Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Category:People known in connection with misdeeds or punishment

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.

Category:People known in connection with misdeeds or punishment

For a general discussion on how to apply categorization to people: see: Wikipedia:Categorization of people (and its discussion page).

[Misplaced nomination by Netoholic @ moved here, since the issues are completely separate from the ones stated in the nomination under which it first appeared.]

• Delete ALL of Jerzy's categories mentioned above - including Category:People known in connection with misdeeds or punishment. It's far too wordy and doesn't make for good categorization. -- Netoholic @ 02:27, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • It's as wordy as it needs to be to cover the ground it does. Your recommendation is to dump 6 categories back into the top of Category:People. No category should be deletable, IMO, w/o agreement upon a better category (or two, if necessary) to accept the subcats and articles in it. (Except those descendants for which access "from that direction" is shown to be somehow misguided. However, in this case -- unless i'm wildly misinformed -- the fact that the articles in this subtree are all bios means their remaining descendants of Category:People is the biggest single reason for creation of the category system, so go ahead; make my day by going there!) --Jerzy(t) 20:13, 2004 Aug 31 (UTC)
  • BTW, we have a solution for wordy article names, of which there are many. If the wordiness at the bottoms of pages bothers you, ask for something that, from the reader's point of view, works like a pipe: hover your cursor over "Categories: Misbehavior people" and "People known in connection with misdeeds or punishment" would appear. It wouldn't do that bcz of a pipe in that page's markup, tho: it would do it bcz __HoverName Misbehavior people__ was the first such directive on Category:People known in connection with misdeeds or punishment. That means the editor has to be aware of the nuances of its extent in order to code. (Their not being aware is a current problem, the moreso the shorter the name.) But the reader can pay attention to them if they desire. Ask the developers for that, if non-wordiness is your priority. MediaWiki is not stone. --Jerzy(t) 20:13, 2004 Aug 31 (UTC)
• I think I have to agree with Netoholic; all of these categories, even the ones Jerzy wants to keep, seem pretty unwieldy, with little categorizing value. Maybe I'm just missing it, though: Is there a specific scenario for readers' beneficial use of these that can be sketched out, here? Otherwise, I would vote to delete all. --Gary D 03:10, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • If you mean "ones" (e.g. Category:People and Category:Impostors, which are not "mine" nor stated as ones i want to keep) specify, in your nominations for deletion. (Or single nomination, if you're really sure you can get support re all of them based on common reasons). There is one i created, and implied i want to keep, mentioned in the nomination where you put this. --Jerzy(t) 20:13, 2004 Aug 31 (UTC)
  • Did i just sketch that out in reply to Netoholic? If not, go read The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, if not the paper it describes, and peruse Category:People which has 33 (35 if the background process hasn't caught up yet) subcats at present and will quickly go down to 19 if this discussion doesn't make me abandon cat structuring in disgust. Visualize Category:People as it would be if i hadn't created the following kids for it, populating them by migration out of that parent cat:
    • Category:People by time of events involving them
    • Category:People by vocation
    • Category:People known in connection with identity politics
    • Category:People known in connection with misdeeds or punishment
    • Category:People known in connection with religion or philosophy
    • Category:People known in connection with sports and hobbies
    • Category:Recipients of formal honors
    • Category:People noted for being in rare medical or psychological categories

It was around 100, and growing by several a day, when i started consolidating its kids into these subcats, and some lower descendants of Category:People. Now, i don't especially like any of those names. But that's not the reason we began discussing deletion of any of them. I or you disliking them is relevant only because i've suggested something marginally better for two of them. You do the same, and i'll be silent at worst -- or maybe audibly admiring, if you exceed marginal improvement. --Jerzy(t)

I think you've pointed out an underlying problem here, which is that Category:People as a huge dump bin to collect all the people mentioned in WP is preposterous. It would be like Category:Things or Category:Words (P.S.: or Category:Books—see listing below). And I appreciate that you are only trying to alleviate that problem. The subcategories under debate are probably no worse than just leaving all the people undifferentiated in the parent category. I could hope there might be better ways to split the subcategories, but perhaps any way we split something as vast and vague as this would introduce arbitrary and unwieldy judgments. I would hope more strongly that we could abandon the whole notion of an omnibus people-listing category as unworkable. WP has not yet appreciated, but I think it will, that successful categories are really about concepts, not about lists. Your efforts are commendable, but, I don't know, maybe if we don't create temporary alleviating subcategories to this monstrosity the misconceived thing will fail under its own weight all the sooner. --Gary D 02:13, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

P.S. Just to see, I took a look at Abraham Lincoln, and found him categorized six times under "people-list" categories. At that, he hasn't yet been categorized as a speechwriter or a tall person or an honest person or a woodsman or a husband or a lawyer, so there could be twenty five more people-list categories coming to cover him, or twenty five hundred more. List taxonomy gone mad. So I'm not complaining about your efforts, Jerzy, you're rushing around trying to put fingers in the dike, and that's an admirable effort. It's just that this sucker's gonna blow completely—as it should. --Gary D 02:23, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• Support keeping this one unless or until a better scheme comes along. Jerzy is doing good work. Yes, we can probably improve this even more, but deleting this category without improving it would be a step backward. anthony (see warning) 22:04, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• Aha. Category:People is really the root of all of our /unresolved problems. Perhaps we should have an across-the-board policy discussion on Category talk:People. -- Beland 06:50, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

(OOPS just discovered this suggestion by Beland, after having created a new "wikipedia:" article: Wikipedia:Categorization of people- Beland, could you say what to do best now?) --Francis Schonken 13:24, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Cool; Wikipedia:Categorization of people is a good place. -- Beland 05:44, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• In the meantime, "Justice system people" might be more concise (though Pirates would be booted out; maybe they could join Defectors, who were apparently but not suprisingly not invited in the first place). But the long, flowing category names are so cool. -- Beland 06:50, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)