Category talk:Churches in Belgium

Category substructure

This category contains more than 1000 church pictures, and is not very workable/usable anymore. And this is only the beginning as only an estimated 30 % of the pictures is available. Moreover, MediaWiki seems to have errors in counting and displaying subcategories (see for you self if you have the patience to go to the last page of this category). See discussion page for suggestions. Suggestion to create for each town:

• category "Churches in location" containing
  • [[Category:Churches in Belgium|location]]
  • [[Category:Buildings in location]]
• category "Buildings in location" containing
  • [[Category:Buildings in Belgium by city|location]]
  • [[Category:location]]

--Foroa 06:55, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

The type of categorisation you propose is widely accepted. I suggest you just go ahead and start. If a category buildings in location is present, this type of category should be a subcategory of that location, instead of a subcategory of location itself. Siebrand 07:10, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

This type of categorization is not user-friendly. I suggest you to create categories Churches in LOCATION only for important cities and the other 10 provinces of Belgium. Remind you that pictures are used to illustrate articles in the Encyclopedia, so it's handy to find them according to the subject of existing or potential articles.

• if you have a lot of pictures showing the same church, create a category to put them together (however, the issue of naming buildings of lower importance is currently unresolved in Commons).
• if you have few items (pictures/categories regarding churches) which are located in a small village, you can directly categorize these items in the village category, and also in the category Churches in PROVINCE of the matching PROVINCE.
• the categories Buildings in LOCATION are not mandatory: create them only when you think they are useful for browsing.

--Juiced lemon 10:15, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Example: You can categorize several pictures in Category:St. Brice Church, Hombourg (or another better name for this church), and categorize this page in Category:Plombières, Belgium and Category:Churches in Liège (province) .--Juiced lemon 10:37, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion but it simply doesn't work. For example, West Flanders alone counts 64 municipalities, around 260 villages, 364 parishes and a guesstimated 400 churches. Too much to hold in a category. I guess that a normal category can grow quite large, but a big category full of pictures is a nightmare. Therefore, we have to isolate in the first place pictures from the top categories, hence for me the primary reason to insert an intermediate category.

In your example, I fail to understand why Category:St. Brice Church, Hombourg is better than the suggested Category:Churches in Hombourg, the latter being more standard and open to accommodate several churches till there are too many pictures.

Your idea of having per province a number of big cities and the rest in a global province container doesn't work neither: still too many and a mix-up of categorisation rules.

My suggestion was to define at least per municipality (64) a structure "churches in xxx", possibly with an intermediate "buildings in xxx" category. I noticed that town halls and squares are getting full as well. Again, 260 villages, meaning that they cannot fit in a category.

In conclusion: if we can apply categorisation per municipality (at the highest level), we have a structure that holds up for growth and has a rather easy relationship if someone has to search.

Personally, I would even favor such a structure per village for reasons of simplicity (one to one relationship) but that might be overkill indeed. This could even be autogenerated as it is very orthogonal, so simple to use and to respect. Anyway, it started, and we will see how it goes.

Besides the aforementioned churches, town halls and squares, most of the villages have some sort of library, statues, post office, Two war memorials (first and second world war), cemeteries, art work, ... I'd rather had a category to throw all those miscellaneous things in, but have no suggestion yet, besides throwing them in "Buildings in xxx" " till it getting too full...

I guess that in the end, each village will have around 30 pictures, Municipalities will range between 60 and 500 pictures. Our Flemish cultural heritage agency seems to indicate that there are 10 to 200 worthwhile historical monuments/building per village, so we still have some way to go and a good structure seems essential. --Foroa 12:59, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

This project has no planned end. That means that we classify the pictures which are currently in the database, not future ones. Our first goal is to make the database as effective as possible immediatly. So, we can build progressive structures, but not near empty structures. Because browsing in an empty structure is a waste of time and discouraging.

