User:Qwerfjkl/How to close CfD discussions

Step 1: Finding discussions to close
The simplest way to find discussions to close is to go to Categories for discussion and pick a day. Typically there will be a few ones that are tricky to close in the older ones; if you're new to closed idscussions at CfD, try to start off with a brand new set, i.e. Categories for discussion/Log/. Longer discussions that have been relisted twice will most likely be harder to close as well.

You can also look at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Old unclosed discussions and Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/All old discussions

Step 2: Determing consensus
This is the hardest part of closing discussions. You don't necessarily need to know all of these but it may be helpful to be familiar with them. CfD nominations will often link to the relevant policies and guidelines. The main policies and guidelines that are cited in discussions are:
 * WP:NONDEFINING. A category has to be defining, that is, it has to be important enough to be worth categorising. E.g. Category:Blue fish would not be defining because a fish being blue isn't that important. A related guideline is WP:TRIVIALCAT.
 * WP:NARROWCAT. The intersection between characteristics needs to be defining (see above) e.g. Category:American people of Hungarian descent by occupation is an intersection of occupation and ethnicity.
 * WP:OVERCATEGORISATION. This is a broad guideline that is broken into a lot of smaller guidelines like SMALLCAT and NARROWCAT.

Here are some discussions and my thoughts on them:

Category:Wikipedia AfC reviewers

 * Propose renaming Category:Wikipedia AfC reviewers to Category:Wikipedia Articles for Creation reviewers
 * Nominator's rationale: Expand acronym. C LYDE TALK TO ME/STUFF DONE 23:30, 19 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Rename per nom. * Pppery * it has begun... 04:59, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

This one's nice and striaght forward, an easy rename.

Most discussions of this type will be straight forward to close. Make sure that the nominator's rationale makes sense and isn't missing anything, and that nothing has changed e.g. if a category is nominated for deletion per SMALLCAT and you check and see it has 10 members. In that case, relisting would probably be best to play it safe, leaving a relisting comment mentioning that there are 10 members.

If there's just the nominator !voting, the discussion should probably be relisted. THe exceptions to this are
 * 1) If the rationale is a speedy criterion. Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy is the normal place for speedy nominations, but if someone makes a nomination in CfD by accident, it can be closed as speedy as long as the typical discussion period has passed.
 * 2) Soft delete. If the rationale is reasonable, straight-forward, and no one objects, you can close a discussion as soft X. This means that if anyone objects to the result afterwards, the category should be restored (and a new nomination should be started). See WP:SOFTDELETE.

Category:British sportspeople in British India

 * Propose renaming Category:British sportspeople in British India to Category:British expatriate sportspeople in British India
 * Nominator's rationale: Parent is: British expatriate sportspeople in India Mason (talk) 21:43, 19 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Note: consider opposing rationale by user:Place Clichy at Categories for discussion/Log/2023 September 21. – Fayenatic  L ondon 14:39, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. The two articles in this category, Edward Lee French and Ernest Raikes, were an "English-born" policeman and an advocate that incidentally played for a cricket team based in Bombay called the Europeans. It is fair to assume that they considered themselves British in a British land, and the word expatriate seems a bit out of place. More widely, if we go and add the word expatriate, let's discuss it for all categories for colonial settlers of every country and every trade, not just one sportspeople category (see e.g. and French people of colonial Algeria). For the sake of historical continuity and better navigation, I don't object to place this category in a parent Category:British expatriate sportspeople in India though (and Pakistan and Bangladesh, for that matter). Place Clichy (talk) 07:24, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

The nominator's rationale is reasonable and follows the spirit of WP:C2C (a speedy criterion). However, the opposition rationale is also strong. In this case I would relist. If no further comments were forthcoming, I would close as no consensus.

