Category talk:Ethnic cleansing

Problematic category
As our article on ethnic cleansing says, this is a very vague term that is often used to avoid clear terms or to insinuate war crimes. As a consequence, it creates heated discussions in articles assigned to this category, such as Expulsion of non-resident Tamils from Colombo. Moreover, it seems to contain articles that clearly belong to category:Genocide, such as Armenian Genocide, Assyrian Genocide or Pontic Greek Genocide. If there are more problems with this category then I'd vote for deleting it and moving its content to category:Genocide, category:Ethnic conflict or category:Forced migration, as applicable. &mdash; Sebastian 02:56, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Is it appropriate to use the term ethnic cleansing for this category?
The use of the term "ethnic cleansing" is in my view problematic, as it is a) a euphemism and b) used retrospectively. Opinions? 红卫兵 19:44, 26 August 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree that this category is utilized in far too many historical situations. If we are to be consistent, we need to go back to antiquity. Either this category should be abolished or its use should be restricted to a limited number of contemporary cases, in which ethnic cleansing was used to describe the event after the term came into common use. Figureofnine (talk) 16:24, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

I did some research and came up with the following tables. The first table is a legend for the second. In the second table, the abbreviations in the columns list to which categories a given article or category has been assigned to. "y" stands for "yes", "i" stands for indirect, meaning it has been assigned to an obvious subcategory. Example, Category:Massacres of Poles in Volhynia is a subcategory of two "Massacres in ..." categories, and hence indirectly in category:Massacres.

My impression from this table is that most articles in Category:Ethnic cleansing are also in at least one other category that could replace it, above all category:Forced migration, category:Genocides, category:Racial massacres, category:War crimes, and category:Discrimination. I think therefore we could dissolve this category, if we spend some time sorting those that aren't into the existing categories or their subcats, and I hope this should be possible without too much POV quarrels. &mdash; Sebastian 04:11, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for an amazing amount of work, Sebastian. I agree with that "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism, and that these other categories are preferable. Moreover it presumes a violent distate for the expelled party. Use it as a category when the perpetrators used such a term, but also put them in these more objective categories when appropriate.--Carwil (talk) 01:45, 21 September 2010 (UTC)