You must consider that structures are progressively built, and that you don't build them alone. So, the scheme I have suggested works perfectly well. You can classify churches first in Category:Churches in Liège (province), then in smaller areas when you have too much items in the category. When you have enough pictures of the same building, you can put them together in a category, so the number of items decreases of N-1 (N number of pictures regarding the same building).

Category:Churches in Hombourg would not be a good idea, if the database don't contain pictures of many Hombourg churches. More, as you create Category:Churches in Hombourg, you should create also Category:Hombourg. Now, that would not be usefull, since no Wikipedia project is going to create an article about this village. --Juiced lemon 18:10, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

In West Flanders alone, I guess we have around 200 churches already, and at the speed its is progressing, we should have 400 by the end of the year. Far too big for a single category, especially with the limited search capability of the Wiki.

I did a few example structures with a small town and for cities with many images: to me it proved useful for those cities to have their structure improved. I am sure, they will prefer that than to have to merge in a province infrastructure.

What I have done is merely a worst case structure to open the debate with the users that really feed the commons. I know by experience that most people use easily an existing structure, having to make it themselves is not very much appreciated and error prone. I stop adding structures, and don't count on me to restructure things every now and then: these churches and city halls cats will take ages to get back to normal sizes.

The commons are a supporting infrastructure for other Wiki's, so the faster they can check, the better they can address the thing, the happier they will be. Of course, empty structures are useless, but you have to try out a number of potential structures.

“Far too big for a single category...”

Have you realized that Category:Topics probably contains more than one million files? If Category:Churches in West Flanders cannot group 400 churches together, how can this be possible? --Juiced lemon 19:53, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Last response on this. Anyway, I feel that his is not my decision, but a decision of the people that are really using it.

• • Don't tell me jokes: your Category:Topics displays in half a page. If they contain one million files, they are hidden very well.
  • It is clear that you didn't even got a look at Category:Churches in Belgium before discussing. One has to painfully scroll through six pages full of thumbnails to see bits and pieces of all the categories on pages 1, 5 and 6, and those are the things I need to see. The thumbnails are pretty much useless as they are sorted on file name which start sometimes with the name of the town, sometimes with the name of the church. Most of the time, you see only part of the name as it gets truncated. In those circumstances, I find a page of more than 200 thumbnails completely useless.
  • If the thumbnails would be displayed after the complete list of cats, then there is no need of restructuring of churches in xx, because they are useless in big quantities but nobody would care.
  • We are not in the US, the province level in Belgium is the least important, least powerful and most unknown level in Belgium: if there is one intermediate level that will disappear one day (between state, regions, communities, provinces, arrondissements, municipality, town, parish, ...), it will be the province level. Moreover, entering the province will not only cause errors (wrong province) but it is a pain in the *** because of complex long names such as Liège (province), Antwerp (province), Namur (province), Luxembourg (province), Brabant (French province), Brabant (Flemisch province) and Brussels (pseudo-province). West Flanders and East Flanders are easier but still source of errors with capitals and trait d'union. But anyway, I think that nobody wants information split at the province level.

--Foroa 22:21, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

There is no joke. Category:Topics contains more on million file in its substructure. It's clear you don't understand the basic principles of the classification in Commons. The number of pictures related to a given subject cannot be an argument to do not create a category matching this subject, because these files can be easily sorted in any appropriate substructure. Nobody said you that hundreds of pictures would have to be directly put together in a single category. You made up that in order to ridicule my comments. That's an unfair manner.

Regarding the province level, I have not any opinion about its real importance in Belgium. However, Commons have categories for each province of Belgium (10) and there are used to categorize municipalities (589 in whole Belgium). So, there are no serious argument against the development of substructures in these 10 categories, as well in Category:Brussels-Capital Region.

In the other hand, there are very serious arguments to do not create 589 buildings categories (for each municipality), plus 589 churches categories in order to classify thousand pictures of churches. As I said you previously, in Commons, we classify the files which are currently in the database, and we don't create near empty structures. --Juiced lemon 13:36, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Proposition

To make a small overview of my proposition:

• In each municipality (or town: tbd), create a category "buildings in xx": this separates easily buildings from maps, events, politics, geographic things, all of them are much more difficult to categorise.
• In each municipality (or town: tbd) create a category "churches in xx"
• All the other buildings remain in "building in xx" till they overflow and can be categorised in a proper category

Personally, I am against a province level as this is difficult to live together with a (big) city level.

