Jump to content

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 March 12

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
< March 11 March 13 >

March 12[edit]

Category:18th-century church buildings in Sweden[edit]

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: keep. MER-C 12:22, 24 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Merge. Only entry at this level in the category tree. This is also the only entry in Category:18th-century church buildings by country which I don't believe is needed at this point. That part of the tree exists with content only for the 19th century. Given the large number of existing church building categories, is this by century by country really needed? Most, if not all of the building articles are already in the country tree. Depending on the outcome here, a discussion of the 19th century category may be needed. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:16, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep and populate. I woudl be surprised if there were not a lot of notable buildings from this and the preceding century. Perhaps since this is the English WP, many that appear in the Swedish WP do not appear here, but should. Peterkingiron (talk) 19:01, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per Peterkingiron Laurel Lodged (talk) 19:16, 22 March 2015 (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:17th-century church buildings in Sweden[edit]

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: keep. MER-C 12:22, 24 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Merge. Only by country category at this point in the tree. Everything else is by denomination. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:10, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Weak keep while on a global level a categorization by denomination is most meaningful, it is not meaningful at all in a country like Sweden in which a single denomination strongly dominates the religious landscape. The same applies to many other countries, by the way. Marcocapelle (talk) 22:30, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep and populate as with 18th Century one (above). Peterkingiron (talk) 19:02, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per Peterkingiron Laurel Lodged (talk) 19:17, 22 March 2015 (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:School board members in Japan[edit]

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 as non-defining. The objectors below seem to have misunderstood the rationale. See also WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. – Fayenatic London 22:35, 17 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: School board members are normally appointed on a voluntary basis and the position form a very minor part of the subjects lives - particularly the only two in this category Toshihiko Seko and Kunio Yonenaga. This is not profoundly different from other kinds of membership category, such as union or party membership. SFB 20:12, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • These two categories should be nominated for deletion as well. Marcocapelle (talk) 08:56, 11 April 2015 (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:Suckless[edit]

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. MER-C 12:24, 24 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Category for a company that is itself not notable. Only three items in the category. Just can't see the utility here. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 18:20, 12 March 2015 (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:Scales with unusual key signatures[edit]

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 (contents merged to Category:Musical scales). Good Ol’factory (talk) 23:40, 24 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Propose deletion, as category depends on subjective inclusion criteria that are inherently biased toward one musical tradition (Western European classical music). Ibadibam (talk) 17:24, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support—The key signatures are only related to trying to represent music on a standard 5-line stave. There is nothing inherently unusual about them. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 08:52, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You may disagree with "unusual", but you are not arguing with me, but with Dave Hunter and Tommy Tedesco. How about "nonstandard" instead of unusual? Hyacinth (talk) 20:14, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Never heard of them until seeing your changes to the category info. As the nominator implies and I was getting at, these key-signatures are only non-standard if the standard is Western-classical music as written from ca. 1650 onwards. However, as this represents an inherent bias towards a single music tradition (albeit influential) it is something WP works to avoid. The other music traditions have their own scales, it is only when there is an attempt to write them down in Western-classical style that these key signatures appear. Also, a key signature is just a printed shorthand to make reading a score easier, it's not some special talisman that is an essential part of the piece of music. Remove the key signature and mark all the relevant notes with accidentals, the music is still the same. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:14, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. If my memory serves me, there are 1700-odd different scales and, I can't think when, where or how one would decide which is unusual, nonstandard or otherwise. Why can't all the scales live together, or would that cause disharmony in WP? --Richhoncho (talk) 22:26, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If we delete this category there will still be twelve subcategories of Category:Musical scales. Hyacinth (talk) 06:27, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
None of the other sub-categories are about the key-signature of the scale (or what the scale looks like in printed music shorthand), so this is a strawman argument. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:14, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The category's criteria for inclusion is entirely objective, and is now stated on the category page. Hyacinth (talk) 06:31, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comment 'unusual' is dependent on cultural context, there are probably people that think a major scale sounds pretty unusual. However, the category seems to be clearly scales found outside the western diatonic patters "father Charles goes down and ends battle" and all that. What would people think of renaming the category to "non common practice scales" or something similar? Storeye (talk) 08:54, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It would be the right thing to do if the category were worth keeping. But even after renaming or redefining the inclusion criteria, the terms "common practice" or "standard" are still dependent on cultural context and thus inherently biased. It also seems like the category still wouldn't be defining, something of a miscellaneous category. Why would we categorize things based on what they are not? A category of "nonstandard" scales is as useful as a category of non-English football clubs or chocolate-free cakes. Ibadibam (talk) 22:11, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The term 'common practice' in music is a recognised term that is not dependent on cultural context, see Common practice period. But you're right that it does define things based on what they're not rather than what they are Storeye (talk) 06:00, 22 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Question: Aren't the standard key signatures in themselves a part of Western European (not necessarily just classical) music tradition? There is absolutely nothing subjective about deciding what is not usual: there are exactly 15 usual ones, and all others are unusual/nonstandard.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:59, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
However, just because we're used to the key-signature for B-major looking like:
{ \override Score.TimeSignature #'stencil = ##f \clef bass \key b \major \hideNotes f4 }
doesn't mean that expressing it like:
{ \override Score.TimeSignature #'stencil = ##f \clef bass \set Staff.keySignature = #`(((-2 . 3) . ,SHARP) ((-1 . 0) . ,SHARP) ((-2 . 4) . ,SHARP) ((-1 . 1) . ,SHARP) ((-2 . 5) . ,SHARP)) \hideNotes f4 }
is wrong or unusual. And, while key signatures like
{ \override Score.TimeSignature #'stencil = ##f \clef treble \set Staff.keySignature = #`(((0 . 6) . ,FLAT) ((0 . 5) . ,FLAT) ((0 . 3) . ,SHARP)) \hideNotes f'4 }
weren't seen in Western European music from about 1700 to 1925(?), they were used to indicate scordatura tunings in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:14, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Does "unusual" mean wrong? If so, let's rename the category. Hyacinth (talk) 10:27, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In answer to your question: No. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:06, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Either keep The definition seems to be that the notes do not fit the standard Western 12-note scale. That is a legitimate category, but the present name is unsatisfactory, since it appears to involve POV as to what is usual. In fact there is a robust (non-POV) definiiton in the headnote. If not kept, merge back to Category: Musical scales, rather than delete. Peterkingiron (talk) 19:11, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete: The title is misleading; scales and key signatures aren't actually as inextricably linked as the category title suggests. Many pieces historically in C minor were written with two flats: B♭ and E♭. It's OR and contrary to practice to suggest that one can reverse-engineer a key signature from the scale's notes. If you did that with G harmonic minor, you'd get a signature with one sharp and two flats. And what would you do with scales which don't have 7 notes? Seems like what you mean is unusual scales. But I don't see a need for a separate category for those. Just categorize them under Category:Scales. —Wahoofive (talk) 16:21, 23 March 2015 (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:Pakistan studies journals[edit]

