Commons:Categories for discussion/2014/09/Category:Everyday life

This discussion of one or several categories is now closed. Please do not make any edits to this archive.

Category:Everyday life

This category, if properly populated, would contain millions or even billions of files that have little or nothing in common.    FDMS  4    17:44, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. For the slightly less messy Category:Online I used __HIDDENCAT__ {{To check category header}} after it was empty (manual cleanup). Meanwhile it is again populated by 34 files. –Be..anyone (talk) 22:45, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

This is useful as a container category and to illustrate the topic of w:everyday life. It's about as essentials as Category:Humans, and the proposed criticism is an (in)valid as if we were discussing what to do with that category. It should, of course, be full of subcategories, such as by century and by region. Probably also by activity. From social sciences perspective, it is a very vital category in need of development. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 04:25, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

See the Wikipedia article – everyday life is a phrase, not something definite (good-looking people or nice guys are phrases too). You just can't tell whether, for example, this woman just left hospital walking for the first time in her life or this father knows that he will die of cancer the next day.    FDMS  4    12:12, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

That's irrelevant; both cases would be everyday life for people somewhere. Most images showing people should within a category everyday life by place and time. Or, please tell me: if I am teaching a class on history of Korea, for example, what's the current best way for me to find images the educational topic of everyday life in Korea in 19th century? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 04:14, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

How could these two scenarios be considered "everyday life"? Again, there cannot be categories for everything — please tell me, how can I find images of good looking people/nice guys on Commons? There already are [century] people of [country/area] categories on Commons, but not for Korea.    FDMS  4    15:19, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Delete. It seems to me this is redundant with Category:Way of life which has been subject to discussions already: Commons:Categories for discussion/2012/04/Category:19th-century way of life. - Themightyquill (talk) 18:25, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

Keep Everyday life, delete Way of life. For me, Everyday life is clear: It is what people do (nearly) every day and how they do it: sleeping, eating, drinking, shopping, cooking, cleaning, going to work or school, working, learning, interacting, playing, entertaining and so on, just as described in w:everyday life. And because everyday life might be different for different kind of people, places and times, I agree that it should indeed contain subcategories by period, region or (group of) people, and by subject. So I agree with Piotrus.

However, I do not understand in what way Way of life is different from Everyday life. Unless someone could clearify that, my suggestion to solve this discussion would be:

• Add to Everyday life: subcategories for Everyday life by period and Everyday life by ethnic group (at least for the Don Cossack way of life‎, but it might apply to many more ethnic groups).
• Mark Everyday life as a parent category that should not contain any individual files. [done, 30-6-2019, JopkeB]
• Remove Healthy lifestyle from Way of life to Health education or Health promotion (what it actually is, according to the infobox).
• Remove the remaining subcategories of Way of life to the new subcategories of Everyday life by period and ethnic group.
• Categorize the remaining individual files properly (in Way of life as well in Everyday life - done for Everyday life); most of them do not seem rightly placed there. Of course I would like to help.

JopkeB (talk) 15:25, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm not convinced that this is worthwhile keeping, but I have moved the "way of life" categories here to at least consolidate (the files and the discussion). - Themightyquill (talk) 10:09, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

	Category:Everyday life	Merge into	Category:Human activities
	Category:Everyday life	Delete
	@FDMS, Piotrus, Themightyquill, and JopkeB: This is a case where we either must impose our own views as users and contributors on the content in deciding what constitutes 'everyday life', or we must be completely inclusive and allow inclusion of nearly every human activity, as most of them have been an everyday thing for someone at some point. I suppose a third possibility is that the category (and especially its branches) only get used a pet projects by some editors to create groupings to their liking of what meets their own concept of the idea. None of these is a good approach to a Commons category. These are human activities, and files depicting these activities can be done perfectly well arranged under Category:Human activities. There is probably no debate that sleeping is an everyday activity, but shopping, auto racing, or conflict are debatable. What is the value of some arbitrary line we impose on what is "everyday"?
	Josh (talk) 00:12, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

I stand by my prior view, it's a high level container category. What's the problem? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 01:46, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Even if I accept that, there's not thing to keep it a high level container category. It currently has a signficant number of images directly in the main category, and the sub-categories are only consolidated at all because I did so fairly recently. Even if images are subcategorized by country, that's still an incredibly broad category. Substitute "everyday life" with the word "everything" (which isn't hyperbole when you're talking about everyone in a country throughout time, or the whole world during one century) and Category:Everything in the United States or Category:Everything in the 16th-century both look rather ridiculous, don't they? - Themightyquill (talk) 08:59, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

@Piotrus: Your comments above seem to indicate (please clarify if I am reading them wrong), is that anything considered 'everyday life' by anyone at any time can be included, with sub-categorization to sort things out. If that is the case (and again, correct me if I am misinterpreting you), then what difference do you see between Category:Everyday life and Category:Human activities, and if there is a difference, what need is there for an additional level of 'high level' categorization to separate the two? Josh (talk) 20:17, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Everyday life should be a subcategory to Human activities. It should eventually be a conmtainer category, but we may need to create a bunch of subategories. And it clearly has images which are not everyday life, like File:Fred Wheezy.jpg or File:FredrikTheng-15.jpg. Posing for camera is not everyday life. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 02:36, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

Surely, posing for cameras is everyday life for many people. - Themightyquill (talk) 13:11, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

My heart still says: Keep Everyday life. But my head tends to transfering this category to Human activities, because there are at least two problems/issues/challenges with Everyday life:

1. There is no clear definition and no dividing line between what is in and what is not. For Human activities there is a clear definition and a dividing line. And all Everyday life activities are Human activities.
2. Within subcategories of Everyday life there are subcategories that do not belong to Everyday life. For example (via People by activity) the Category:Sleeping people. Sleeping in your own bedroom at home is indeed Everyday life. But People sleeping on trains‎ or Sleeping people under tree is not. Are we going to split the Category:Sleeping people (and many others)?

So for practical reasons I vote in favour of the proposal by Josh. JopkeB (talk) 12:46, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

---

 Done: this discussion determined that: a) if the nominated category is kept and is meant to capture human activities, it becomes redundant to Category:Human activities; b) if its contents are to be decided on by editors, it becomes subjective, which is undesirable for categories. There is consensus to merge the contents into Category:Human activities. --ƏXPLICIT 06:24, 4 September 2020 (UTC)