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Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 November 11

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November 11

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Intersection of descent and occupation

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The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was: No consensus. Timrollpickering 12:38, 26 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Full nomination on the talk page.
Nominator's rationale: this is follow-up on Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2018_October_29#Category:Canadian_journalists_of_Chinese_descent. Descent and occupation are a trivial intersection, e.g. the fact that a Canadian journalist has Chinese ancestors says nothing about his/her professional career as a journalist. Note that is not a SMALLCAT nomination. In contrast to the previous nomination, all sibling categories are now nominated as well. Sometimes there is a single upmerge, sometimes a dual upmerge, dependent on whether the articles are already somewhere else in the tree of occupation by nationality. Marcocapelle (talk) 17:13, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Good Olfactory, Bearcat, Simonm223, Fayenatic london, and Peterkingiron: pinging closer, nominator and contributors to the previous discussion. Marcocapelle (talk) 17:18, 11 November 2018 (UTC) [reply]
@Carlossuarez46: pinging other contributor to previous discussion. Marcocapelle (talk) 17:21, 11 November 2018 (UTC) [reply]
  • Oppose It does indeed make a difference. In journalism: a reporter's ethnicity provides opportunities for them to cover the group. It gives them contacts, language skills, and familiarity with the subculture. Likewise many ethnic groups specialize in certain occupations and this has been central to the groups economic status. For example, food/groceries/restaurants have been a major theme in such new arrivals in the USA as the Chinese, Greeks, Italians and Mexicans. Farming and skilled crafts for Germans. Likewise needle trades, clothing and retailing for Jews. Erasing this information is unnecessary and unwise. Rjensen (talk) 14:39, 12 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Food/groceries/restaurants, farming, skilled crafts, needle trades, clothing and retailing aren't among the occupations that are actually being categorized for here: the occupations being categorized for are things like writing, acting and politics, where individual ethnicity isn't a strongly defining distinction. Bearcat (talk) 19:00, 12 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
For the record, at least one farming related category did get caught up in this nom: Category:Japanese-American farmers. And you didn't respond to Rjensen's comment regarding journalism.—Myasuda (talk) 14:13, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete inclusion of such categories seems to imply that people in various professions are notably different in their skills and abilities by ethnic group; otherwise it's a non-notable intersection per WP:CATGRS. First, I find that offensive; but objectively: does anyone have some reliable sources up to the Sagan standard that, e.g., scientists of Foo descent do their science differently than those not of that descent? Carlossuarez46 (talk) 17:57, 12 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. These are triple intersections of "people who happen to be X Y Z", not WP:DEFINING characteristics in their own right. Quite obviously race can play a role in notability, but individual ethnicity doesn't have the same significance. For example, sources about the Asian American experience in politics do not typically delve into distinctly Chinese-American or Japanese-American or Korean-American or Vietnamese-American or Thai-American notability contexts, and sources do not routinely discuss African American writers in terms of distinct Kenyan-American and Ghanaian-American and Ugandan-American and Nigerian-American and Senegalese-American and Congolese-American literatures. A person's occupational context may certainly be defined by their broad status as having Asian or African heritage, given that anti-Asian or anti-African racism has certainly impacted on their careers, but the individual Asian or African ethnicities they happen to have do not impact notability in the same way: anti-African racism does not impact Kenyan-American writers differently than it does Nigerian-American writers, anti-Asian racism does not impact Chinese-American politicians differently than it does Korean-American politicians, and on and so forth. So things like Category:American politicians of Asian descent and Category:African-American writers are fine, but there's no encyclopedic value in subdividing them by which individual Asian or African country the article topics' ancestors came from. Bearcat (talk) 19:00, 12 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Race & ethnicity are a key basis for many categories here on Wikipedia (and yes, I know about WP:CATGRS). Do you have any idea how this change would impact tens of thousands of categories that would need to be changed? This is not a change that can happen on a single Cfd discussion, it should involve the participation of many more editors that CfD draws and the relevant WikiProjects on ethnicity and occupation should be notified. This would be a major departure from current practice. My casual observation is that most people without a strong ethnic identification believe ethnicity doesn't play a big role in a person's identity and profession while those who do have a strong ethnic identification know how important ethnicity is in how they experience the world and practice what they do. And lumping all Asians together as being similar is just beyond understanding! This is a huge consideration that should be publicized in the Village Pump or other central location. Liz Read! Talk! 02:10, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - at least for Category:Sportspeople of Chinese descent, as there is a lot of coverage on the background of sportspeople who have Chinese ancestry outside of China. For example this source covered