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. – Fayenatic London 22:38, 17 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: This cat was split off from Asian studies journals and only contains 1 article, with not much potential for growth. The parent cat only has 50 entries, which is not overly large. Hence I propose that this cat be upmerged to Asian studies journals. Randykitty (talk) 14:54, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support with no objection to recreating later if more articles appear. RevelationDirect (talk) 03:29, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge having a one entry category of this type is not useful. If more get articles (whether by coming into existence of existing or past ones having articles created) this can be revisited, but at present there is no reason for this category.John Pack Lambert (talk) 18:53, 10 April 2015 (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.

Natural "death by cause" categories[edit]

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: closed as a trainwreck - No prejudice against more clear, more focused re-nominations. Note: I commented in the discussion below. But I think this is pretty clear that most agree that, while this may have been an interesting brainstorming session of a discussion, this is a mess (see also the talk page for one disentangling attempt), and no consensus will be found here except to agree that it's a mess : ) - Obviously any uninvolved closer is welcome to substitute their own close for this. - jc37 15:21, 30 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
full list
Nominator's rationale: Natural deaths are nothing out of the ordinary, therefore should be deleted as routine catagories. If needed, cause of death should be migrated to Wikidata. Also nominating all subcats of these. --Mdann52 (talk) 10:32, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Of course deleting it before it is migrated to Wikidata is the silliest possible outcome. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 21:32, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The last time I checked, WikiData was specifically not using category tags as a source of information; they prefer (quite rightly, IMO) cited information - e.g. from infoboxes and lists. DexDor (talk) 21:38, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support All with 1 Exception Per WP:COPDEF. There is a real source bias where biography articles are categorized by everything in their newspaper obituary (cause of death, hospital/place of death, place of burial, fraternal club memberships) even though these categorizations fail even my most liberal reading of what is defining. Certainly there are exceptions for Category:Martyrs and similar people, but these are the outlyers. (The one exception I would make here is Category:People who died on hunger strike, because those articles do seem to be largely defined by their death.) RevelationDirect (talk) 12:00, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all as being defining to the individual. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 19:24, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

