hiawatha a minority character? Are the few Christians and Jews who appear in Arabian Nights stories minority characters? Is Frodo Baggins the Hobbit a minority character? Jallan 23:57, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

When I created the supercategory, I thought that the reason someone had seen fit to create "fictional gays and lesbians", "fictional jews", "black fictional characters" and "fictional native Americans" was that these were real-life minorities according to the perspective of most modern-day Internet users. So Hobbits would probably not apply as it's not a real-life minority, and the fewness of Christians and Jews in Arabic tales would probably not be relevant either, as it's the modern-day (Internet-user) perspective we are seeing.

But as I said I'm not arguing in favour of retaining these categories, I just tried to group them according to the criterion they seemed to have in common, and which seems to made someone want to create them -- I can't think of any other reason to create the "black fictional characters" category. Anyway my vote remains to delete the whole bunch of these 4 categories+supercategory. Aris Katsaris 03:36, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

This should be renamed. The characters don't exactly "belong" to minorities. They are minorities. anthony (see warning) 01:47, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I think this should be included in the /unresolved debate on problematic aspects of classifying people. -- Beland 06:08, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I think the word "minorities" here creates a series of potential paradoxes (e.g. looking at a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of a predominantly Anglo city in a predominantly Hispanic state of the predominantly Anglo U.S. in the predominantly Hispanic Americas, who is the minority?) so the name is poorly chosen, but we have tons of lists of people by ethnicity (often masquerading as lists by nationality, but listing many people whose ethnicity matches the nation-state in question, but whose citizenship does not) so what's the problem with having categories, too, and I must be very tired to write a sentence this long, or reading too much German. -- Jmabel 07:26, Sep 3, 2004 (UTC)