Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Surname categories

The following discussion comes from Wikipedia:Categories for deletion, where it is currently listed as unresolved. It may be reviewed again in the future in the light of evolving standards and guidelines for categorization. 21:29, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Category:Anderson; Category:Bauer; Category:Cole; Category:Collins; Category:Fischer; Category:Farmer; Category:Schmitt

Sorry, but these all seem completely stupid. The guy seems to want to make a different category for each single surname in the English language that there ever existed, or atleast ones that he can find more than two people sharing the name!! This is as much a definition of categorization scheme gone wild as one can hope to find. Please delete. Aris Katsaris 22:11, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC).

• Delete all. Postdlf 22:38, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
• Wow this is an ambitious project! I wouldn't imagine it will end up being so useful, though. Delete. -Seth Mahoney 22:41, Sep 10, 2004 (UTC)
• Delete. Tempted to vote "keep", but for the headache of linking and listing similar-sounding and otherwies linked names. -Sean Curtin 01:47, Sep 11, 2004 (UTC)
• Delete. Quadell (talk) 04:44, Sep 11, 2004 (UTC)
• The Wikipedia is not a geneology or surname list; I'm surprised that the creator of these articles was User:Jerzy (one of the admins!) This stuff makes better sense in the Wiktionary, where the etymology and origin of specific names can be discussed. I don't envision people trying to find out who the world's most notable Smiths were by typing "Smith" in the search box.
  Delete. --Ardonik.talk() 00:26, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)

• (I am the guy adding the stupid cats.) It has been stated, i think repeatedly, that lists are suitable for things like countries, or states/provinces of countries, that have a definite number, whereas cats are suitable instead for things that expand freely; arguments against that should be directed to that policy, not to instances of compliance with it.
  • The scenario of seeing the famous Smiths together is not absurd, just backwards: you don't add them one at a time in order to see them together; you see them together to find the one you want. I was doing something finicky at List of people by name: Bra#Brady a night or two ago, and just by looking without any conscious thought, noticed that Jim Brady wasn't there. While looking more focusedly at the other four Bradys there, it occurred to me neither was his wife the activist, nor Diamond Jim. (A text search didn't turn up Monica Brady (because she's Sarah!), but i didn't waste time text-searching "Brady": this is a wiki, so i followed Jim to the gun-control lobby and found her proper name there. Diamond Jim is a well-targetted text search. Jim/James has an article, and the other two are red links.) My point is that looking at lists quickly does things for the brain that text searching can't. So don't think Museum of the Bradys, think disambiguation. If you look on a dab page for Monica Brady, you find Sarah Brady right quick. To the extent this is about pages to look at, those pages are dabs: what's Hegel's first name? Or Dalton's? (No matter which Dalton you have in mind.)
  • These cats are all responses to corresponding articles (often explicit dab pages but i think sometimes also doing etymology/origin stuff) that others have linked to, from pages in the List of people by name tree. I find these editors generally object to incorporating the list portion of, e.g. Anderson, into List of people by name: And#People named Anderson, with that link taking over the corresponding position in Anderson, and the additions and corrections to Andersons being made in that one place instead of having two lists that need to be either harmonized with each change or (more likely) cross-checked by every reader of them. My outlook is that therefore
    • A standardized link format is desirable. (And the recent spurt in my creation of children of Category:People by surname is the result of another editor's automated LoPbN traverser choking on the free-form versions of such links within LoPbN: when i came to a link in the exception list from the traverser, i standardized the link within LoPbN into a format linking to both the article and a newly created cat.)
    • A category is easier to update than a list:
      • Cat: Look at the bottom of the rendered page to see if it's included, and edit the same page to add the cat tag, just above the language links, if it isn't.
      • LoPbN list: Link to this pages "What links here" page, sequentially search the unalphabetized list there; if you don't find "List of people" there, link to List of people by name, hit End, within-page-click the first letter of the surname, then within-page-click that list's longest leading substring of the surname, which links you to the page where the surname belongs; find a longer leading substring in the ToC of that page and within-page-click on it, sequentially search for the adjacent names it belongs between (but of course it may be already there if you searched the "What links here" page poorly, or if it has the full 500 page-names listed), remember the two; back up and click the "[edit]" link for the section, find the two names again (being careful, because they're in the confusing piped-markup format now), and do your edit.

So it's the better way of raising the likelihood that a bio article gets linked into a single means (not 10,000 unlinked dab pages) of gathering all the bio articles.