So please users, your opinion on this problem is very much appreciated.

I am trying to find out how to avoid the limitations of the category and how far categories with a large number of subcategories (OK, no real limit) and a large number of images (adressing and sorting problems) can be resolved. As soon as I have a better idea about those limitations, I reformulate my proposition above. This should be possible before the end of June. --Foroa 06:35, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

The proposistion above will be updated with a longer term migration path. Known frequent providers of pictures will be personally invited to join the discussion. --Foroa 17:23, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Other proposal

• Category:Churches in Wallonia, in Flanders, in Brussels

and, further on, when it becomes again too heavy

• • Category:Churches in the Province of Liège
  • Category:Churches in the Province of Namur
  • Category:Churches in the Province of Luxembourg
  • Category:Churches in the Province of Hainaut
  • Category:Churches in the Province of Brabant wallon

I began today to move my own pics from ... in Belgium to ... in Wallonia

Lucyin 23:43, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Please, use the standard form Churches in LOCATION, LOCATION is the name of the matching category for the location in Commons.

Example: Category:Churches in Brabant Wallon.--Juiced lemon 00:28, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Other proposal

directly make for all provinces subcategorie:churches in the province of....; this has been done recently for the Netherlands and is very satisfying. Havang 18:07, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

As most users I did contact, I am completely against province cats as proposed by Havang. For many reasons, one of them being the visual search. Other reasons will be explained later. --Foroa 18:29, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

At least for visual search other possibilities are available:churches in the Netherlands. I look forward to know your other arguments. Havang 19:29, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

You're right that this works for the Netherlands as they have less churches for now and they tend to make a collection of "postcard" type of images. Just try :Thumnails churches in Belgium, and then it shows much less useful. In fact, when I am creating churches, I always create the right subcats and put one single "postcard" style of image in churches in Belgium and in buildings in ..., just to provide more access selection and access points. (I am not saying that my way is the perfect one, I am in an experimenting phase). --Foroa 07:19, 3 October 2007 (UTC).

• The B catscan already gives potentially all images, but is aborted at 1000; if one could catscan by province, B catscan could give access to several thousands of images.

The NL catscan can be extended to level 4, 5, giving more images; and NL catscan research can be refined in 12 section-searches (provinces) so NL system can grow to contain a much larger mumber of catsearchable images.

• There is a visible difference in information given by the catscan: the NL search gives info about provinces but does not mention NL cat (but this was your entry, so no problem about that), the B search gives no info on provinces burt repeates B cat. I am not very accustomed about B geography, so I like to see that province info.

Fact is that categorising is also adding info to the item; I am blocked in doing categorising mainly by lack of (geographical etc.) knowledge: I have to search wiki and/or google for citynames to know if f.i.St.Guirard is french, swiss, canadien, belgian etc. and that makes it timeconsuming also. Havang 07:47, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

You're right but you inverse the logic. As you mention, from a place elsewhere in the world, most of the time you only know the city and the country. So if you make a cat system that only requires the knowledge of the city and the country, you make it easier for all people to move around and to categorise. I fully agree that we need a full geographic categorisation, but that does not mean that we need it for all category work. If we would apply the same for Belgium (nice example ;)), then we would need an organisation like:

• Belgium - Belgian organisation (communities/regions)
• either communities (french/German/Flemish) --> Provinces --> arrondissements --> towns
• or regions (Flemish/Walloon/Brussels) --> provinces --> arrondissements --> towns

By the way, a nice example of how you really need overlapping (red link on your categorisation drawing) cats. If you look in the top left of Category:Belgium at Category:Cities and villages in Belgium, you will see a direct access to any place in Belgium and only two clicks away; extremely useful for most people because they don't care (know) all detailed province borders (what you call geographic knowledge). As you see, a matter of finding the right compromises. And frankly, so far I never got a use case for finding churches in a particular province, but that's maybe only me.

