Category talk:Lists

Is this category needed?
Is this category needed? I thought the category feature was intended to replace the List of lists. If you want a complete list of lists, it's at Special:Categories. GUllman 18:53, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * Special:Categories is mainly replacing un-annotated topic lists. -- User:Docu


 * Regarding List of templates see Wikipedia talk:List of lists. Gangleri 04:23, 2004 Nov 10 (UTC)

Rail transport related lists
I feel this would be a viable subcategory. I would create it myself but I wont have time until the middle of next week to hunt down all the lists and recategorise them. sub-sub categories might be or is this getting too specific? Thryduulf 01:47, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * lists of rail aciddents
 * lists of railway stations
 * lists of rail locomotives (possibly split into diesel, electric and steam)

Proposals for subcategories
Currently the Lists category is very long while there are few subcategories and listings under those subcategories. According to what the template says, we should work on subcategories. So I have a few proposals listed below for better organizing this. I would like some feedback. —Tokek 01:06, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

List the subcategories by hand
I think we could add the list of subcategories to the main category page by hand. The list is: As you can see the list is fairly short so there is no need for it to span multiple pages like it currently does. Without this, the user might not notice that there are more subcategories than the first page. —Tokek 01:06, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
 * Category:Asia-related lists
 * Category:Culture lists
 * Category:Lists by form
 * Category:Geography lists
 * Category:Housekeeping lists
 * Category:Math lists
 * Category:Science lists
 * Category:Technology lists
 * Category:Lists of TLAs

Good idea, with a couple of exceptions, which you should see momentarily after I make a couple of changes. Maurreen 02:59, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Update It seems like Category:Computing solves this problem by adding a sort key preceeded by an asterisk for each subcategory. Maybe this should also be done here. —Tokek 01:17, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Add more subcategories
Sometimes the items listed in the Lists category aren't moved to a subcategory because there isn't a subcategory for it or a subcategory is too specific for it. I think the following new subcategories could be useful:

Subcategories that currently do not exist: —Tokek 01:06, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
 * Astronomy lists
 * Geoscience lists
 * Computing lists
 * Literature lists
 * Sexuality lists
 * History lists

I'd planned to have just a few main list subcategories, then many others could fit under them. Maurreen 02:59, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Merging or renaming existing subcategories
Currently there is a Science lists and Nature lists category, both very sparsely populated. I think these two should be merged. There is also a Category:Lists of astronomical objects. I think this should be renamed to Category:Astronomy lists which would allow more lists to be addded. —Tokek 01:06, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Embedded lists
Is there an unstated assumption that this category and its subcats only relate to standalone lists rather than embedded lists? This is not obviously a better policy so it needs discusion. In which case, where is the borderline between the two types? Joestynes 10:08, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Reorganizing Subcats Based on Standard (topical) Schemes ?
I rearranged the subcategories to be more like the categories in the category bar at the top of the page. So I added Category:Art lists and I moved Category:History-related lists, Category:Philosophy lists, and Category:Lists of people from under Category:Culture lists. The rest of the categories were already there except for Health and Society which I haven't added yet. At some point we need to rename these categories so that they have a common format.

It would be really nice if there were some way to group these topic categories separately from the other categories that cut across topics, like Category:Lists of books and Category:Lists by country.

I think it might have been a mistake to split off Art from Culture as I ended up moving at least half of the subcategories in Culture to Art. Looking at what is left, it seems that most of those would be better under Society. So I'm thinking of creating Category:Society lists], moving the relevant categories from Culture to Society and then merging what is left in Culture into Arts and calling it [[:Category:Arts and Culture lists. I'll wait a while before doing that.  I still have to move the pages under Culture lists to the right place, but I might as well wait to do that until after the merger if I decide to go through with that.

I'm having some difficulty understanding what a topic list is and how it differs from a regular list. To my eye, a lot of what is in Category:Mathematical lists aren't topic lists even though the category is a subcategory of Category:Topic lists. --JeffW 18:51, 9 March 2006 (UTC)


 * With CategoryIntersect.php you can easily select lists by topical subcategory. In this perspective, categories such as Category:Topic lists are much more useful. -- User:Docu


 * That looks like a great tool for the use of maintaining categories. However, I don't understand how it helps me understand how a topic list category differs from other list categories.  --JeffW 19:49, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I've decided that People isn't really a Subject like the rest (I've decided to call the Subjects since Topics is used here to mean something else), that it's more like Books in that it cuts across all the subjects. But this is where my intuition fails me. I can't think of how I can group the remaining sub-categories, Abbreviations, by Country, by Form, Reference material, Worst lists, Year lists, Books, and People into cohesive groups. --JeffW 00:59, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Japanese military-political doctrines in the Showa period
This page seems to be half-way between an article and a list. I don't know how to classify it. --JeffW 05:24, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Description of page organization
I added a description of the way this page is organized. I don't claim that it is well-written, and I invite anyone to improve on it. In particular I'm not sure how to describe the topic lists. Would it be helpful to suggest why they are there? Perhaps something along the lines that they are a good way to get a broad view of a subject area. --JeffW 19:22, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Placement of catdiffuse template
I move back from the talk page to the category. See User talk:Ruud Koot, item Should be on talk pages?, and also cf. the first sentence in Template messages/Category namespace
 * These notes are generally placed on top of category pages.

JoergenB (talk) 18:50, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Contested deletion
This page should not be speedy deleted because... --Bhebbard (talk) 15:21, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Sorting
Why are there to kinds of "top" sorting, an asterisk and a blank, here and elsewhere too? trespassers william (talk) 11:39, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I found the answer in the 6th and 7th bullets at WP:SORTKEY:


 * Use a space as the sort key for a key article for the category. (Note: If the key article should not be a member, simply edit the category text itself to add it, perhaps using Cat main.)
 * Use other sort keys beginning with a space (or an asterisk or a plus sign) for any "List of ..." and other pages that should appear after the key article and before the main alphabetical listings. The same technique is sometimes used to bring particular subcategories to the start of the list.
 * I'm unsure on further details, and whether there are project-specific variations on this scheme (Ask at the relevant Wikiproject talkpage). Hope that helps. –Quiddity (talk) 20:38, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. I'll share my view this isn't very neat on that page's talk. trespassers william (talk) 00:37, 5 June 2013 (UTC)