* Support per nom. Marcocapelle (talk) 22:36, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • @Mdann52: You're saying "also nominating all subcats of these", I assume you mean that you are going to nominate the subcats, right? Because at this point of time you haven't nominated them yet. Marcocapelle (talk) 22:36, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • I agree with Marcocapelle that we need some clarification here. Some of these categories either are currently or could potentially be limited as container categories for the subcategories. I think we need to know what exact categories are being nominated in this nomination before users can make a fully informed decision. For some of these one might say "keep" to if the subcategories are not being immediately nominated, but one's opinion might change if all the subcategories are also being nominated. Good Ol’factory (talk) 22:55, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Procedural oppose. The subcats have not been nominated for deletion so this CFD would, for example, leave Category:Suicides by starvation without a starvation parent category. In a case like this you really need to either nominate a complete tree for deletion or start at the bottom of the tree and work upwards (or explain in the nomination why no change to the subcats is needed). However, I do agree that bio articles should not be categorized by cause of death; it is an important fact about a person, but it is not defining in an encyclopedic sense (e.g. an article about a Foolandian politician should be categorized under Fooland, people and politics, but not under medicine). DexDor (talk) 06:54, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Support in principle, but the details should be checked - e.g. Category:Methanol poisoning incidents and Category:Black Assizes should be removed from the nomination. It would also be a good idea to check for articles (example) in these categories that are not biographical articles and may need to be upmerged (I'm wondering if there's an automated way to detect such articles). DexDor (talk) 19:39, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The defenestration CFD proposed an incorrect merge; there's no contradiction between the category surviving that CFD, but being deleted by this one. DexDor (talk) 19:39, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Most of the articles in Category:Deaths from asphyxiation (and its subcats) are about politicians, actors etc who are already categorized by their reason for notability. These categories currently contain 10 non-bio (based on not being in a date-of-birth category) articles (these ones) of which a few may need to be upmerged. Articles like Death of Otto Zehm are already in a more suitable category. DexDor (talk) 09:04, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I would support the deletion of categories which are not parent categories to which the nom applies: ie those relating to "Natural deaths [which] are nothing out of the ordinary". Marcocapelle (below) is developing a list, which seems a splendid idea. Kudos to the nominator too for a prodigious effort. Oculi (talk) 19:36, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think it's fair enough to tag (a selection of) subcategories as well, include these in the list of nominated categories and discuss them right here. Marcocapelle (talk) 14:17, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've tagged all those I think should be deleted, as per the comments above. I've removed the one recently discussed. @DexDor: I've nominated them all now. Mdann52 (talk) 17:16, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per nom except all suicide categories (including hunger strike categories), all executed categories, jockeys killed while racing, filmed deaths from falls, all AIDS-related categories, live burial and falling out of airplane. Marcocapelle (talk) 18:14, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Actually, for some of the exceptions I mentioned (filmed falls, jockeys killed while racing), I'd be okay with listifying instead of keeping the category, per jc37. Marcocapelle (talk) 08:00, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Support - especially all the general grouping by disease or sickness or execution or suicide, and general grouping by hazardous recreational events/activities. That said, Keep the pandemic ones (including Category:Black Assizes), the hunger strike ones, and the nazi burials, since those are specific shared events. Keep the poison incidents one. Keep or Listify the jockeys in races one (it's more than just riding horses) and the falling out of airplanes one. Weak keep/listify filmed falls. - jc37 04:50, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I'm trying to imagine the closing admin going through these and saying well, this many people generally supported this but every single one of them had different exceptions.RevelationDirect (talk) 10:46, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment the nominator's rationale refers to natural deaths, but many of the nominated categories do not seem so natural (Parachuting deaths? Deaths by horse-riding accident? People executed by starvation?). Also, many categories are definitely NOT ordinary, and appear as definiting characteristics of the individuals, sometimes one of their claims of notability (eg Suicides by... categories‎, Deaths by defenestration, People who died on the 1981 Irish hunger, Deaths from Ebola, Deaths from plague, Deaths from yellow fever, Deaths by live burial, Jockeys killed while racing, Filmed deaths from falls, are some examples of categories that IMO should absolutely be kept). I am also uncertain about AIDS, which seems a defining characteristic for most of the individuals who were affected by it (including a bunch specific coverage focusing on "he/she & AIDS"). Some very rare degenerative diseases would require further investigation as well. On the other hand, some categories are quite ordinary and non-defining, and could go away without any regret. Probably a wider and more accurate RfC discussion would be a better way to handle with the death-related categories and to achieve more consistent results. Cavarrone 11:47, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Why do you think that, for example, Category:Deaths from yellow fever should be kept ? That category contains articles about people who are notable as actors, artists, generals etc - not people who are notable for having died of yellow fever (which, according to the article, kills 30,000 people per year). Their cause of death is just one of the biographical facts included in the article text. DexDor (talk) 12:35, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Because it kills 30,000 non-notable people in the third world. It killed about 50 notable people in recorded human history. 11,000,000 people died in 2014, yet we have Category:2014 deaths --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 17:14, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Category:2014 deaths etc are, I believe, more for administrative purposes (e.g. for BLP tagging) than for navigation - hence we don't split them into subcats when they get beyond a few hundred members. DexDor (talk) 21:30, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Procedural proposal On my home page User:Marcocapelle I made a list of all categories, leaving out the country subcats, in three groups and otherwise in alphabetical order.
  1. Can we move this list to a any more neutral place? (Where?)
  2. Can everyone who agrees on the general principle of deleting most of these categories puts his username behind a category if he/she wants the category not to be deleted? By default the objection will also apply to the country subcats of that category.
  3. Assuming there will still be a large amount of categories left to which nobody objects to delete, I would suggest the closing admin only deletes categories to which nobody objects (including the respective country categories), without prejudice against discussing (in a later nomination) any particular category that is kept for the time being. Marcocapelle (talk) 17:29, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I've added my keep !votes against 2. A more neutral place to put the list would be the talk page of this page or a subpage of this page. DexDor (talk) 18:56, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It's on the talk page now. Good suggestion! Marcocapelle (talk) 19:15, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm fine with granular tabulation of exceptions but it only applies if the overall proposal passes. (I don't want to discount Lugnuts and other editors who may disagree with this whole endeavor.) My 3 exceptions are addedRevelationDirect (talk) 21:53, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely agree. By taking the exceptions apart, we can discuss at this place whether or not the principle is right. Marcocapelle (talk) 23:16, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Just out of curiosity, why do you think AIDS should be kept, but not syphilis, rabies ... ? DexDor (talk) 09:49, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
A strong majority appears to agree with deleting many of these categories. I see one blanket "Keep! We need them all" vote, but maybe there are others. But that does NOT equate to agreement that we should delete all nominated categories that no-one specifically objected to. As an imperfect analogy, think of the military commander who says, "We will execute all the war criminals on this list next week." Several people recognize names on the list and protest that their friends are entirely innocent. "No problem," says the commander, "we'll only execute the people for whom no-one has spoken up." Just as civilized societies follow due process and not summary execution, this blanket CfD request should be replaced with targeted discussion in each area. What types of categories do we see here? What purpose does each type serve? Are there other ways to correlate those articles that are at least as useful as categorization? What's needed (e.g. wikidata expansion) to get to a point where a CfD request could be supported for a particular category type? Etc. Rupert Clayton (talk) 22:25, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Procedural oppose: This CfD is a mess. Not only are there too many categories proposed, they are across a too-broad a range of topics - also not all the categories are "natural" causes of deaths, (suicide? accidents? really?) and the comments above show that the proposal is confusing. I suggest withdrawing this and making about five or six smaller CfDs - for example, I would most likely support upmerging most of the "death by X by country" cats into simple "death by X" categories. However, things like the parachuting or horse riding death cats are ones I'd keep. But this proposal is so broad that no one can parse the consensus of "X but not Y, Z but not A, B but only if we upmerge to C..." YIKES!!! Montanabw(talk) 05:40, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Procedural oppose per Montanabw. I'm open-minded but this is too complex to sort out. