User:Vegaswikian/sand1

rfc|style For a while now, there have been many discussions about the correct naming for categories that contain students of individual schools. We currently are using at least 4 different forms to address various regional differences. These are Category:People educated at schoolname, Category:Former pupils of schoolname, Category:schoolname alumni and Category:Old schoolnicknameians. At this point, there are still some naming issues between the first two and converting the last to anything else. I believe that the parent category for all of these is Category:Alumni by educational institution.

One large group of nominations that drove the creation of this RFC is here. There are about 15 associated individual CfDs there. These discussions link to some of the previous discussions which have reached multiple conclusions. This last set of discussions is also tainted by violations of WP:CANVASS. Historically bulk nominations don't work since the results for different institutions can be different. Conversely, individual nominations don't work since some editors claim that this is trying to bypass what is the common consensus that a bulk nomination would support and oppose for that reason.

CfDs generally don't have the participation that other classes of discussions have with discussions often closing very limited input (similar to what we get for some nominations at WP:RM). So in the interest of getting the input from a wider segment of the community it is believed that an RFC would help.

One example of what a category can look like when there is mixed results is Category:Former pupils by school in England. This category also shows a different issue in that while it is a 'by school' one, using the 'old fooian' naming does not identify for most casual readers the name of the school. This leads to a main discussion point here. Should we retain categories in the form Category:Old schoolnicknameians in violation of WP:OFFICIAL but, while being obscure, likely conforming to WP:COMMONNAME? I'll note that many of the naming policies and guidelines don't really cover category names. So a reading of Categorization and Category names may be helpful for some.

I'm not going to list a suggested solution for a survey at this time, but let one evolve from the discussion. The 'old fooian' issue is probably the difficult one. I think the other issues can can resolved by simply agreeing on the name for country parent category and then using that for the subcategories. Vegaswikian (talk) 20:55, 26 July 2011 (UTC)