User:Le Deluge/categories

I had to grab a lot of red-listed categories for something else I was working on, and I ended up with a list of around 6500 (still only a fraction of the total, I will do the full list at some point) red-link categories that need either creating or editing the articles that point to them. I cleaned up over 1500 of them to get rid of most of the obvious typos, spam etc, but that still left nearly 5000 categories to create. I ran some crude filters to allocate over 800 to educational institutions and football but that still leaves just over 4000 here. I need help!

It must be emphasised that I'm not expecting all of these categories to be created - even though I've done quite a bit of cleaning up, there's still a lot of rubbish in there, and many more where the current wording is not quite right and a related category should be created instead. In particular one shouldn't get too stressed over made-up categories on user pages, I don't have too many qualms about removing them from people who've made <20 edits and not edited for more than a year, but many editors seem to like that sort of thing and there's no shortage of other red links to chase in the meantime, however much it offends my inner OCD!

I definitely believe in quality over quantity doing this, it's not about dashing off something just to turn a link blue but trying to fill in the category page as well as one can. There's a bit of an art to it, first of all you have to look at the link and see if it's spelt correctly, in the correct format for Wikipedia (for instance, "Alumni" -> "alumni") and matching the main article name. If not, you will have to edit appropriately any articles that point to it.

To help you I've derived a potential article link and put them after each category link, which will allow you to quickly check what the parent hierarchy looks like - I tend to have at least two tabs open, one for the article and one for the potential new category. If the article has a blue link then that's looking good that the category should be formatted/spelt the same way, but still check the article link to see that it's not a disambiguation or redirect to a different spelling. Even if an article does exist, we don't necessarily want a category for every article, some judgment is called for.

Then it's a good idea to look at a similar category of a big equivalent institution etc ideally from the same country (eg Category:Harvard University alumni - typically there will be a catmain link and some other bits in the header, plus at least an "institution people" category and a Category:Alumni by university or college in state/country. You can then use that as "inspiration" for the new category.

I suggest that if you'r seriously interested in doing something on this, you edit this page and cut/paste a chunk of categories to a page in your own userspace, then there won't be any duplication and you can work off a page that is much quicker to load than this one.

Anyway, enough talking, here are the categories!!