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 05:55, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Montanabw: @Stevietheman: It's actually easier than it seems at first glance. If you agree or disagree on the entire concept of deleting natural causes of death categories, please indicate it right here. While if you have objections against deleting one or more particular categories, please indicate it on the talk page. Marcocapelle (talk) 09:21, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • No, as the first few "natural" causes are themselves ill-defined and rather debatable. (Starvation and bleeding are far different from disease or aging) Then we have the huge collapsed section which contains dozens of other examples that clearly aren't "natural" - suicide and accidents, for example. The one thing I do think is overdone are the "deaths by country" sections; unless there is some really good reason to create such sections, it seems an odd and (if I may pun) unnatural categorization. Montanabw(talk) 03:50, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment regarding the 2 procedural opposes above. Unless one nominates categories one at a time (which in this case would mean hundreds of separate CFD discussions) one has to decide how big a branch of the tree to discuss and it is then almost inevitable that some people will think the scope is too wide or too narrow. If some of the lower level subcats (e.g. some of the deaths by falls categories) are kept then some parent categories may need to be kept or recreated, but that wouldn't be too difficult. How is this nomination more complex than having separate discussions (either in parallel or in series) ? (Having said that, I would probably have started with a smaller nomination.) DexDor (talk) 09:49, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Finding the right size bite is a challenge here. This is probably too large. Smaller nominations lend themselves to WP:OSE though. RevelationDirect (talk) 01:33, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all, absolutely defining, it is the lede in every obituary. To quote User:Alansohn: We link people by year of death Category:1900 deaths, when they are geographically separated by 12,000 miles. We link people by location Category:People from London, even if they are separated by 1,000 years of history. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 16:55, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - I think this is a classic example of a group nom that needs to be split. If it was earlier in the discussion process, I might have boldly made the split. But as it currently stands I don't see the comments as untangle-able. I suggest this be withdrawn / closed as "no consesus", and nominated separately. The separate group noms I would suggest: diseases and illnesses; suicides; executions; and (semi-)hazardous recreational events/activities. And individual noms for the categories individually named by others above (I think I listed them in my comments above.) This would make it more easy to determine consensus on these. - jc37 18:20, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Could that be done without detagging and retagging all the categories? (all the editors who've commented here would have to be notified). Or perhaps a closing admin could rule in favour of deleting part(s) of the list (e.g. cancer, infectious disease) based on this discussion and relist the rest. DexDor (talk) 18:54, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    @Jc37: What you suggest is sort of what I hoped to achieve by listing the categories on the talk page. Can that still be a procedural solution for the problem? Marcocapelle (talk) 22:03, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    My guess would be that most closers are likely to see this as a mess and close as "no consensus". Treat this as a brainstorming RfC. We all learned something and now we can move forward on a clearer re-nom. And yes, you will need to retag all the cats so that the cfd page target and the dates are correct. - jc37 22:19, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    I suspect you are right. RevelationDirect (talk) 01:33, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Like jc37 said. Montanabw(talk) 03:50, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
*@DexDor: Mdann52 bot is approved for tagging/detagging categories related to the CfD, so if it is needed, I consider it in scope to retag or detag any cats that are not involved in a future CfD (which would, at the minimum, mean going through and changing the dates on the tempates). 11:05, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • keep all including all the subcats that are being wildly tagged without even a semblance of discussion here. Causes of death are most certainly defining to the individual. Hmains (talk) 00:06, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all: These categories are of major importance, especially from a medical perspective, as well as being defining to the individual. They serve useful purposes to those of us working with the medical and health aspects of biographical articles. "Natural deaths" are of no less importance than extraordinary or unnatural deaths. It would be a great loss if these categories were removed. — Gaute chat - email - sign 00:14, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Essay I agree that death is defining to a person. Here's how deaths have been defined in my family:
  • Died Old vs. Died Young
  • Lingering or Painful vs. Sudden
  • Natural vs. Suicide/Car Accident
  • Who found the body
  • Life Insurance vs. No Life Insurance
I look at our categories with obscure medical diagnoses or method of suicide, and they really ring hollow to me. RevelationDirect (talk) 01:38, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note to closer Please ping me when this is closed - My bot is approved to detag these, so when we are ready, If this is a no consensus/keep, I'll run it to remove the tags. Mdann52 (talk) 11:05, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment This discussion will be moot in 1-2 years when this sort of information is curated in Wikidata then migrated to the Wikipedia of every language by an automated process. See d:Property:P1196, manner of death, and d:Property:P509, cause of death on Wikidata. See also Johann Sebastian Bach (Q1339) as the test case biography which is most developed. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:42, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Nationality, date of birth, date of death, and cause of death are standard biographical details. An obituary which omits cause of cause would generally be considered incomplete. The amount by which cause of death defines the person will vary - sometimes it will be the most defining characteristic - such as Titanic victims and AIDS victims, other times it may be minor, so it becomes an editorial decision if an individual article requires a cause of death category, but, yes, of course we should keep the potential to categorise those articles which would require such a cat. SilkTork ✔Tea time 19:29, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all / procedural oppose I could be persuaded that a fair number of these categories are not justified and do not add to the encyclopedia. However, the fact that the nominator is pushing for the deletion of more than 1,000 categories based on a three-sentence justification highlights a significant imbalance within Wikipedia's procedures. All of these categories cover the more or less "natural" cause of death of multiple individuals, but their merit varies widely.
As an example, I created Category:Deaths from the 1889–1890 flu pandemic two years ago. It currently has 15 members and was modeled on the earlier Category:Deaths from the 1918 flu pandemic with 129 members. Research into historical flu pandemics is an important aspect of epidemiology. About 1 million people died during the 1889–1890 flu pandemic. There were extensive studies of transmission and treatment at the time (even though little was known about what caused flu), and the pandemic has been the subject of recent research. It is germane to the biography of notable individuals that they died in this pandemic, and conversely, the deaths of notable people and the historical effect of them are relevant to study of the epidemic. These categories provide a useful connection. Consequently, I would make a strong case to keep these particular categories. So that's my seven-sentence argument for keeping two of these categories. Others may disagree. A CFD discussion with a note on my talk page would be a reasonable way to kick off that conversation. Either way, we need more than the nominator's three-sentence dismissal.
To pick another category at random, I would be less concerned if Category:Cancer deaths in Newfoundland and Labrador were to be deleted, as it has two members who are not connected by anything beyond being notable citizens of the same Canadian province who suffered one of the most common causes of death. Overall, I think we should respect the work invested in accumulating the knowledge that these 1000+ categories represent. That means that any proposal to delete, upmerge or listify these categories should take them in sensible chunks of similar categories. Lots of this stuff might be better handled through wikidata but it would seem that we can leave the category deletion until after that is substantially complete. Rupert Clayton (talk) 22:05, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all I agree with Rupert Clayton. Any cause of death, natural or otherwise, is not necessarily, but can be, definitive in/of a person's life. It seems like there is more of a problem with making users aware of what kinds of categories are useful and appropriate, and under what conditions they should be assigned. Combining unrelated factors into a single category causes data integrity problems. We could end up having categories like pianists-who-died-of-heart-attacks-in-Indonesia-in-1935 and end up with the same number of categories as there are deaths! Such confounded or combined categories can/should be proposed for deletion. (On the other hand, if there is a reason for the dual category, like if there were a cancer cluster in a particular location, that is a unique situation, and a logical category.) Peacedance (talk) 03:37, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Peacedance nicely illustrates both the problem with excessive and irrelevant categorization, and the problem with deleting the current categories. There's a very good chance that Wikidata can provide a better solution, but it's not there yet. To take the example above, the individual would have an "occupation" property of "pianist", a "date of death" property of "21 February 1935", a "cause of death" property of "heart attack", and a "location of death" property of "Jakarta" (among many others). This data stored in Wikidata can then be used to populate an infobox, and provide appropriate navigation and grouping (as categories do now). Presuming that a good UI will be designed to help users navigate, they could find other pianists who died in Jakarta, other people who died of heart attacks in Indonesia in the third week of February 1935, etc. There's also a question of how to select and prioritize this data within the Wikipedia article. But we can see there's a good chance that there will be no need for manual categorization in the way we currently perform it. However, all the above requires Wikidata's software and content to advance to that point. And until that work is much closer to completion, any CfD request in this area needs to operate carefully and conservatively. Rupert Clayton (talk) 23:08, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Well said. Remember the data in the categories is harmonized, and the cause_of_death field is not. category:myocardial_infarction can have as the cause_of_death any one of the dozen or so euphemisms or historical names for a heart attack. Even in current death certificates issued by states the names are not harmonized from state to state. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 23:35, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Fortunate then that Wikidata has support for aliases for everything. As long as all the alternate names for "myocardial infarction" are included in that item, a single category can be populated to list deaths by heart attack, heart stoppage, myocardial infarction... // coldacid (talk|contrib) 00:20, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm just getting into Wikidata, and I agree that aliases might provide some help here, at least where two terms are synonyms. But disease categorization is more messy than that. Like biological taxonomy, different viewpoints exist on whether closely related conditions should be grouped or split, and there are competing ways to group diseases (symptoms, affected organs, causative agent, etc.) Of course, systems such as ICD-10 already classify diseases quite precisely. Wikidata links provides ICD-9 and ICD-10 classifications as a property of a disease, but some causes of death won't map precisely. Is "death of a human by bull attack" the same as "W55.22 Struck by cow"? Is "defenestration" the same as "W13.4 Fall from, out of or through window"? Even for diseases, ICD-10 is still an imperfect solution for cause of death. We need to agree common name aliases so that "I21 ST elevation (STEMI) and non-ST elevation (NSTEMI) myocardial infarction" becomes "heart attack" in English. We also need to provide an easy way to select the correct entry. And we have to deal with a whole bunch of historical medical conditions where assignment would be speculative ("a broken heart", "apoplexy", and "a surfeit of lamphreys" come to mind). Rupert Clayton (talk) 22:57, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Rupert Clayton: Given that the origin and primary purpose of ICD is the classification of mortality to enable member countries of WHO to report deaths, it is amusing to suggest that it is not precise enough to classify causes of death. For WHO purposes the classification at the third-character level is sufficient for mortality. In answer to your specific questions: W55.22 is only in ICD-10-CM and therefore not recognised by countries that use other versions. In ICD-10, struck by a bull is classified under category W55 Bitten or struck by other mammals; W13.4 is again ICD-10-CM specific (the Australian modification ICD-10-AM uses W13.1 for the same concept), however, whichever W13 code is assigned, it only applies to accidental causes and suicidal or assault (or legal execution) defenestration are classified to X80, Y01 and Y35.5 respectively; for the whole medical conditions issue with various terms resulting in the same ICD-10 code, this is usually addressed within disease classification circles by using a nomenclature such as SNOMED rather than a statistical classification. [Disclaimer: I'm a nosologist in RL.] Beeswaxcandle (talk) 23:18, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Beeswaxcandle: Ah, I don't think I was trying to suggest that ICD-10 lacked precision in describing the medical cause of a person's death. My point was rather that Wikidata and Wikipedia's criteria for categorizing cause of death might differ in some way from those of ICD-10 — that we might not have one-to-one mappings between the terms people expect to use in an encyclopedia for general readership and those of ICD-10. For example, ICD-10 cares that falling from a window caused the person's death; Wikipedia has Category:Deaths by defenestration because someone cared about grouping people who were intentionally pushed out of windows. In reality, the value of using (or linking to) an existing controlled vocabulary likely outweighs the few edge cases where we need to know whether the deceased fell or was pushed, and there's nothing to prevent adding an additional property that adds that granularity. Rupert Clayton (talk) 23:32, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all and procedural oppose: no sufficiently valid reason has been presented as far as I am concerned for the removal of these categories. The information these categories provide, and can potentially provide, far outweighs any minor procedural misgivings, IMO. Quis separabit? 12:55, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment How do we determine objectively whether a potential category is defining or not? It seems 50% subjective. How would you define it so that I could write a bot that would read a biography or an obituary and it would pick out all the relevant categories that define a person? If you can do that, then it becomes objective. If you can't it is arbitrary. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 19:30, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    I think in some cases these categories are defining and then, once they're created, it's hard to control widespread categorization since it becomes a judgment call. The AIDS category tree has Category:HIV/AIDS activists which I think is useful because, often, someone who died of a disease is notable not for cause of death per se, but because they became outspoken on the issue. RevelationDirect (talk) 19:55, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I thought an encyclopaedia's mission is to impart reliable information. The circumstances of the death of any subject deemed sufficiently notable to have an article on Wikipedia in the first place are not unimportant, but vary in importance by degrees. Quis separabit? 00:10, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
To understand where I'm coming from, we have plenty of articles on chess and basketball which are certainly notable and we categorize professionals in those fields as such as notable. But we don't categorize every biography by whether or not they did those things as a hobby because the overlap is not notable. I see this as analogous to these death by cause categories; other editors obviously don't.RevelationDirect (talk) 12:12, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There is, however, a significant difference between categorizing chess players by their hobbies, and categorizing notable individuals by their cause of death. — Gaute chat - email - sign 18:43, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I actually see them both as WP:TRIVIALCAT (a trivial intersection) unless the person is notable because of chess or their death. Others obviously see a difference.RevelationDirect (talk) 02:29, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep All Hey! Let's delete all "routine catagories [sic] because they are "nothing out of the ordinary"! That would include year of birth, year of death, place of residence and career! After all, aren't all of these remarkably ordinary? Everybody is born, everybody lives somewhere, does something and then dies; Nothing vaguely interesting there, so let's junk it all. Remarkably we categorize on all of these remarkably ordinary characteristics because they are defining, despite their utterly boring ordinariness. I also enjoy the "source bias" of using material in newspaper obituaries. It's how people are described on a consistent basis in reliable and verifiable sources that makes something encyclpedic, and newspaper articles, encyclopedias and books have a nasty and consistent habit of prominently listing a cause of death. Given that the reliable and verifiable sources that are the bedrock standard for Wikipedia are consistently and prominently focusing on a cause of death, that's what we should be doing here. Alansohn (talk) 15:09, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Re "It's how people are described" - no it's not; Margaret Thatcher is usually described as "Britain's first female prime minister" (or similar), Neil Armstrong is usually described as "an American astronaut", "the first person to walk on the Moon" etc. How a person died is (of course) a fact that can/should be mentioned in the text of a biography (if it's known) - like parent's occupation, marital status, number of children, hobbies (e.g. golf) ..... An obituary that is reporting news of someone's death is bound to feature information about the death (like a newspaper report of someone's marriage will include information about the ceremony, the spouse etc). Re place of residence - WP:OTHERSTUFF. DexDor (talk) 21:30, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
My larger concern with over-reliance on obituaries is all the negative content they leave out or minimize out of respect for the dead. Even the unpaid ones in newspapers have a source bias and tend to be pollyannish.RevelationDirect (talk) 02:23, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Margaret Thatcher is certainly known as "Britain's first female prime minister", but the 60-odd categories in her article include such remarkably ordinary characteristsics such as Category:Former Methodists, Category:People with dementia, and both Category:English chemists and Category:Women chemists. All of these things are defining, even though they're probably not the single most defining characteristic in her life. If it were the case that categorization solely reflected how people are "usually described", her article would have only one category and she would be the only entry in that category. Per WP:CATDEF, "A defining characteristic is one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having." Be it books, articles or encyclopedias, you're going to commonly and consistently find her cause of death, and you will find that detail for virtually any person who has died. These reliable sources provide the material that we use to build our articles, and they deem cause of death to be a strong defining characteristic. Alansohn (talk) 04:15, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • KEEP ALL — I don't know how you can judge something like starvation to be a "natural cause of death" when it comes to Wikipedia, which does not have articles on the millions of people who starved to death historically. Death by starvation that is not classified as anorexia is almost nonexistent these days. Same with hyperthermia or hypothermia! I can't, off the top of my head, think of a single person who died by either of these causes. These are very extreme causes of death. Deaths from disease should be only a parent category that only holds subcategories for specific disease. These are vital categories as has been mentioned already, similar to "living people" or "1932 births." The only overcategorization that I've seen in this area are the geographic subcategories (eg, Category:AIDS-related deaths in California‎, Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in Delaware‎, Category:Infectious disease deaths in French Guiana), which I see all the time and are unnecessary. Where they die is really not significant unless it's something like, Category:German people executed abroad. —МандичкаYO 😜 16:16, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Procedural oppose / weak keep. Way too many categories in here, some of which, as Wikimandia pointed out, aren't exactly normal "natural causes" of death. I've no opposition to the "{type} deaths in {place}" categories being deleted, but each category really needs to be looked at and evaluated individually or in smaller, more closely related groups; batching this many of them all at once is just a big pain to evaluate. // coldacid (talk|contrib) 16:39, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep defining (literally), as one of the first things to know in a bio is when and where born, when, where and how died. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 21:55, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Listify most The purpose of categories is to link articles together in the situation where the given topic of the category means the articles have high relevance to each other. Cause of death is almost always not such a feature. I don't see the purpose of linking together very different people who died in the same, common fashion (births by caesarian anyone?). I believe this nomination is overly broad as some very specific and unusual types of death (e.g. Category:Jockeys killed while racing, Category:Parachuting deaths, Category:Deaths from MRSA) are clearly of some use.I disagree with deleting non-routine deaths categories in a mass nomination, as these make the conversation far too complex. A better approach would be to focus on the more routine types of death first. I propose we listify the following (and all their children):