how many table tennis players in the Olympic games are Chinese even though they represent countries outside of China. And one only has to look here for the deep coverage that Jeremy Lin's Taiwanese ancestry had on the public's perception of him during the rise of his basketball career, so I think it is safe to say that the intersection of Chinese ancestry and sports is not trivial. Regarding the other categories being nominated, there are academic sources such as 1 2 for the important role the ethnic Chinese population plays in the economy and politics of Southeast Asian nations. It is also worth mentioning that Ahok's Chinese ethnicity was a major factor in the discrimination he faced while holding public office, and that this is not limited to him. So as one can see the intersection of career and Chinese identity is not always irrelevant, in fact it often is relevant and there are citations to back it up. Inter&anthro (talk) 04:39, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: It's going to be difficult, to say the least, to force a single yes/no answer on this entire series of categories. While I agree that Category:American politicians of Thai descent is probably unwarranted cross-categorisation, Category:Indonesian politicians of Chinese descent clearly isn't, as the group's activities have been widely studied. --Paul_012 (talk) 06:44, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • If I understand correctly, you are trying to say that Chinese Indonesian people are similar to African American people and should therefore be excluded from this nomination (together with all other Southeast Asian categories, presumably). As nominator, that is something that I can well accept. Marcocapelle (talk) 07:19, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
He was merely using this as an example...me thinks we should therefore ignore your delete comment as you clearly didn’t understand that. 82.132.246.65 (talk) 14:28, 16 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
User:RightCowLeftCoast, iirc the folks over at WikiData have said they don't take data from wp categories (e.g. because they want data with references). Do you have any info that WD are doing so? DexDor (talk) 19:29, 21 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
In the little editing, and the briefs I have received about WikiData, they would disconnect the intersection as its own category, but maintain it by allowing the different categories to interest based on search terms. That said, as long as categories continue to exist, and they haven't all been removed for use of some type of WikiData mega categorization collection, these categories should remain, as they are important to those who are editing within topics about ethnicities, as I have stated before.
I don't understand the logic of deleting these categories.--RightCowLeftCoast (Moo) 04:44, 22 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • strongly oppose as nominated. Each of these categories has two parents, an occupation parent and an descent parent. In many cases, this nomination is only going to place the bio articles into the descent parent, meaning that the bio articles will no longer be in an occupation category tree. This nomination is simply information destructive and unhelpful to WP navigation, the purpose of categories. Hmains (talk) 04:05, 14 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    @Hmains and Marcocapelle: I'm sure the nominator did not intend to remove articles from the occupation category tree. If nomination is amended to explicitely mention a double upmerge, except maybe when a finer occupation category is not already present, would that solve your concern? Place Clichy (talk) 18:46, 14 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, and further: The intersections are important for research and serves the purpose of categories, which is to assist users to navigate to articles. I also see that the nominations selections are selective, with whole groups being skipped, perhaps reflective of a conscious or un-conscious POV of the nominator. Hmains (talk) 03:11, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Hmains: The distinction between single and dual merging has been made deliberately, dependent on whether or not the articles have already been diffused by some other criterion within the same tree. E.g. politicians are always diffused by political party, sportspeople are always diffused by particular sport. I am not sure what you mean by stating that the nominations are selective with whole groups being skipped. Which groups are you referring to? Marcocapelle (talk) 06:37, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
By whole groups being skipped, he probably means that (for example) subcategories belonging to Category:American people of Italian descent by occupation, Category:American people of Mexican descent by occupation, Category:American people of Haitian descent by occupation, etc are not included under this nomination. For some reason, your nomination's focus is entirely on Asian American occupation subcategories. This unexplained choice leads the impression of a bias.—Myasuda (talk) 16:06, 23 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If a person has, for example, 10 characteristics (that they can be categorized by) then (simplistically) that person can have 10 one-characteristic category tags, 45 two-characteristic category tags, 120 three-characteristic category tags (if my maths is correct)....  See the problem? In fact it's much worse than that as even a person with just 2 characteristics could have many two-characteristic category tags because of the combinations of categories at different levels. DexDor (talk) 06:36, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Dimadick, my !vote was upmerge (i.e. support). DexDor (talk) 17:06, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes but you explained the usefullness of intersecting categories. This is the most usefull arguement for keeping that I have read in ages. Dimadick (talk) 17:13, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Dimadick: If I understand correctly, User:DexDor argued that intersections are exponentially increasing the number of categories that an article can be assigned to. Is that something you'd like to encourage? Marcocapelle (talk) 09:30, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
