Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Category:Gods and Category:Goddesses

The following discussion comes from Categories for deletion, where it is currently listed as unresolved. It may be reviewed again in the future in the light of evolving standards and guidelines for categorization.21:38, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Category:Gods and Category:Goddesses
These should be merged into Category:Deities (and then probably sub-categories by type, affiliation, or whatever, due to the sheer number of members) for the following reasons: -- Beland 23:48, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * There seems to be at least a consensus that these should not be outright deleted, but that some reorganization is in order. Since they have been reorganized (somewhat), I'm removing this listing from CfD. -[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 18:13, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * The new policy on Categorization of people prefers gender-neutral category names. (This example was specifically mentioned on Wikipedia talk:Categorization of people.)
 * They are of themselves too big to be much more useful than an uncategorized Category:Deities itself.
 * Cross-referencing all subcategories of Category:Deities by gender is too messy.
 * The gender classification of some deities is ambiguous or otherwise problematic.
 * Excellent reasons. Delete. Very Verily  03:20, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * I'm against gender-categories for real individuals, but in the case of deities I think it makes sense. Gender was such a defining characteristic of the characters and forces in mythology that it makes sense to classify them as such.  Male and female were very different powers from one another.  Postdlf 03:45, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * Why not just have a third category for Godlings of indeterminate gender, intersexed, or alternate non-male, non-female gender 132.205.15.4 23:20, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * Keep as is. Deleting these will just end up cluttering Deities. Alkivar 02:10, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * Merge into relevant subcategories and delete. I don't see how this would create clutter, rather than clearing it up.  -Sean Curtin 04:18, Nov 3, 2004 (UTC)
 * perhaps because everyone wants to merge it into the parent group Deities of which Gods/Goddesses are sub-groups? Alkivar 03:31, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * To be clear, these deities shouldn't be just dumped at the top level. That would certainly be cluttered.  They should be re-sorted not by gender, but by type or mythology and whatnot, since there are other deities that are already sorted that way. -- Beland
 * Exactly. I thought that that would have been obvious upon looking at the current categorization hierarchy.  The only individual articles in these two categories are God, Goddess and a few articles with no obvious specific parent categories beyond these two.  -Sean Curtin 04:10, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)
 * Merge--Josiah 14:48, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Postdlf is right. Alternately God is a generic term including both, as Man means the entire human race so if merged it should be into Gods (deity is a clumsy word & is not the first choice people looking for gods or indeed goddesses will type in anyway). Neil Craig

Whether it is the word people would be looking for is not as important for categories. Anyone who is not familiar with Wikipedia is unlikely to type in "Category:Gods", but if they do, they can still navigate to Category:Deities very easily from that page and the notice at the top should explain clearly what is going on.

How about this scheme? Category:Deities Category:Deities by association Category:Deities by culture Category:Deities by gender Category:Gods Category:Goddesses Category:Fictional deities Category:Singular God The sub-categories of these could all be broken into gods and goddesses (as is the current system), which would also go into the Gods/Goddesses parent categories. Thus there would still be a lot of dual categorization of sub-categories (but not so much of articles), but I don't really have any problem with having parallel distinct categorization schemes. This would make it easy for folks to browse deities by association/type, culture of origin, or gender. We could introduce a third "by gender" category for cases where the gender is ambiguous. -[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 18:03, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * Keep IZAK 00:44, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and made Category:Deities by culture but then I thought perhaps it should be Category:Deities by culture and religion? -Aranel ("Sarah") 18:23, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)