And thank you for the St.Guirard use case. --Foroa 08:13, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

• Category:Cities and villages in Belgium respond to my ideal of good maintenance: it is clean of loose items or pages and contains only subcategories.
• It is a secundary link (overlap), however, it is not a red link like on the categorisation drawing: the red line shows redundancy, because then the item is repeated in the higer category. A secundary link is allowed as long as it is not a shortcut way as shown by the red line in the drawing, but if it contains also a dichotomia point carrier of information. De cat C & V of B is (among other functions) a dichotomia point on the secundary line, making overlap permitted. (the drawing comes fom Commons:categories). Your city subcategories belong to the geographic or locator tree and take actively part in a dichotomia or trichotomia process, giving entries for parallel trees (buildings, plants, objects, COAt's, whatever). . No problem if those cats are small or large: the dimension of CityCats in this group may vary from 1 (or even no) item to a whole subtree.
• Geographic cats form an important tree, but of the easiest kind also. The geographic subcategories are good search entries. But take care: broad searching on secundary search terms is still difficult for the same reason: because the problem of insufficient compartimentation remains. Catscan blocks at 1000. (For me a compartimentation by province is very useful. I work in the tourist sector and actually look up all things about a part of Finistère).

All this is an interesting broadening of our brain-storming. I now have to move on to other things. Greetings. Havang 13:33, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Resolution september 2007

This is the resolution of various discussions above and elsewhere.

So far, there has been no single enthousiasm of the major Belgium image contributors to split the church categories in a province level. In fact, deeper categorisation makes especially sense for pure categorisation work, but renders search and categorisation work more complicated, while requiring more geographic knowledge. It makes visual search more difficult too. The idea is to make finding and categorisation as simple as possible when you know, as is mostly the case, only the name of the city and the country.

While a province categorisation alliviates a bit the problems with the tools for display (Catscan, cat display), this solution is only very temporarily. As most churches are only populated for 30 % and some provinces already exceed the tool limits (more then 200 churches, more then 1000 churches in the catscan), deeper province categories give substantial additional work while only decreasing the problem for a couple of work.

Therefore, it is requested for now and to maintain coherence, unless there are serious objections from Belgian photograph contributors, to leave all Belgian building cats only at the country and city level for now.

Note that this resolution does not mean that we have the ultimate solution or a position that is frozen for ever. It is just the actual situation that should be maintained as long as there is no broad consensus to move to another system for everybody. This is to avoid that some use another system in parallel, thereby creating inconsistency and forcing the others to follow.

--Foroa 07:57, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree with you.

--Jean-Pol GRANDMONT 08:22, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Resolution June 2008 - Belgian category organisation

After many discussions and for the reasons explained below, so far the Belgium Commons community seems to agree for almost everything (churches, rivers, castles, town halls, chapels, windmills, town squares, ...) except for pure geographical organisations, to use basically a two level main organisation:

1. . At the formal town level (not municipality)
2. . At the Belgium level

Although in a couple of cases, the categories are a bit full, this is considered the best, most efficient and easiest compromise for one single and uniform main category system.

• a uniform two level system (town & country) is a standard international way of addressing something, so the quickest and the least chance on errors. It requires no knowledge of the specific Belgium organisation. If you tried to categorise churches, castles, ... in other countries, you will know what we mean.
• an intermediate Belgiam (geographic) organisation would produce a number of problems, mainly because of the complex linguistic and political situation in Belgium:
  • Although a province organisation would be natural, the naming of them inside the provinces is a mess and not consistent at all in their related cats. This originates mainly from the fact that many provinces have a name that has several meanings fr:Luxembourg (City, country and province), Limburg (province in Belgium and the Netherlands, German city), fr:Hainaut (province and regio)
  • Some people push for a community division (Flemish, French speaking (including Brussels) and German), others for a regional division (Wallonia (that includes the German speaking), Brussels capital region and Flanders)
  • Some people want yet another organisation according to regios like Belgian/Walloon/Flemish Ardennes, Kempen, Fannes, Gaude, ...
• each additional level means equally that the Belgium organisation has to be replicated at the next lower level, such as for example windmills in such province, Romanesque churches in that province, ... complicating matters seriously .