In all instances, all this information is useful as a list, however, and should be maintained in that format instead (i.e. in the list the emphasis is on the topic as a whole, not each element of the list being directly related to the other elements).

  • Keep all / procedural oppose: these should have never been grouped to be discussed as a single entity. I particularly object to category:death by falls being deleted. I personally follow and utilise this for articles about jumpers from the Golden Gate Bridge and other bridges; Twin Tower jumpers on 9/11 and accidental falls from stages during performances. These are just off the top of my head...I astoundingly object. I discovered this discussion from the Christopher McCandless article who of course died by starvation. This would be an omission that is highly related to his entire biography. Fylbecatulous talk 15:14, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Procedural close and renominate in groups -- Deaths from most diseases, old age, etc are probably too common to warrant a category, but there are some diseases that are unusual, also some other causes, such as defenestration (being thrown out of window), execution, murder that are certainly notable. Those diseases that have an extensive by country split are probably too common to merit a category, but Ebola, plague and some others should be kept. For plague, 1348 deaths (Black Death) are probably a special category. Peterkingiron (talk) 19:24, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support procedural close and renominate in groups, for the sake of easier reaching consensus. Marcocapelle (talk) 09:59, 22 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong procedural oppose to renomination in groups, the issue needs a centralized discussion, not a few discussions with some inconsistent local consensus, especially as many categories are intersected each other. It is an easy prediction that a number of CfD discussions would turn in a mess and in a lot of complaints. We need a wider RfC or something analogue to deal with a so large matter and to achieve a consistent result. Cavarrone 17:00, 22 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep not all cancer deaths are 'natural' for example the spike in cancers following nuclear weapons use. Stuartyeates (talk) 02:19, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all. I would be open to deleting some of these individually, but there are swathes of these that serve a clear purpose and should definitely be kept (e.g. the AIDS-related deaths in Australia page I came from). In that case, having a category of notable people who died from AIDS in that country is a necessary part of covering the history of AIDS in Australia. From the discussion above, there are bunches of others in a similar boat (the arguments re the flu pandemic categories above being another good example). This mass-nomination is ill-considered and a bit bizarre. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:49, 28 March 2015 (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:Stations of Malaysian Railway[edit]