Category:Maxillopoda

 * Propose deleting
 * maxillopoda
 * maxillopoda genera
 * maxillopoda stubs
 * Nominator's rationale: Maxillopoda was WP:BLARred last year.

jlwoodwa (talk) 19:37, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Qwerfjkl  talk  20:15, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
 * So what's the taxonomic status of Maxillopoda? Even if it was declared a synonym or invalid or whatnot, we shouldn't leap onto the new classification until it gains more scientific consensus. Wikipedia doesn't need to have front-line updated classification. Edward-Woodrow :) [ talk ] 12:42, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I was pinged about this deletion because many years ago I created this category. I don't remember why exactly did I do it, but it was most likely for some technical reason. I wrote "iw" in edit summary then, by which I mean "interwiki", or more precisely, interlanguage links. I don't know anything about Biology, so I can't comment on the scientific validity of this name. If there are scientific reasons to delete it, so be it. I do hope, however, that if it is deleted, people who encounter this category in Wikipedia in other languages will have a useful interlanguage link. Perhaps it should be deleted in other languages, too. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:46, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, C LYDE TALK TO ME/STUFF DONE 21:32, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
 * If not kept, Merge to Category:Crustaceans/Category:Crustacean genera/Category:Crustacean stubs rather than deleting. A merge does seem reasonable if the nominator's argument is true, but I haven't investigated more closely. * Pppery * it has begun... 00:21, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

First off, it is clear that the category cannot be deleted - its members should be merged as Pppery says. However there isn't exactly clear consensus for that - only the nominator argued strongly for that. It cannot be relisted, because it has already been relisted twice. Closing as no consensus would be a reasonable closure, but the nominator's rationale seems reasonable. The only issue is that there is uncertainty over the taxonomic status of Maxillopoda. In this situation, I would either close as no consensus, or !vote myself.

Category:Baltic-language surnames

 * Propose merging Category:Baltic-language surnames to Category:Names by language, Category:Surnames by language, and Category:Surnames of European origin
 * Propose deleting baltic-language names
 * Nominator's rationale: Two WP:NONDEFINING redundant layers. "Baltic" has zero navigational value in this tree. NLeeuw (talk) 23:44, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Qwerfjkl  talk  18:12, 10 September 2023 (UTC) Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, C LYDE TALK TO ME/STUFF DONE 21:32, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Merge/delete per nom, but add a "See also" note in the pages of the two subcategories. Note that the two subcategories remain in the tree of Category:Baltic languages anyway. Marcocapelle (talk) 06:23, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * keep but containerize or delete and reclassify content Baltic languages constitute a small set including Latvian and Lithuanian. Contents shouldn't be classed to Baltic- as it's a grouping name and not a valid language name.--User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 16:05, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Here, first looking at the category structure helps. Category:Baltic-language names contains only Category:Baltic-language surnames, and those two categories are the ones being nominated for deletion/merging here. Category:Baltic-language surnames contains only two categories, Category:Lithuanian-language surnames and Category:Latvian-language surnames. It is then worth reading the objection to the reasons for deletion/merging. In this situation I would ask Ceyockey to clarify what they propose containerising, because the categories already contain only categories, and perhaps also ask them where they suggest reclassifying the content, and maybe ping the other contributors to see if they have a response to Ceyockey. Ultimately, I would probably close this as delete/rename as per nom, depending on what responses I got. Alternatively I might !vote myself, though not being very knowledgeable in this area, I myself probably wouldn't.

Step 3: Implementing the closure
This is a slightly tricky bit, because the contents of a category often have to be modified in order to do anything with it.

If you are a non-admin: You can list closures at Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Working so that admins can add them to Categories for discussion/Working, which gets a bot to process them. For this purpose I wrote a script, User:Qwerfjkl/scripts/CFDlister, which you may or may not find helpful. It helps to read WP:CFDW and now the format expected for that page.

If you are an admin, you can add closures directly to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working. If you're unsure about how to go about doing it, feel free to ask at Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Working or Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion.

If the closure needs to be implemented manually, instead go to Categories for discussion/Working/Manual.

The script Cat-a-lot is excellent for large scale recategorisation. You can install it at User:קיפודנחש/cat-a-lot.