In terms of crowded cat displays, it looks as if there are software improvements coming; there are several cats exceeding ten thousand items.

A lot of people put church pictures in a local church category but put equally one or two of the most speaking pictures in the churches in Belgium category. This allows at the top level for quick visual church, such as for a specific architecture or era, a copper roof, .... without having to visit all the various subcats.

So far, we have been operating with that scheme since almost two years, and so far, it looks like almost if not all heavy Belgian contributors are happy with that scheme. It should be noted that typing the province names is a very error prone complication, and possibly the major reason to avoid it. --Foroa 18:03, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

• Agree. Most correct with respects to the contents and the facts; and practically easiest to organize and work with. --LimoWreck 18:53, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

New proposition

I would like to propose a modification of the resolution here above. The main reason is this cat contains today 2,777 files and 192 subcats, which makes it poorly usable.

I think the files presently contained in this category could be sorted according to 4 criteria:

1. The name of the church;
2. The style of the church;
3. The rank (cathedral, basilica, etc.) of the church;
4. The geographical position of the church.

For the first criterion, there already exists a metacat Category:Churches in Belgium by patron saint and more subcats could be created.

For the second and third criteria, there already exists some subcats, but no metacat. We could create Category:Churches in Belgium by style or Category:Churches in Belgium by period and Category:Churches in Belgium by rank, but I don't know whether it is necessary, since in both case there is only a few potential subcats.

For the fourth criterion, there only exists subcats by deelgemeente/section. I have a problem with that, because there exist approximately 2,700 deelgemeente/section and in most of them, there is only one church. So I think we should introduce categorization at an intermediary level, because systematic categorization at deelgemeente/section will lead to the creation of many subcats containing only a few files, which will not improve usability.

I think 2 intermediary levels can be imagined:

1. Province level (there are 10 provinces in Belgium);
2. Municipality level (there are 589 municipalities in Belgium).

These two levels could possibly be combined.

I mention that generally the municipality has the same name as one of its deelgemeenten/sections. So, in the case of the introduction of a categorization at the municipality level, I suggest that the existing cats at the deelgemeente/section level should be treated the following way:

• In the case they have the same name as the municipality they belong to, they should become subcats at the municipality level (e.g. Category:Churches in Mouscron would remain unchanged, but would also include files about churches in Herseaux, Dottignies or Luingne),
• In other cases, they should become subcats of the cat of the municipality they belong to (for example Category:Churches in Eizer would become a subcat of Category:Churches in Overijse).

Thank you for your comments. BrightRaven (talk) 18:12, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

You would have to use the same structure for everything, as churches are subcat. of buildings, and by extensions chapels, chapels, bridges, houses, streets, towers, museums, shops... follow the same structure; and similarly parks, squares, people, etc... as well. In the scenario you propose, there is nó category available that is restrained to the churches of the central "deelgemeente" (which would correspond to this [1] in the case of Mouscron), so you're missing something. Instead, you're misusing this category to be municipality wide - which is rather redundant. You can already get there simply by navigating through the actual corresponding "deelgemeente" --LimoWreck (talk) 18:40, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

"You would have to use the same structure for everything" Why that? Categories with less files required less subcats than cats with many files (Category:Coats of arms of municipalities of Belgium is subcategorized by province and it does not seem to be a problem). Category:Churches in Mouscron would contains some extra files about other deelgemeenten/sections of the municipality Mouscron, but I don't think this would be a very big problem if you are only looking for files only about the deelgemeente/section Mouscron. Let me remind you that in the present situation you have to look for them amongst the files about Belgium as a whole in most cases. BrightRaven (talk) 18:50, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

No, you can simply look under "Mouscron". About the CoA: they are categorised by province, because they're about municipalities, and the municipalities ARE categorised by province; so that's perfectly consistent. --LimoWreck (talk) 19:32, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

By they way, adding levels by municipality and by province in between will NOT improve usability of that category, and will NOT have added value for the reader. Just STOP thinking you have to re-create the entire geographical situation of a country in full-blown detail with all its intermediate levels within each and every subject-specific category imaginable.

