Category talk:Photographers by nationality

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This category strikes me as ill-conceived and potentially harmful. I've nominated it previously on CFD and it's been mostly cleaned out, but now it looks like it's being repopulated. The reason why I think it's a bad idea is that it breaks orthogonality and makes things hard to find.

About the first point, the key question is, in what sense is a French photographer more than a French person who happens to be a photographer? Why not put every French photographer in a category "French people" and the category "Photographers"? Also, it entails that American photojournalist who covered a major war and worked for Magnum have to be put in three or four subcategories of Category:Photographers. This strikes me as somewhat odd.

Second, imagine a reader looking up Category:Photographers because he's looking for information on, say, "Helmut Newton" without remembering his exact name. In the "photographers by nationality" scheme, such a reader would have to browse through several subcategories before being able to find the desired entry.

Compare the situation with Category:Mathematicians, which is much larger than the present category. There every mathematicians is listed under Category:Mathematicians first and then possibly under specific subcategories (by field and/or nationality). --MarkSweep 17:40, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * You can't stop it. It's natural and it is consensus about it. - Darwinek 16:16, 26 November 2005 (UTC)