Talk:Race and ethnicity in censuses

Majority-minority districts
The section on the US says
 * The United States is one of the countries that uses racial and ethnic census data in order to create minority-majority districts

This implies that there are others -- are there? If not, the sentence should be shortened to
 * The United States uses racial and ethnic census data in order to create minority-majority districts

Duoduoduo (talk) 14:19, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Summary needed
I think the article needs a summary section right after the lede (or maybe just an extended lede). It should give information like how many countries (a) now collect, and (b) have ever collected, data on race. It appears that very few ever have, but it's very hard going through a couple hundred countries in the article to piece this together. Also relevant would be approximately how many countries do or do not currently collect ethnicity data; approximately how many countries actually use the data for particular purposes; etc. Duoduoduo (talk) 14:25, 30 December 2012 (UTC)


 * what the article needs most is clarification regarding the difference between race and ethnicity, and clarification of the fact that neither categorisation has any useful universal meaning. Census data of this type, where it is collected at all, is always defined in terms of the local ethnic and/or 'racial' categorisations, and the article is fundamentally misleading in its implicit (and explicit in the lede) assumption that such data is based on 'characteristics', rather than on local social constructs. Incidentally, it also needs some serious copyediting, given the poor grammar and ambiguity of much of the content: what does "[Country X] has not enumerated people by ethnicity since at least 1945" mean, for example? That it did so in 1945? That it did so some time before 1945? Or (what I think is intended), that we have no data regarding whether census data regarding ethnicity and/or 'race' has ever been collected - in which case, what the heck has 1945 got to do with it? AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:40, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

An apparent misuse of a source
The article list multiple countries as "[Country X] has not enumerated people by ethnicity since at least 1945" 'cited' to this UN document:. I have checked the first five such countries (Andorra, Austria, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Burkina Faso) and in no case is the country mentioned in the document at all, from what I can see. I would like to see an explanation for why this source is apparently being misused in this manner. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:50, 30 December 2012 (UTC)


 * It looks to me like the Grump is right about the UN document. By Occam's razor, I think the obvious explanation that he asks for is simply sloppiness, manifested in failure to read the source's explanation on p. 3 of why some countries were omitted, and just assuming wrongly that the answer was that they had no ethnicity question. From p. 3:
 * Our findings are based on the analysis of census questionnaires from 147 countries or areas, which represent 79% of the countries that have already conducted a census in the 2000 round. From the 228 countries or areas, 81 were not included in this analysis. The reasons for their exclusion are as follows: 23 have not taken or planned a census for the 2000 round (nine of them have population registers instead), 19 are expected to have a census in the future, and 39 have supposedly completed a census but the questionnaires were not available to UNSD at the time of reporting.


 * Moreover, since this 2003 source is giving (incomplete) data for the 2000 round of censuses, the article should include in each assertion that it means "as of the 2000 census", not as of 2012.


 * In addition, the tables in the source's appendix merely state what countries have their ethnicity questions summarized in past issues of this yearbook, again with no indication that any country not listed did not ask ethnicity questions.


 * So: this source can only be used to give data on countries that are listed in it; if a country is listed in an appendix table for a previous issue of the yearbook, that previous issue must be used to make any statements about what the country did or did not ask in that census.


 * As I said before elsewhere, it is worthwhile to have this article in Wikipedia, because it can help readers find out information about the practices of a particular country and about how practices of different countries compare. But it has to be done right. There are two big problems with the article as it now stands: sloppy use of source(s?), and an excessively lengthy format. As for the format, it would be much better to simply create a table with a row for each country for which we have data, and columns for things like ethnic groups in questionnaire?, racial groups in questionnaire?, etc. Then there can be three parts to the article: a lede that summarizes what practices are common and what practices are uncommon; the table with X marks in the cells as appropriate; and then a section with additional information about countries like the US and UK that we have substantially more information on.


 * How to proceed right now? I suggest that the article's main author (thus far) go through it and delete anything that is not correctly and adequately sourced as discussed above, and do so right away (unless the Grump's and my analyses here of the source are somehow not correct). Then the article can be built back up from there, preferably along the lines I suggested in my previous paragraph.


 * (Note the UN source's use of the term "ethnic group" (p. 2) and "ethnicity" (title):
 * ''According to the Principles and Recommendations for
 * ''Population and Housing Censuses, “… some of the bases upon which ethnic groups are
 * identified are ethnic nationality (in other words country or area of origin as distinct from citizenship or country of legal nationality), race, colour, language, religion, customs of dress or eating, tribe or various combinations of these characteristics. In addition, some of the terms used, such as "race", "origin" and "tribe”, have a number of different connotations.”
 * So they use "ethnic group" as the broad term and "race", "ethnic nationality", etc. as narrower terms.) Duoduoduo (talk) 15:20, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Well, no response from the person who was sloppy in misrepresenting in the sources, even though he's done around 50 edits elsewhere since my posting above. So I'll start fixing things myself, even though I really think that should be done by the editor who created the mess in the first place. Duoduoduo (talk) 14:45, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Languages in censuses
What aboute Languages in censuses?--Kaiyr (talk) 17:11, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Individual native languages are not asked in Census Canada forms.Skookum1 (talk) 07:48, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

First nation
Why dont number of each first nation count in census? for example how many cree?--Kaiyr (talk) 07:28, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * StatCan/Census of Canada doesn't do summaries based on individual FN ethnicities; all FN (status) and non-status and Metis are counted nationally/provincially/by census subdivision; likewise "North American Indian" in ethnicity tables, which can apply to natives from the US also. Totalling INAC information on each band population can be misleading and is always incomplete; many bands do not allow census-takers on their reserves is one reason why; another is that some bands are not all the same ethnicity but comprised of two or more; see Cree and its subpages (e.g. Woodland Cree, Swampy Cree) for estimated totals; what the sources there are I haven't paused to look.Skookum1 (talk) 07:47, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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The map in the lead is wrong
It incorrectly shows Australia as a country "where the ethnicity or race of people was enumerated in at least one census since 1991". The text for Australia later in the article (under Oceania) correctly says it has classified people only "by ancestry since 1986". HiLo48 (talk) 22:54, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

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