And the reason is quite simple : There IS already a complete, correct and usable geographical tree to look up everything you ever want to find:

• starting from the premise you know the specific village : everything (churches, houses, parks, trees, ...) you want to find about the village can be found under the village category, which is alphabetically found in category:Cities and villages in Belgium. So if you're looking for something specific about "Mesen", you can find the category:Mesen there.
• starting from the premise you know the village and its municipality : use the same way as above, OR, use the existing geographical categorisation: category:Belgium -> category:Flanders -> category:East Flanders -> category:Kaprijke -> category:Lembeke. That's 5 levels of categorisation already. Duplication of the entire geographical structure x 20 or more (i.e. for each subject) x 500 (i.e. for each municipality) is NOT useful: there already IS a geographical structure. Moreover, this would lead to literally hundreds of very sparse or empty categories (or even meaningless). You don't create castles in..., churches in..., parks in... categories when most of the categories will be empty by definition (e.g. because there are simply no castles) or have photos on one single subject (most villages have only 1 church, so no point in creating a "churches in ...").

So what you're proposing is a 20 x or more re-creation or duplication a very deep category tree (at least 5 levels) of thousands of categories, duplicating this entire geographical tree to literally each and every subject imaginable, thereby creating thousands and thousands of empty or meaningless categories. Don't categorise for the sake of categorising !!

( A side note on the churches by the way: they actually belong to a parish, which are grouped in dioceses; so that would actually be more correct as a way of categorisation by the way).

By the way, about the "name of church" and "style of church" categories: those additions are more than welcome, and various people are already adding details and categories from time to time. That's not a replacement of the existing categories however, its another additional categorisation. So of course, go ahead adding romanesque, gothic, etc... labels where appropriate, or adding the ... by patron saints label where appropriate !--LimoWreck (talk) 20:02, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

If you simply look under "Mouscron", you won't find only files about churches, but files about everything about "Mouscron" (the municipality as well as the deelgemeente, because obviously this or this is about the municipality). So for important municipalities, it is not always easy to find the file you are looking for.

So according to you municipalities have to be categorized by province, but it is strictly forbidden to categorise anything else by province. I don't see any rational argument for that and I would not say this is really consistent.

I have never suggested to re-create the entire geographical situation of Belgium or to create empty cats, I just want to solve a concrete problem, specific to Commons: the lack of usability of Category:Churches in Belgium, nothing more. So you totally misunderstand my proposition, if you are thinking I want to create Castle in XXX for each municipality of Belgium. (I think creating a cat like that would be meaningful only for municipalities with at least 5-6 castles, which is really rare.)

I don't pretend my proposition is the only possible solution. But if you have other ideas to improve the usability of Category:Churches in Belgium (which in its present state is simply impossible to use), I would appreciate to hear about them.

In addition, I mention that in the collection "Le Patrimoine de Wallonie", edited by the official Walloon Heritage Institute, the sites are sorted by province, and then by municipality.

Churches are well part of parishes, but the buidings themselves belong to fabrique d'église/kerkfabriek, organized at municipality level.

To sum up, I just have two questions for you:

1. Do you think Category:Churches in Belgium is easy to use in its present state?
2. If no, what do you propose to improve the situation?

