Category talk:History of the British Isles

Untitled
Can someone explain what the precise purpose of this category is?

We are asked to go to History of Britain to find out more about this category but that sends us to Britain. That page states that Britain can either mean Great Britain or the United Kingdom. We already have Category:History of the United Kingdom. The blurb on Category:History of Great Britain states that it is actually for the History of the Kingdom of Great Britain (1707-1901), so is Category:History of Britain intended as a category for the history of Great Britain in general, and not just during the Kingdom of Great Britain (or perhaps for history before and after the Kingdom)?

On the other hand the blurb on Category:History of Great Britain also states that Category:History of Britain is for subjects that "overlap" between Category:History of England, Category:History of Scotland and Category:History of the United Kingdom.

These two possible purposes are not necessarily compatible. Under the first "Britain" is treated as a synonym for Great Britain. Under the second what it is supposed to mean is not clear at all. At the very least the scope of "History of Britain" should be clearly explained at the top of the category page itself rather than sending us on a wild goose chase.

Ikari 19:32, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * I've just arrived too, and this area of Wikipedia is a mess, albeit that it was no dount set up in this form with the best of intentions, and ones which can be backed up by a rather formalistic logic.


 * I would like to see a radical simplification, but there are certain intractable problems. The only head category name which would allow all the tangle of topics which make up the history of the two large islands off the North West Coast of Europe to be included in one menu system is "History of Great Britain and Ireland", but it is unusable as it would be unacceptable to Irish nationalists to relegate Irish history to a subcategory of such a category, and they would have the sound argument that they have an independent state which is not part of a "British and Irish" entity to back up their position.


 * We really have to have both "History of the United Kingdom" and "History of Britain" because they are so different in chronological and spacial scope. There should probably be more duplication of first level sub-categories between the two and I will work on this.


 * The "History of Great Britain" category seems to me to be redundant, as I have explained in more detail on its talk page.


 * History of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland are off course all necessary. History of Ireland is an associate category of History of Britain, rather than a subcategory. I think the only answer to the fact that many articles fall naturally into both a British/UK category and an English/Scottish etc national category (and more importantly, that people will look for the same topics in both places unconcerned about the formalities, but just keen to find relevant information) is extensive multi-categorization.


 * All the main categories must have an explanation of the difficulties which non-experts might understand. I will try to write these.


 * Overall, I think the weakness of the category system at the moment is that it focuses on intellectual precision rather than usability. Removing the "History of Great Britain" category, increasing the number of subcategories that are in multiple locations, so new users will come across them whichever main category they started out in, and adding more explanations on the head category pages would ameliorate this. Philip 15:07, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

History of Ireland
This article is not categorised, nor should it be, as a sub-cat of the "History of Britain". Bad enough having it categorised has history of the POV term "British Isles". (Sarah777 19:09, 12 October 2007 (UTC))