Category talk:British politicians

How to organise
Right - we need subcategories - but which ones?

I suggest:


 * Members of the House of Commons
 * Members of the House of Lords
 * Members of the European Parliament
 * Members of the Scottish Parliament
 * Members of the Welsh Assembly
 * Ministers
 * Labour Party politicians
 * Conservative Party politicians
 * Liberal Democrat politicians etc

- A politician who had been an MEP and an MEP would appear in both subcategories.

This still leaves us with thousands of MPs.

So.. each subcategory has subcategories.

Ministers would contain several sub categories such as Foreign Secretaries etc

Members of the House of Commons and Lords
Lords could contain sub categories relating to party whip and cross benchers etc.

MPs I think we are going to have to do by term - this still leaves 600+ in each sub category.

Any ideas - if this is okay I will set up.

Secretlondon 05:59, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * We could split by type and by party at the same time, have 'Labour Party MPs 1997'.   But this still leaves us with hundreds.   Morwen - Talk 06:12, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * Oh - and one other (minor) thought, we can't use Category:Members of the House of Commons directly, because there is a Canadian House of Commons. Morwen - Talk 06:19, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I've done a bit of fiddling - Members of the Scottish Parliament are a subcategory of Scottish politicians etc. Scottish politicians are a subcategory of Scottish people and British politicians. Secretlondon 06:36, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Some thoughts: Categorizing British politicians by party can be difficult. Would Roy Jenkins go in Category:Labour Party politicians, Category:Social Democratic Party politicians and Category:Liberal Democrat politicians? Does Churchill go in Category:Liberal Party politicians and Category:Conservative Party politicians? Categorizing by individual ministerial office might be even sillier, especially given that we already have lists of all the people to have held nearly every ministerial office in Britain. For instance, Churchill (again) would have to go in Category:British prime ministers, Category:Chancellors of the Exchequer, Category:First Lords of the Admiralty, Category:Secretaries of State for War, Category:Secretaries of State for the Colonies, Category:Home Secretaries, Category:Presidents of the Board of Trade, and Category:Chancellors of the Duchy of Lancaster. That in addition to the two partisan categories. And to the dozens or so different "Members of the House of Commons" categories he'd have to be put in, seeing as he served in parliament almost continuously from 1905 to 1965.

Another thought: I'd oppose "Members of the House of Lords". I'd suggest Category:Life Peers, Category:Peers of England, Category:Peers of Scotland, Category:Scottish Representative Peers, Category:Peers of Great Britain, Category:Peers of Ireland, Category:Irish Representative Peers, Category:Peers of the United Kingdom and Category:Representative Hereditary Peers under the House of Lords Act 1999 (or something indicating the same thing, but less awkward. Obviously, even that is tremendously huge - although the representative peers might be manageable - I believe we already have a list of Irish representative peers somewhere.  The categories for actual peerages (as opposed to representative peer categories), could be divided up by Rank, obviously (Category:Dukes of England could be a subcategory of both Category:Dukes and Category:Peers of England. But you might find yourself eventually getting down to Category:Marquesses of Salisbury, or Category:Dukes of Norfolk...sigh. Peerage is a mess to categorize. Another question is whether anybody who had a peerage that gave them a seat in the House of Lords should be classified as a subcategory of Category:British politicians. This would make Lord Byron and Christopher Guest British politicians...

A final thought: We need to be really careful (as Morwen already suggested, in one case) to make sure we are not assuming the UK as the "natural country." This is especially the case with political parties - there is or has been a Conservative Party in Canada; Labour Parties in the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, and Ireland; Liberal Parties in Canada and Australia; Social Democratic parties in Germany and Austria; a Whig Party in the United States; and so on and so forth. One should be careful with this. john k 06:48, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

My response would be that Roy Jenkins would be a member of all three categories. As far as ministers are concerned the category should contain all holders of the office. Yes Churchill would have lots of categories, in the way that he has lots of boxes now. The list of peer categories would all come under a broader Members of the House of Lords category. We could stick members of the House of Lords under Category:British Institutions or something and just stick peers who take the party whip under British politicians. I have made sure to specify UK on political party categories for obvious reasons. Secretlondon 06:54, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Fundamentally - we need to fiddle and changing the arrangements of sub categories to each other is trivial. However we cannot stick all british politicians in one category without sub categories as we would have 1000+. Secretlondon 06:59, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * I agree that the House of Lords is going to be tricky to deal with. However, I think that the suggestion for dividing up the peerage by what country it hails from, and then the types of title within that country is a good idea. With the longer lasting individual titles it may indeed be necessary to put them in a category all their own, after all there have been over 15 Dukes of Norfolk under the present creation.


 * As for the main House of Commons at Westminster, it should be in Category:Members of the United Kingdom House of Commons, that eliminates ambiguity.


 * When it comes to categories, eventually we are going to end up with some very big categories, that is true. However I think that is unavoidable. After all, we have some very big lists here. The lists of Royal Navy and United States Navy ship names already have over 1,000 links each, although those links are far from complete. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships lists over 10,000 American naval ships. The Royal Navy is going to be of a similar size, if not bigger. A book, Ships of the Royal Navy, by J J Colledge, which in this case covers only major vessels, so excluding things like commissioned trawlers, is several hundred pages long. I'm working through DANFS getting all the names beginning with A into the Wikipedia page, and I'm only up to Ar…. The entry for the letter A in the list of American warships is rather large already. David Newton 12:13, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Of course, of course. But I do question the wisdom of having separate categories for each political office. What purpose does this serve. What would Category:British Foreign Secretaries tell you that Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwelath Affairs do not do already. Why not just Category:British cabinet ministers? This would be a large category, obviously, but not even nearly as large as Category:British Labour MPs, 1997, or whatever, which is about as small as you can get and still be useful in terms of MPs. (Of course, a much larger percentage of cabinet ministers throughout history probably have articles than British Labour MPs in 1997, but that's a different matter). john k 07:06, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

We do actually have articles on all MPs elected in 1997 - which is part of the categorisation problem. Secretlondon 07:24, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Oh wow, really? That's crazy. Replace 1997 with, say, 1983, then. But, in any event, you haven't addressed my question about what the benefit of doing individual offices is...do you disagree with me, or are you conceding the point? At any rate, I don't really see why it's such a problem to have a category with a few hundred articles in it - so long as they're all in alphabetical order, of course. john k 07:28, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Category suggests that regular articles should be used for comprehensive lists, while Categories should be used for broader or partial lists (such as "Writers" or "Politicians.") I don't think that "British Prime Ministers," etc., should form Categories; they should remain as lists. -- Emsworth 19:36, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)

What makes a politician a Northen Ireland/Scotland/Wales politician?
Should we define Northern Ireland/Scottish/Welsh politicians as being just politicians in the politics of Northern Ireland/Scotland/Wales or UK politicians who happened to be born in those parts of the UK? The current set-up, and descriptions on many individual pages, follow no clear consistency.

I'd propose the former option. Michael Howard and Michael Heseltine may have been born in Wales but are primarily UK politicians and to call them Welsh politicians would be very confusing - what has been their contribution to Welsh specific politics? Timrollpickering 23:32, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Sounds fine to me. john k 00:32, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)