Category talk:Ethics

Guidelines for authorship
It seems to me that the following ought to be on this page, and out of view of readers, because it isn't part of the entry itself and is a specialized message just for authors.

"These are fairly obviously distinguished from ethical concepts by name alone. Inclusion or exclusion of an article is obviously an ethical issue in itself, as different people regard different issues as 'substantial', and different ethical works as influential.

Some simple guidelines:


 * Where a separate article exists regarding only the ethical debate, link only that article, not the main article.
 * Only very basic and influential abstractions from analytic philosophy or game theory, e.g. Prisoner's dilemma, Tit For Tat are included.
 * Nothing dealing strictly with belief, e.g. propaganda - this has no direct impact on a living body and it does not imply or directly suggest an action by any body.
 * Anything applicable only to one religion or only of historical interest belongs on Category:Religion.
 * Metaphysics and epistemology are covered in Category:Metaphysics or Category:Epistemology.
 * Political and diplomatic concepts should not be included unless they constitute a profound ethical problem, e.g. choices like the prevention of genocide by violating national sovereignty.
 * Business ethics is considered a separate category - include only those issues large enough to affect the general society and planet.
 * Legal ethics is a separate category as well.
 * Medical ethics is also a separate category - include only those issues that seem to transcend the doctor-patient relationship.
 * Concepts specific to economics should be added to Category:Economics.
 * Concepts specific to Islam should be added to the category of Islamic terms in Arabic instead.
 * Names belong in Category:Ethicists or Category:Philosophers."

Lucidish 17:45, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Cleanup request
There are too many articles into this category; time to make subcategories and sort articles into them. -- Beland 23:38, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

What happened so far
On Aug 3, 2006, user:Cwolfsheep inserted the following tag:

On Aug 5 and 6, user:Common Man moved many articles from this category into subcategories, and removed articles from this categories when they were already in subcategories.

Discussion
I removed the catdiffuse tag which seemed to be encouraging people to create messes out of categories down the line. a general cleanup tag is all that is needed here, we don't need any nouveau templates that confuse people. --Buridan 11:09, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm fine with removing it now. A lot of cleanup has been done, and it has been overwhelmingly accepted. Could you please clarify what you mean by "create messes"? On a lesser note, I also don't see why you write "that confuse people". Common Man 18:08, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
 * it is just a fact of categorization that unless you know which subcategory something is under, you do not know where to look and might look in the inappropriate one thus be confused as to where it should be. any given two people will not subcategorize similarly unless there are standards and longterm training, which is why we have librarians.   the messes that were created were when people were removing a ton of categories from ethics related and leaving only one in the name of diffusion and clarification.  I ended up returning some of those cats.   --Buridan 22:45, 6 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Your arguments do not hold water, at least not for this category. More than a week after the cleanup, of the over 300 cleaned up articles very few (4, afaik) have experienced pertinent changes. This is far less than the usual churn at Wikipedia. Neither has there been any evidence for your claims of confusion or that you ended up returning even a single one of those cats. Common Man 16:04, 14 August 2006 (UTC)


 * umm? eh? after the cleanup... churn went down, can be seen to be an indication that new people were not finding articles.  Churn going down is actually a bad thing for wikipedia, not a good thing.   as for confusion, i returned a few in areas that i thought were highly problematic, but not many.   at best, i think you can conclude that there is no evidence that i was right, nor is there evidence that i was wrong, though there is evidence that churn went down, according to you, which indicates something.  i don't think we need to be the sort that goes... i'm right, you are wrong, but we do need to be the sort to say, something changed, and because of that something else changed and are either of those changes 'good' and from whose perspective.  The category issue is not good, it is my claim from the user perspective, it is only good from the categorizer's perspective. --Buridan 16:27, 14 August 2006 (UTC)


 * You are beating around the bush. An easy example: You say you "ended up returning some". This should be easy to substantiate. You don't. Instead, you add up even more far-fetched claims. Please stop wasting everybody's time.  Common Man 17:13, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Explanation for tag
The function of the tag is to discourage people from using a single category as a dumping ground, as most of us are guilty of. My experience cleaning up Category:Politics illustrated to myself how easy it is to do: the vast majority of those articles were for "local" issues that were better suited by already existing subcategories. Deep subcategorization is not feasible beyond a certain point. Cwolfsheep 20:58, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Category changes
Would anyone object if I started a category:normative ethics and changes category:virtue to category:virtue ethics ? Anarchia 00:53, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
 * virtue is not the same as virtue ethics, the categories do not map the same territory. other than that, if the materail in virtue currently all maps to virtue ethics without issue, go for it, but remember also that virtue is a category in deontology.--Buridan 12:59, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Very good point. I assume that there is no argument against starting a category:virtue ethics. But, I will think on this for a bit. Anarchia 01:15, 31 August 2007 (UTC)