I also mention that Category:Churches in France, Category:Churches in Germany, Category:Churches in the United States, Category:Churches in the United Kingdom, Category:Churches in Switzerland, Category:Churches in the Netherlands... have subcategorization at intermediary level(s). But of course you probably think all these people are wrong. Or you think Belgium is so special that what is done elsewhere is totally impossible to do in Belgium. BrightRaven (talk) 17:34, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Additionnal note about parish: categorizing by parish is not useful, because there's generally just one church by parish. But if you propose to categorize churches by deanery and diocese, I won't oppose this principle. I think it can serve as a complementary geographical criterion, besides categorisation by municipality and/or province. I note that the mention of the deanery is generally absent from the articles about churches on WP. Categorizing by diocese is compatible with categorising by municipality (since every municipality belongs to only one diocese). It could be an alternative to categorizing by province, so why not? BrightRaven (talk) 10:58, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

My 2 cents: I bounced into this category and the first thought was, honestly, "what a mess!" I'm not very familiar with Belgium, but I understand the divisions are regions (Wallonia/Flanders/Brussels), provinces, municipalities, deelgementen; in parallel, as we're dealing with churches, dioceses and parishes, and also patron saints, style, etc.. When I decided to put order in the category of the churches of my province in Italy, I decided to apply the "rule of 3": if a municipality has photos of more than 3 churches, then I create a category for the churches in that municipality, and if a church has more than 3 photos, I create a category for that church. So, for the church of St. Hilarius in Bierbeek (it's on top of the page, no other reason to choose it): Churches in Belgium -› Churches in Flanders -› Churches in Flemish Brabant -› Churches in Bierbeek (I don't know if that's needed) -› St. Hilarius (Bierbeek); in parallel: Churches in Belgium -› Churches in the Archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels (I'm not sure it's the correct diocese) -› Churches in Bierbeek (I don't know if that's needed) -› St. Hilarius (Bierbeek). For example, I'd expect that the category Churches in Flemish Brabant belongs to Churches in Flanders and to Buildings in Flemish Brabant. The only reason why I would skip a division by provinces is if the majority of the people who know Bierbeek would not know that it is in Flemish Brabant, otherwise 509 potential subcategories of Churches in Belgium by municipality (I would create this category to leave Churches in Belgium usable) are a bit too much to be used. --Cruccone (talk) 18:51, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your common sense. Unfortunately, Foroa and Limowreck only accept subcat at deelgemeente/section level, which means 2,700 potential subcats. Thinking of categorisation at province and/or municipality level is wrong. Don't you understand? BrightRaven (talk) 16:39, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Discussion July 2010

There are so much churches in Belgium : categorizing all these buildings in "Churches in Belgium" seems inefficient. I propose to put all the churches in category by municipalities (after 1977) - a list of more than 5000 churches in Belgium seems totally unpractical : when you search something, you hope to have a sorting criterium... -, bu saint patron, by architects, by style, by date of building... or by area localisation for what the administrative division of a country is the more efficient (in Belgium, the lower level is the Municipality. In Belgium there are now 589 municipalities, it could be a efficient basis to categorize all the pictures on a territorial point of view. http://www.belgium.be/fr/la_belgique/pouvoirs_publics/communes/ --Jean Housen 18:25, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

By the way, on a practical ground, if I intend organize a guided tour in some village church everywhere in Europe (that's one of my jobs), I search to phone numbers : the municipality (which could give me the phone number of the person who have the keys) or the bishop's office. The name of the village where the church is grounded give me no way to access....--Jean Housen 18:45, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Read the above: there already IS a categorisation by municipality/geography. This is the basic category tree where you can find all churches. If you look for a church in place xyz, you just browse to belgium > the province > the municipality (> if needed also the format municipality). So there IS a geographical hierarchy for find really everhing you'd want. It's stated somewhere above, but you don't expect to duplicate a full hierarchy for churches, town halls, castles, streets, squares, bandstands, houses, etc... So everything is categorised per municipality. But if you'd duplicate this hierarchy for all possible subjects for belgium and other countries as well - what you are proposing - we would have an exponential increase in number of categories --LimoWreck (talk) 20:14, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

OK but no convinced yet. I think it's a matter of eyeglasses. You prefer put all the things in smalls boxes, to be sure to find everything in an appropriate category. I can't understand why you prefer take the former municipalities of Belgium (which don't exist since 40 years) as the background for category. For me, Tilff is a part of Esneux, Meeuwen is a part of Meeuwen-Guitrode, etc.

