Category talk:Educational institutions by year of establishment

Granularity
There are a couple of issues that need sorting out here:
 * Granularity of categories: The current situation of categorizing each institution by exact year of establishment is a bad idea since early institutions will end up in isolated categories of one. Far better to sort them using an approach like at Category:Bridges by date. My suggestion would be:
 * Institutions established prior to 1500 are sorted by century
 * Institutions established between 1500 and 1799 are sorted by decade
 * Institutions established in 1800 or later are sorted by year
 * I feel that would reflect the article numbers appropriately.


 * Sorting around ends of centuries: Technically 1800 belongs to the 18th century, with the 19th century beginning in 1801. The way years are sorted under Category:Years is to sort "1800" under "18th century" and "1800s" but to sort "1800s" only under "19th century". "1801" is sorted only under "1800s". My suggestion would be to follow this scheme as closely as possible. In centuries for which "Educational institutions established in xx00" is not given a category of its own (see above - suggested affected years would be 1500, 1600 and 1700) then it would make sense to class the "xx00s" category under both centuries; but if a distinct xx00 category exists, then it should be sorted under the technically correct "xx-th century" as well as the "xx00s" category, which in turn would be sorted under "Educational institutions established in the (xx+1)th century". Would that make sense? TheGrappler 13:58, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Coding the xx00 vs century problem in the templates, but what I have done seems like a workable solution. Each century has only subcateories for the 11 decades that have years within that century, including both double zero categories. Thus the years xx00 are never directly in a century category, but only in a xx00s decade category. j-beda 18:54, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree with you on the granualariry. Though I note that [University of Cambridge]] has just been moved from the "13th century" category to the "1209" one Bluap 23:45, 30 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I support this approach. -- Usgnus 23:39, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
 * See Category:Candidates for speedy deletion -- Usgnus 20:08, 2 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I have withdrawn my nomination to delete lots of these categories, while this debate is going on. Sorry, I missed the debate here. I agree with the above, particularly the granularity of categories in the first dot point. I too note the University of Cambridge point. It was the change of category on University of Oxford that drew my attention to this problem. --Bduke 01:12, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Support. I agree with the above approach, though I might be inclined to say that the "by year" cutoff should be 1900, not 1800. But I can live with 1800. --Elonka 18:07, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Support. I think the 1800 cutoff is not so bad, since the number of members of these categories is only going to grow. I've been the one creating and populating a lot of these "single member" year categories and the probably was a bit too gung-ho of me. I can make some changes to the Template:Eiei templates to reflect whatever we decide. People might also be interested in the renaming of Category:Educational institutions established in xxxx, the discussion of which is currently going on. j-beda 18:54, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Remediation
I went through and recategorized every educational institution established on or before 1800 to the proposal above, with the exception of St. John's College, U.S., which is currently protected. I also deleted all subcategories for which I was the sole editor using the db-author tag. According to the speedy guidelines, once a category is empty for four days, it can be speedy deleted, which I will submit for all remaining subcategories. J-beda, do you want to change the instructions on the templates? -- Usgnus 22:58, 2 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I made some quick changes to the templates at Template:Eiei, but they still need to be properly fixed to not display year categories before 1800 and decade categories before 1500. If anyone has bright ideas how to do that within a single template, let me know. j-beda 00:59, 3 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Okay, I changed them to have the cutoff at 1500 instead of 1000. I also put a conditional in so that the decade-table shows only for centuries after 1500 and the year-table shows only for decades after 1800. -- Usgnus 03:29, 3 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I've updated the templates to have the year cutoffs in two templates, so if we want to changeg them in the future, it should be trivial. Maybe I'll put "error" detection in the year and decade templates so that they display a warning if invoked with "forbidden" years. j-beda 23:22, 3 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I have made the conditionals in the templates so that categories before the cutoffs display appropriate "this catagory should be empty" messages, and are not themselfs put into the other Eiei categories. Maybe I'll get around to creating a template to put in articles that takes the year as an imput and puts the article in the appropriate Eiei year/decade/century category. j-beda 14:07, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Wow, superb job on the templates! I made one small tweak, adding a pointer to the discussions, in case anyone else has questions (I know that I had a heck of a time finding the proper place to discuss this). If you know of a better way to handle the pointer though, feel free to tweak.  And again, great job. I learned some new template tricks from you today.  :) --Elonka 17:21, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I moved your text to Template:Eiei so it should be easily found by anyone looking at any of the templates - a good idea. The template hacking would be a lot easier if our stupid year system had a year zero, so our centuries were in line with our years ending in 00s. I hve been thinking of ways to get a template to spit out "3rd century BC" or "21st century" given an arbitrary year (maybe using negative years for BC inputs?) but it gets messy dealing with the BC/AD stuff, as well as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 11th, 12th, 13th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, etc. variations. If I got that working, we could build a template, say called "eiei-categorizer" that took a single year parameter and then assigned the appropriate category (year, decade, century) based on that year, as well as put the article in the appropriate "xxxx establishments" category if appropriate. Like I don't have more important things to do with my time - see j-beda 03:58, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I agree that having the direct to the discussion on the master template is a good idea, but I also think we still need to find a way to communicate a discussion point in the template, so it's actually visible on all the category pages. Not all of the editors are going to be savvy enough to understand how to backtrack to look at a template's main page.  Can you think of another method that would allow a discussion pointer to be included in a non-obtrusive way?  --Elonka 13:25, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
 * That's a good point (your addition was within "noinclude" tags so it was not visible anywhere but on the Template:Eiei-cutoff page either). I can't think of a clean way of putting on the category pages - I suspect that anyone messing with a category page will see that they all are nothing but template references, and all the templates point to the correct place to talk, so it might be a non-issue. With that said - I have not set up to "watch" the 200+ categories to be aware of any ill-conceived editing - so it might be a good idea to have a more direct link to the appropriate place to talk available. j-beda 14:35, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Time to delete "outmoded" categories?
It seems like all the categories (year/decade) that are outside the cutoff dates are now unpopulated - should we get them deleted? If so, how does one go about doing that? j-beda 16:39, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
 * WP:CFD -- Usgnus 18:41, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
 * So do we just go through and plug db-catempty into all the empty and "out of bounds" categories, or does there need to be a "non-speedy" type of action? I think they have been empty for more than four days. j-beda 19:08, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes. For future reference, any category (or article or template for that matter) for which you are the sole editor can be speedied with Template:db-author without needing a four day waiting period. -- Usgnus 19:19, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I went through and added the db-catempty tag to all the empty and "out of bounds" categories - I suppose we could have done something slick with the templates to do it automatically, but that might make for some interesting errors and so is probably too dangerous to do.  j-beda 20:23, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Templates
Many thanks for all the work that has happened on this. At the moment, the templates take up a lot of room in the category pages. I wondered if it would be possible to find a way to present all this information in a more compact way? I think part of the problem is having the navigational templates "stacked up" on top of each other, although perhaps the introduction is a little wordy too. TheGrappler 11:53, 29 June 2006 (UTC)