• • IMO, you should vote "del" on this if you have a better way of facilitating the ultimate recognition of bio articles. But IMO it will be three to twelve months before we really have much idea of how to make the cat system work long term, and for now, you and i just have theories about it. (Not to mention that the software support for cats is not done. I assume that one upcoming feature is the ability to list not just the children of a cat, but other descendents as well, say three generations, or all of them. And that that is impossible until the system can hunt down cycles, e.g. the 3 cats including "category:computer terminology" that last week worked together to accomplish the trick of each being its own great-grandparent. Probably someone else found it by hand, as i did, but fixed it.
  • If, on the other hand, all you're sure about is that it's conceptually ugly, you should vote "keep" for now, and see what it accomplishes, and how ugly it looks when the cat software is complete. It can still be deleted later on, when its work is done, or when there is evidence that it's simply categories gone wild.
  • My maximum vision for it is influenced by the likelihood that Category:People will have the largest set of descendants that have as much structural similarity as they will. At present, the best guess is that LoPbN has about 25,000 names. IMO more than half of them are live links, and IMO there are another 10,000 to 100,000 bio articles that are not linked by LoPbN. (We know there are 385,000 articles -- tho i don't know whether that counts redirects.) That's significant enough a part of WP that i'd like to think that once we have advanced category support:
    • Tagging an article Jones or maybe even Surname:Jones will have the same effect as Category:Jones (if the cat already exists) or that plus editing Category:Jones and tagging it Category:People by surname (if it doesn't).
    • Having such a tag will
      • guarantee the system will add a (hand-editable) corresponding link to a dab named Jones if such a link doesn't already exist, and
      • suppress the display of "Jones" and display a single-character-sized stick-figure icon in the "Categories" box,
      • incidentally, also do things like suppressing rendering of redundant categories that lack some kind of override qualifier field.
    • Now that i've seen the technique of adding to categories (or their talk pages?) red links for non-existant articles that belong in the cat, i'm getting ready to admit that the end of the manual LoPbN is foreseeable, with various kinds of sublists of the grand list of existing bios' respective people automatically compiled, and even better places to list needed bios (and perhaps generate "shadow stubs", with just name and dates that are visible only when an editor tries to create a new page with the same name)).
    • That turns LoPbN into scaffolding for getting its current contents into the Cat system in an orderly and hopefully automated way. It may still be important to keep it usable in the interim (and make it moreso), by editors who are intimidtated by categories, and perhaps even maintain it through a few cycles of automatic replacement by an autmatically generated similar list.
  • Coming back to the current moment, the surname cats i created all have two or three people in them, but are straightforwardly expandable, in some cases to dozens, just by doing the clerical work of going to the appropriate LoPbN page and following each one's respective link to edit the tag into its corresponding article. Even if manual creation of Surname tags fails to catch on beyond my standardizing links that anyone adds in LoPbN to a surname-dab page, i think the logical extension of it is for bots and/or the future cat system to ensure every article linked from LoPbN or another List of People has at least one "real" cat tab, or a surname-based tag if there are more than 2 (or 20, or however many) sharing the surname, or a "Category:Rare surname" tag for the rest. With a stick-figure icon (maybe at the top rather than the bottom of the page) for those and any other descendants of Category:People, tagging by hand the residue of icon-less bios may become doable -- especially when pages in the town/city/county/state/country hierarchy are tagged with, say, a street-grid icon. And a "Random uncategorized page" link could focus that work further.
  • I'm not very committed to the surname tags, and i'm more interested in this as an object lesson on the Category:People problem. But i do think the opposition to these cats is shortsighted and premature, and i hope they are kept.

--Jerzy(t) 13:55, 2004 Sep 15 (UTC)

Could you synopsize your argument to three paragraphs or less? And please don't use so many bullets in discussions, because bullets are normally used here to indicate a new post, not subpoints of the same post. It makes it extremely confusing to know when each post ends and the other begins. Thank you. Aris Katsaris 01:07, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

(--Francis Schonken 14:02, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC):)

• Added this as a topic to wikipedia:categorization of people (first and, thus far only, example of "problematic" "BC style").
• My first thought: this is rather a "non-wikipedia classification" topic, but then I thought: hey, wait, all classification at wikipedia is in alphabetical order, so are all surnames. When people are in categories they should be there with a category tag that looks like "category:Topic|Surname, First Names" - then you get the names alphabetically by surname. Don't know whether there is a general problem of not correctly applying the "category" tag?
• Seems to me a lot of work with only a marginal "bonus" effect to other, already existing systems for grouping people with the same surname at wikipedia.
• Personally, I'd see disambiguation pages as the best place to do this kind of grouping of surnames. Note that some time ago I put quite some work in finding all Eponym, all First name and all Surname uses of Orlando included in wikipedia, and made nice separate lists about these on the Orlando disambiguation page. Well, someone removed these lists from the Orlando disambig page. Still think what I wanted to do there, more effective than doing this with categorization. Disambiguation pages have both the advantage of being expandable, when new articles are added to wikipedia that need disambiguation in this sense, and the advantage of attempting completeness in a list-like manner. See Singer (linking to Singer (disambiguation)) for an example of how this is starting to work out right. In short, I propose to mention disambiguation pages as a specific listing technique on Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and series boxes.
• However, I have no opinion on whether the "people by surname" category, and its "surname" subcategories, should be kept or not ("people by eponym" subcategory should be kept by all means in my opinion, but could, as far as I'm concerned, be a direct subcategory of "people" category).

• See also Wikipedia_talk:Categories_for_deletion#Non-Wikipedia_categorization_systems --Francis Schonken 13:25, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)