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. – Fayenatic London 18:08, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Duplicate categories. "Malaysian Railway" is an incorrect name for Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM). Joshua Talk to me What I've done? 08:30, 12 March 2015 (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:Grammy Award-winning artists[edit]

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: rename. – Fayenatic London 22:45, 17 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: With actors and comedians receiving awards for non-music work (i.e. comedy albums), this would be a more encompassing description as "artist" is more often affiliated with music than it is things like comedy. Snuggums (talk / edits) 20:24, 21 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Note Link to previous discussion from SEP 2012 in which the reverse rename was proposed and implemented. --StarcheerspeaksnewslostwarsTalk to me 02:55, 22 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Interesting..... however, my point still stands that "winning artists" is too narrow of a description. Snuggums (talk / edits) 03:16, 22 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Which is why I didn't !vote on it myself, but the earlier discussion should be presented here. I would like to see what the community says. However, "act" is an option as well, as comedians are acts just as much as musicians and groups.
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice.
  • Comment, how about "musician" rather than artist, as I can see the logic of Fayenatic london.--RightCowLeftCoast (talk) 21:54, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support "Artist" conjures up a painter or sculptor. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 00:51, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support with comment: Because this and the previous categorization at "winners" is borderline large, this should be broken down even further into subcats, with the winners cat being for those in the grey area or cats that would have too few to list it under. What it shouldn't be, however, is "artists". — Wyliepedia 03:47, 3 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per nom. (sorry for WP:JUSTAVOTE, can't really think of anything to add that hasn't already been said) ― Padenton|✉   16:41, 6 May 2015 (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:Streisand effect[edit]

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. If we just relied on sources for categorization involving such situations, there would be no need for the guideline WP:SUBJECTIVECAT. (And in any case, you won't find many sources arguing that a given situation is not an example of the "Streisand effect", so relying on sources for this appellation can be problematic.) Good Ol’factory (talk) 23:37, 24 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Per WP:SUBJECTIVECAT. The Streisand effect is when trying to hide or suppress embarrassing secrets draws more public attention than just releasing the information would have. For a article to belong in this category, it's not enough to say that hiding information caused media attention. Rather, it needs to have caused more attention than just releasing the information would have in in a hypothetical alternative scenario. That comparison seems inherently speculative and subjective.RevelationDirect (talk) 02:09, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Note: Notified the main category creator and this discussion has been included in Wikipedia:WikiProject Marketing & Advertising. – RevelationDirect (talk) 02:09, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, easy qualification is when secondary sources have referred to an event as such. — Cirt (talk) 03:51, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • — Note to closing admin: Cirt (talk • contribs) is the creator of the page that is the subject of this XfD. . Sorry, feel a bit awkward tagging an Wikimedia admin's cmt but I believe this is germane. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 19:34, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment if the WP:RS says it is, then we have objective evidence (in terms of Wikipedia) that it is, instead of subjective Wikipedian opinion of it (in this case, outside sources are "objective" in that they are not Wikipedians). It is not WP:OR on the part of Wikipedian editors classifying it as Streisand effect, rather, the sources state it is. -- 65.94.43.89 (talk) 05:44, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Clarification I'm not trying to purge the actual articles of PR experts saying "In my opinion, this backfired" under WP:RS. For comparison, the Ford Edsel and Pontiac Aztek both have reliable sources giving their opinions that they are ugly cars. But we don't have Category:Ugly cars even though there is no shortage of secondary sources. RevelationDirect (talk) 10:40, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • "Ugly cars" as a group aren't notable. The Streisand effect is. // coldacid (talk|contrib) 02:51, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        • @Coldacid: Major automakers spend billions on design and obsess over being seen as innovative while avoiding a PR gaffe of an ugly car that hurts their overall brand image. Mercedes Benz is being widely mocked in the automotive press for designing an astoundingly ugly car based on a box fish.RevelationDirect (talk) 20:39, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
          • @RevelationDirect: That doesn't address my point. There are certainly ugly cars out there. There are certainly cars whose defining trait in the eyes of many are their ugliness. But these are issues of the individual cars. There's a reason by ugly cars is a redlink, but Streisand effect isn't, and I believe that reason is also why we have Category:Streisand effect but not Category:Ugly cars. I don't think I'm explaining this too well, but I guess it comes down to being something notable at the aggregate level instead of the individual level. // coldacid (talk|contrib) 20:50, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, not defining, speculative. Neutralitytalk 15:30, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per User:Neutrality Snuggums (talk / edits) 17:55, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Sorry, I just don't see this as a category. The basic premise here is that a person or entity, trying to conceal something, has somehow made it worse -- which seems to me to be such a common element in politics, public relations, life. I'm not sure it's WP:SUBJECTIVECAT but I do find it to be non-defining as a category structure. And that an article can be referenced with someone having happened to use the meme is quite arbitrary, imo. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 19:34, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. I agree with Cirt, it's a useful category defined by the events being classified as such by reliable sources. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:15, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Just to be clearer... my concern is then that it becomes a question of whether a journalist is aware of this pop culture meme or expression, and has chosen to mention it in coverage, rather than something intrinsic. Which is why I believe it does violate WP:ARBITRARYCAT. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 13:12, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep just check the sources like we do for all articles. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 00:53, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
No objection to keeping these sources in the articles stating this opinion. RevelationDirect (talk) 01:42, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, but it should be noted that only articles for events and situations where reliable sources state that the Streisand effect has been in place for the the topic of those articles.
However, if the result ends up being "delete" I would further suggest the creation of a list page for cases of Streisand effect, and that reliably sourced articles be linked there before removed from the category. // coldacid (talk|contrib) 02:50, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per coldacid's excellent suggestion that the scope of the category needs to be stated. Mjroots (talk) 10:30, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The characteristic is defining and needs to be based on reliable and verifiable sources documenting the usage, which are amply available. Alansohn (talk) 14:59, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The Streisand effect is well-documented, and several incidents fall under this category. I fail to see the logic of deleting it. —МандичкаYO 😜 16:53, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Violates WP:NONDEF. There's far too much speculation on each of the entries in the category. 'The Streisand effect' might itself be well-documented and notable, that's enough for an article. However, many of the entries in this category appear to have only been classified as streisand effect instances by the wikipedia editors who edited them. It would need clear guidelines, and it's always going to be a subjective assessment by any source that makes a claim that something is an example of the streisand effect. I would prefer categories to be decided based on facts, not opinions. WP:NONDEF clearly states that "A defining characteristic is one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having—such as nationality or notable profession (in the case of people), type of location or region (in the case of places), etc." However, as a source can only classify something as an example of the streisand effect based on their opinion, it's inappropriate. Regarding coldacid's suggestion of creating a list, a section in Streisand effect would be appropriate, provided it is thoroughly sourced and meets WP:NPOV, a separate article less-so, as it's essentially the same thing as the category. ― Padenton |☎  17:50, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Subjective, speculative, and frankly unencyclopaedic, given that the speculation involved amounts to creating an alternative history around events that 'would not have happened' had other things not happened. As for it being a 'defining characteristic', that is frankly nonsensical, since there is no objective way of even measuring the 'Streisand effect', never mind determining a point at which it becomes 'defining'. AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:08, 22 March 2015 (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:American female prostitutes[edit]