 * That is a good point - any ideas on how to make it more compact? We could shrink the font of the text in the boxes, and maybe the granularity information could be made more compact somehow. The nice thing about stacking the boxes is that it is so darn easy to do when combining the various templates into one uber-template... j-beda 20:41, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

How about this for Eiei-cutoff to save a few lines?
 * Articles should be categorised by year for and later, by decade for  to, by century for before , and placed in Category:Educational institutions established in an unknown year for unknown dates.

--Usgnus 21:48, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Looks good to me - be bold! Make the change. j-beda 14:00, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Done (finally). --Usgnus 21:24, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I changed the tables so that they are more compact. --Usgnus 21:46, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Using these templates elsewhere on Wikipedia
How difficult would it be to adapt these templates for use in places like Category:Establishments by year? There's some granularity there that needs to be addressed as well (like Category:743 establishments). --Elonka 16:52, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Probably discussion of that sort of thing should go on in that area - probably Category talk:Establishments by year. I seem to recall that those categories seemed to already have some header templates established, and some move to translate from one form of header to another ? And they seem to have some sort of system for creating entries on-the-fly - at least I seem to recall when I put something into a non-exsistant category like Category:744 establishments, the next time I visited, the category, along with the appropriate template had been created.... I woun't want to step on anyone's toes. In general, since "establishment" is so broad, probably individual years will always be desired, but what do I know? j-beda 21:11, 11 July 2006 (UTC)