For accuracy: It's not exponential; the full sequence is 10, 45, 120, 210, 252, 210, 120, 45, 10, 1 (see nCr for the math) but (for example) placing a 10-characteristic article in 1 ten-characteristic category would be impractical/silly. DexDor (talk) 18:13, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Per the argument, instead of having 1 intersection category in the article, the article would end with 10 or more unrelated categories. This would only add to the category clutter instead of reducing it. Dimadick (talk) 09:34, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Dimadick, I don't understand that (1 intersection category vs 10 unrelated categories). Can you give an example of what you mean? DexDor (talk) 18:13, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Per the nomination, In any given category Category:Canadian_journalists_of_Chinese_descent would be replaced by 2 categories without intersection: Category:Canadian journalists and Category:Canadian people of Chinese descent. 1 category vs 2 categories is a very small difference. But you pointed that the lack of intersections would eventually lead to "10 one-characteristic category tags" and escalations to higher numbers. Per our typical subcategorizations, any of the intersections would replace its parent categories. But in the scenario you described, we could have dozens of categories in an article, because we failed to create a viable subcategory for where they intersect. Dimadick (talk) 18:24, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No - the dozens/hundreds of possible category tags on an article that I was referring to was the result of having categories that intersect many (e.g. 4) characteristics (which could be done in lots of ways). Keeping to 2 (in some cases 3) characteristics per category reduces the potential for category clutter. My cmt at the start of this thread was in response to a cmt about "triple (or quadruple) intersection" (being fine), not about double categorization. DexDor (talk) 20:15, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Marcocapelle, it does not really matter. The anonymous voter above has never edited any Wikipedia article and suddenly appears here to vote. I doubt they know or care about Wikipedia policies. Dimadick (talk) 18:27, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I also oppose deletion, and I am a longtime editor. I literally just came here from Category:American politicians of Korean descent -- after all, there were recent elections for Young Kim and Andy Kim (politician) that were finally called last week. Anyway, my point is that the categories are useful in/of themselves. Mang (talk) 15:16, 18 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep for procedural reasons. Keep the ones that are natural junctions of categories, e.g. the American academics of Chinese descent. As long as we have the parent categories (American academics and American people of Chinese descent), it helps to split up the category: we already have 631 articles in American people of Chinese descent, and if we merge all the articles in the subcategories into the parent, we'll have 1,534 articles in the parent; 631 is already too much, and whether we merge some subcategories or all of them, we're only making the problem worse. The solution is not to expand large categories. And perhaps you're unaware, but some of these are more than mere intersections, e.g. Category:Fijian politicians of Indian descent — Indians in Fiji versus the indigenous people in Fiji are a major political issue, e.g. the 2000 Fijian coup d'état was an indigenous response to an election in which an Indian had become prime minister, at least partly because the Fijians feared that the Indians would launch ethnic-based legislation. Finally, I'm fine with deleting most of the "Topic of National Descent" categories, since they're not natural intersections of anything, and I would be fine with deleting the parents of the natural-intersection categories I mention above (together with the child natural-intersection ones I propose keeping), e.g. American people of Indian descent, both because of potential confusion (if an Indian Muslim from Bengal moves to the US in 1946, how do you know whether his descendants are Americans of Indian descent, Americans of Pakistani descent, or Americans of Bangladeshi descent?) and because it's not particularly defining. But given the fact that this nomination mixes these three kinds of situations, it ought to be split up with immediate renomination encouraged, so we don't keep problematic items or delete good ones. Nyttend (talk) 12:46, 21 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sorry about that. I would like to see nearly all of them deleted eventually, but given current conditions, I'd like to see only some. "PEOPLE FROM COUNTRY of NATIONAL ORIGIN descent" categories, e.g. "Americans of Indian descent", ought to be deleted because they're not particularly useful. But as long as those exist, we ought to retain the "PEOPLE FROM COUNTRY belonging to OCCUPATION of NATIONAL ORIGIN descent", e.g. American academics of Chinese descent, because they're natural split-ups of the higher-up categories. If we have categories for people of such-and-such descent, it makes complete sense to split them up by nationality (so as long as we have the parents, we should keep the split-up categories), so the solution is to go after the parent categories first and then go after the split-ups, since it doesn't make sense to retain an ordinary split-up after deleting the things they're split out of. I'd advocate keeping a small number, e.g. Fijian politicians of Indian descent, because ethnicity is a major factor for them. What if you nominated them individually and made a statement of "I withdraw every one that gets any opposition"? If you get consensus to delete most of a big batch of items, this would be an easy route to know which ones to handle separately. Nyttend (talk) 23:45, 22 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