No time right now, but I will provide a summary of the situation and options within one week. --Foroa (talk) 21:07, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

No problem for delay : to build an encyclopedy or a picture database can't be done overnight :-)... If I could, I would be interested in sorting these 3000 pictures of churches in Belgium--Jean Housen 21:20, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

They are sorted. Alphabetically. If you want a geographical division: go by belgium > region > province > municip., that exists already. So there's not much to sort, unless you think replicating existing hierarchies in other categories over and over again is "sorting"--LimoWreck (talk) 02:33, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, but I still don't understand why not sort churches by municipalities after 1977, so you can get a view of all the churches instead of distillate in ancient municipalities. I've seen the category "Churches in Paris" or "Bridges in Paris" : you have 2 gates to get the pictures : all the bridges or churches of Paris, or by "arrondissement". Same thing for "Churches in Germany" = only 16 pictures, "Churches in Italy" = only 84 pictures, or "Churches in Switzerland" = only 1 picture....It seems easier than more than 3000 churches in Belgium....--Jean Housen 12:46, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't know how many times we have to keep repeating it: pictures are sorted by municipality, so here it is for the 100th time: . "Belgium" > province > municipality. There you go. --LimoWreck (talk) 13:09, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Before continuing the discussion and to simplify things, I will reorganise and move some of the categories. They could be moved back or renamed easily. Should make following discussions easier. --Foroa (talk) 09:31, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Maybe Foroa and LimoWreck should ask themselves why so many people come and say: this categorization is not appropriate. You are probably the only two who do not see there is a problem about it (presently 3.056 files in the cat). BrightRaven (talk) 16:05, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Proposition one

I have now separated church categories in Category:Churches in Belgium by name and Category:Churches in Belgium by location to facilitate the discussions. This has been done with the assumption that in the long term, all churches should be encapsulated in proper categories as the file name of each particular image can contain anything, so cannot really be used for any sort or structured search whatsoever.

There are several needs and ways to search for churches:

1. If you know the village, the quickest way is to go to the village and see if the church is in the village. No matter what additional structures we add, it is going to be redundant but not quicker.
2. If you know only the municipality, you can either go via the municipality (as above in any place in Belgium), or via Category:Churches in Belgium by location.
3. If you know only the name of the church, the quickest way is via Category:Churches in Belgium by name
4. If you want to do a visual search, the current Category:Churches in Belgium is the most useful but equally the contested one. There are several options:
   1. We can subdivide this category per province, but anyway, in the end, we will have more than thousand images per province, so we just displace the problem without real gain.
   2. We can subdivide the category per municipality (basically as in Category:Churches in Belgium by location, but then we use most of the visual search capability.
   3. We forget about visual search. Most images in Category:Churches in Belgium are overcategorised anyway, so in the end, the category will not contain images anymore.
   4. We can make sure that the image sort in Category:Churches in Belgium is properly done, I would suggest per village. The latter would require using sort keys for all images (current sort relying on image file name don't mix well with piped sort keys, but this could be corrected rather quickly, especially when using AutoWikiBrowser (I guess).
   5. People that want absolutely see their images in their municipalities can add them in the related Category:Churches in Belgium by location

In addition, there is still some agreement to be found on church category naming style and syntax, followed by a systematic category naming harmonisation, but I think that its more important to get the basic system right first. --Foroa (talk) 17:54, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

As far as I understand, I would agree with this proposal. Do you mean we could create categories per municipality (with categories per village inside of them) under Category:Churches in Belgium by location? BrightRaven (talk) 14:34, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, Category:Churches in Belgium by location allows to accommodate any elgian "churches in xxx" in order to accommodate all category style preferences. --Foroa (talk) 19:28, 28 July 2010 (UTC)