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The category denomination Category:Old maps" is not a scientific one. IMHO it should be "historical maps" - which would also touch all the connected categories like Category:Old maps of the Alps etc.
On the other hand, the denomination Category:Historical maps is not identical with "maps re./about history". It means depending on definition eg. "maps drawn up before" a certain date (eg. 1900). What would be your proposals?Reykholt (talk) 10:22, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Comment For old maps of particular places -- eg old maps of cities or towns or states or counties or departments -- it makes good sense to keep all the old maps together in a single category. There usually aren't nearly enough to justify fragmenting eg by century. It makes sense to retain "Old maps" categories for larger areas, eg countries, as natural containers for the categories of old maps of regions, counties, cities, etc. Jheald (talk) 21:28, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
"Old" still makes sense for those countries that still use a 70 year copyright. However, the biggest copyright country, the USA, changed to 95 years, so this matters less than it did.
One might also want to remember, most maps are compiled from the latest information and intended to present a place as it is at publication time. For these there's no need for separate "made" and "depicting" cate categories. The distinction of "historical map" applies to those few that depict the past, for example the many made in the mid 19th century to depict the growth of the Roman Empire. These are both old and historical, while those made in the late 20th century to depict Continental Drift are historical without being old. Either of these should have both kinds of datecat. Jim.henderson (talk) 21:02, 24 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Closing admin, remember to delete the whole category tree if this is deleted, or to rename the whole category tree if this is renamed. Nyttend (talk) 13:26, 26 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. It has been around for another year and a half but I agree that it should be put in a holding cell of some type so that people can categorize (or just dump the pages into the generic history of categories) and then we can sort these out by dates as is appropriate. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:17, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It seems a good enough majority for me. What, am I admitting I'm outvoted? Yes. It seems we have no custom of a No objection vote, but I do not object and there's no good reason to keep the question open indefinitely. Jim.henderson (talk) 00:54, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep -- I very strongly object to this proposed deletion. In the next few months I'm on track to land two sets each of up to 30,000 old maps here, with extensive detailed categorisation. It is very useful to be able to segregate current maps, typically created digitally from digital mapping systems either by users or from OSM, from scanned old maps which have an entirely different feel, do not portray the world as it currently is, and have different points of interest -- for example, an old maps category might typically be ordered by date, which would be very annoying for a mixed category, if the modern maps were only on the last page. It's better for people interested in either type for that type to be segregated from the other type.
The old maps hierarchy has been in place since 2006. It contains thousands, possibly tens of thousands of categories. It preserves a valuable distinction. It is not appropriate to destroy this classification that a lot of work has gone into, and wreak havoc on such a scale, on the basis of a proposal and a discussion that has attracted essentially no attention or interest in the last three years, and has not been advertised on even one in a thousand of the categories it would affect. Jheald (talk) 09:49, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. While I am happy with the idea that old maps is something of a holding category for files that haven't yet moved into categories of maps per year, a category of old maps of a particular city should be kept as its useful. For example the Wikipedia article on that city could use various old maps of a city in a minigallery or gif to show change over time. WereSpielChequers (talk) 11:26, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Jheald: No one is talking about destroying the built-up classification system, but about replacing it with something more useful: categorization by century of creation, and century depicted. If it was just deletion, I would have done it and closed already. But I'm not going to delete anything without sorting the existing contents of these categories. The creation of these replacement categories is an enormous amount of work. We have Category:Unidentified date where we could create a sub-category for future maps to be sorted. Sorting via sort key within an "Old maps" category is far from ideal. What sort key would you use, for instance, on a 19th-century map of medieval Lisbon? - Themightyquill (talk) 13:34, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Themightyquill: Pretty much the whole of the hierarchy under Category:Old maps of Great Britain is sorted (within its categories) by date, and it works fine. Across Commons as a whole, I would think between 30% and 50% of old maps have a sort key to force a sorting-order by date within the old maps category. See eg Category:Old maps of whole Wales (alone) for a typical example. This works far better than people over-sorting by date, as per for example the categories under Category:17th-century maps of Wales which seem to me a complete waste of time.
The recommendation (since 2006) is to put them in a separate sub-hierarchy; though sometimes this has not yet been particularly well populated. As an aside here, I would tend to distinguish between two sorts of maps: on the one hand a later facsimile or redrawing of an early map -- eg a 19th century re-drawing and engraving of a 1610 map by John Speed. These I would tend to file in the main sequence, sorted to sit along with other maps by John Speed, so ie with a sort-date of 1610. The other is eg a map newly drawn in the 19th century, depicting an earlier period. These generally fall into a natural hierarchy of groups according to what they depict -- eg Old maps of Anglo-Saxon Britain, Old maps of the history of the city of Norwich, Old maps of the English Civil War, Old maps of the Battle of X -- which make for a natural categorisation. Within such groups, I think it makes sense to sort by the date the map was published, then an identifier for the book, then the volume/page within the book. This keeps like together with like, so that if a book presents five maps of the development of Anglo-Saxon England, or the development of the city of Norwich, these are presented together and in sequence.
So my view is that the existing system is well-designed, and has good answers for most of the requirements of it. Jheald (talk) 12:52, 5 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I still don't think it's a good system. If there are only a few maps of a place, there's nothing to be gained by splitting out the "old" maps, since as you say you can order them by date if desired in a single category. Also, who is going to bother going through all the maps categories every year, to move those maps that are now 70 years old (by creation date or first publication?) into an "old maps" category? --ghouston (talk) 23:00, 5 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Ghouston: Except there is something to be gained by splitting out the old maps, because then you can go to the category one cat up, like Category:Old maps of county towns in England, and immediately see a run-down of which such places we have old maps of, and how many.
The issue about having to worry about maps first published in 1948 and move them is a red herring. The number of such maps is tiny, because they are mostly not out of copyright yet. Most maps when they go out of copyright would go straight into an old maps category. If a handful of maps are not moved as soon as they could be, out of the very large number of old maps we have, frankly it's a drop in the ocean, and not worth too much anxiety.
The real point, as I wrote above, is that there is a qualitative difference between scanned old printed maps, and newly-drawn modern maps. They are different genres of thing, and it's useful to be able to browse and explore the old printed maps for their own sake. Jheald (talk) 11:47, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Closing as Kept. While the term "old" is by itself vague, the "old maps" category is well established and found useful on Commons, and no alternative name nor arrangement for a parent category has been agreed upon. (Further details and comments: The hat-note specifying "70 years or older" helps remove vagueness - any set number of years would be somewhat arbitrary, that number is as good as any. "Historic" or "historical" maps is similarly vague if not more so - a famous map from any year could be called historic, while a map published in an obscure newspaper or magazine 100 years ago might have little or no historical importance; if age is the defining factor, "old" is a clearer adjective than "historical". We already have many more specific subcategories, eg in Category:Maps by year for when more precision is desired.) -- Infrogmation of New Orleans (talk) 14:26, 5 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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