Category:Seventh-day Adventist leaders

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The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was: merge. Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:03, 27 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: This category's description states that it includes theologians, writers, preachers & administrators as well as founders & ministers. This denomination's category in Category:Christian religious leaders is already taken by Category:Seventh-day Adventist clergy, which is currently proposed for renaming to Category:Seventh-day Adventist ministers at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 October 30. – Fayenatic London 17:02, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Clergy categories may be a bit different from other Christian groups. Full ordination is apparently reserved for priests who have already served for several years, and seems to be a seniority rank.: "The ordained clergy of the Adventist church are known as ministers or pastors. Ministers are neither elected nor employed by the local churches, but instead are appointed by the local Conferences, which assign them responsibility over a single church or group of churches. Ordination is a formal recognition bestowed upon pastors and elders after usually a number of years of service. In most parts of the world, women may not be given the title "ordained", although some are employed in ministry, and may be "commissioned" or "ordained-commissioned". However, beginning in 2012, some unions adopted policies of allowing member conferences to ordain without regard to gender. " Dimadick (talk) 16:14, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

Opposed speedies

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The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was: no consensus. Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:05, 27 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
These global categories were all created by @Rathfelder:. Each is an isolated inconsistency with no ‘by country’ subcats or subcats using ‘organisation’ and renaming will introduce no inconsistencies anywhere. Each contains some American organizations. ‘z’ is permissible except in New Zealand according to WP:ISE. Oculi (talk) 14:43, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Copy of speedy nom
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

Category:Television channels and networks by interest

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The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was: merge. Good Ol’factory (talk) 02:56, 3 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: "content" and "interest" overlap considerably. Two seperate intermediate categories seems unhelpful. Rathfelder (talk) 13:49, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • The blurb for the categories seems to say that stations and channels are interchangeable, but networks are different. I think the fundamental problem is that from a technical point of view these three things are distinct, but these distinctions are invisible to the viewers, and to most of the people who wrote the articles. The different terms are certainly used interchangeably in many of the articles.Rathfelder (talk) 10:17, 12 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strictly speaking, the definition is that "station" = a local entity which transmits over the air, airing a mix of locally produced and networked or syndicated content (e.g. WPIX-TV, CFTO-TV); "network" = a national broadcasting entity which distributes its content by selling it to the individual stations (e.g. NBC, CTV) instead of directly operating its own viewer-facing service; and "channel" = a national broadcasting entity which directly distributes one common programming service everywhere via cable or satellite (e.g. CNN, Food Network) with few to no localized variances, and thus consists of one standalone broadcast entity rather than dozens or hundreds of interconnected broadcast entities. In actual practice, however, viewers (and sometimes even the networks, stations or channels themselves) don't really observe or uphold that distinction very well at all, and just mix and match all three terms willy-nilly — which is why we have the problem you observe, and why attempts to clean it up tend not to stick in an encyclopedia that anybody can edit. I'd love it if we could find an umbrella term for all television services, and blow the channel-network-station fuzzification problem out of the category tree completely, but I have yet to figure out a viable alternative. Bearcat (talk) 20:20, 20 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Neutral, this is not totally ridiculous as it categorizes by target audience instead of by content (except the shopping which does not belong here). The question however is to what extent the distinction between target audience and type of content is useful enough. Marcocapelle (talk) 16:49, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I dont think the distinction is obvious enough to be helpful. Rathfelder (talk) 10:17, 12 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - And could someone nominate the whole WP:OR-ridden tree of Category:Works by interest for deletion. please. - jc37 22:59, 18 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge per nom. I agree that there's not a really clear or obvious distinction to make two separate categories useful here — if there is a distinction at all, in fact, I couldn't articulate it if I tried. Bearcat (talk) 20:24, 20 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I'm inclined to support the merge, but would rather see the whole Category:Works by interest hierarchy dealt with, rather than picking off one medium at a time. – Fayenatic London 12:55, 22 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. If I understand rightly, a station is an individual broadcasting location with a call sign, a channel is the frequency at which a station broadcasts or the portion of a cable connection to which a network is assigned, and a network is a group of stations or a cable-only "broadcaster"; there's no real layman's distinction between "channel" and "network" in a cable context, as far as I can tell. That's a good reason, by itself, to have categories for "channels and networks". (But since this is a proposal to merge two metacategories for channels and networks, I don't see how that's a big deal for this discussion.) In this context, "interest" and "content" seem to be synonyms, together with "paradigm", "topic", and "parameter". If a distinction must be made, we should rename something to make things clearer, e.g. "by topic" for the broadcast content itself [shopping TV, Christian TV, sports TV, etc], "by location" for geography [Bhutan-based, Algeria-based, etc], or "by genre" for technical details [digital broadcast, traditional broadcast, cable-only, etc]. "Interest" and "content" sound completely synonymous, especially as the contents of the two ("Shopping networks", content; and "Television channels and networks about health", interest) are apparently the same. "Content" is for communities of interest, per the hatnote, but how do shopping networks appeal more to a community of interest than do 24-hour news networks? Nyttend (talk) 17:36, 23 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

Category:Underdog

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The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was: delete. Good Ol’factory (talk) 22:45, 22 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Too few articles. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:02, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
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