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. – Fayenatic London 22:59, 17 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Upmerge. I fail to be convinced that being a female here is defining. If you look at Category:American prostitutes, it is clear that most editors don't use this category. Depending on how this discussion goes, it may necessitate a follow up discussion on Category:Female prostitutes. Vegaswikian (talk) 01:40, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Upmerge, agree with rationale by nominator Vegaswikian, above. Cheers, — Cirt (talk) 03:51, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Upmerge: per nom. Unnecessary over-categorization and I'm not a fan of gender-segregated categories in most cases. Montanabw(talk) 05:45, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose There are a few professions in this world in which biological sex and gender presentation matter. The sector featured in this category is one of them. In medical research, health and social issues affecting one gender in this sector often do not affect the other. It is meaningful to differentiate. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:55, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Bluerasberry. It is one of those professions defined by biological differences unlike actor vs. actress or steward vs. stewardess. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 19:32, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Upmerge I don't see the reason to differentiate between male/female for most occupations, unless it is somehow historic, eg, female heads of state. —МандичкаYO 😜 16:46, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Upmerge Violates WP:OCEGRS. "Dedicated group-subject subcategories, such as Category:LGBT writers or Category:African-American musicians, should only be created where that combination is itself recognized as a distinct and unique cultural topic in its own right. If a substantial and encyclopedic head article (not just a list) cannot be written for such a category, then the category should not be created." Even if we assume Bluerasberry's claim, there isn't enough exclusive to American female prostitutes (even if there is enough to justify such a Female prostitutes article & category) to justify a split from the Prostitution article. Furthermore, I think we can agree the categories are not large enough to justify the splitting by the same reasoning used in WP:OCLOCATION. ― Padenton |☎  18:04, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge -- Prostittues are overwhelingly female. Those that are not, should be separately categoriesed as male prostitutes, assuming any are notable. Peterkingiron (talk) 19:26, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Upmerge per nominator's rationale. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:50, 28 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose The claim that sex does not relate to the occupation of those involved in this work is ludicrous. Due to the realities of different occupational access over the history of the US, sex does matter. The claim "prostitutes are overwhelmingly females" is besides the point. This is an occupation where the sex of everyone involved heavily matters, and all should be so categorized.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:04, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge per Peterkingiron, only categorize male prostitutes if applicable. Marcocapelle (talk) 09:12, 11 April 2015 (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:British female escorts[edit]

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 to Category:Escorts. – Fayenatic London 23:02, 17 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Merge. Not sure that this thinly populated tree needs this end stage category. Article is already in the female tree from other categories. I also wonder if we need the parent by nationality category on the children at all. Vegaswikian (talk) 01:15, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Upmerge, agree with rationale by Vegaswikian, above. Cheers, — Cirt (talk) 03:52, 12 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Upmerge per nom. Montanabw(talk) 08:02, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose There are a few professions in this world in which biological sex and gender presentation matter. The sector featured in this category is one of them where gender is defining. In medical research, health and social issues affecting one gender in this sector often do not affect the other. It is meaningful to differentiate. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:56, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Bluerasberry. It is one of those professions defined by biological differences unlike actor vs. actress or steward vs. stewardess. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 19:32, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Upmerge I don't see the reason to differentiate between male/female for most occupations, unless it is somehow historic, eg, female heads of state. —МандичкаYO 😜 16:46, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Upmerge Violates WP:OCEGRS. "Dedicated group-subject subcategories, such as Category:LGBT writers or Category:African-American musicians, should only be created where that combination is itself recognized as a distinct and unique cultural topic in its own right. If a substantial and encyclopedic head article (not just a list) cannot be written for such a category, then the category should not be created." Even if we assume Bluerasberry's claim, there isn't enough exclusive to British female escorts (even if there is enough to justify such a Female escorts article & category). Furthermore, I think we can agree the categories are not large enough to justify the splitting by the same reasoning used in WP:OCLOCATION. Also, both of these categories violate WP:NARROWCAT, seeing as how there is only a single page in either of them. ― Padenton |☎  18:08, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Triple upmerge to great-grandfather Category:Escorts, which is barely populated. There are seven biographies in this whole structure (at 6 categories - there are nearly as many as the total contents). Dissecting by nationality is not useful in this instance and the national sex workers categories would be a much better location for national level exploration which includes this topic. SFB 18:30, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Triple upmerge to Category:Escorts per reasoning by @Sillyfolkboy, although frankly, IMO these categories are distasteful entirely. Quis separabit? 01:41, 26 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Upmerge or triple upmerge per the above arguments. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:52, 28 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose The lesson we should have learned from the great media mischaracterization of Wikipedia categorization of the Spring of 2013 is that assuming that a profession is historically or presently primarily dominated by one sex and that only cases of people of the other sex involved in the profession should be categorized by profession plus sex is now seen as sexist and a case of Wikipedia endorsing and reinforcing historical sexist structures. In some professions (Acting, many sports, dancing, and I would argue this one), it makes sense to split every person into a sex specific category. In others, like being a writer, there are enough ways to subdivide that people can be placed in male and female categories and then in not-gender specific ones, in others, such as politicians and journalists, we have decided to have only one sex split out, but to make sure that the rules of non-dispersal are followed. The proposal here would move us backward.John Pack Lambert (talk) 07:02, 16 May 2015 (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.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_March_12&oldid=1138408869"