Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 August 18



Category:Celtic countries and territories

 * The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.


 * The result of the discussion was: delete. Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:53, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Propose renaming Category:Celtic countries and territories to Category:Celtic-speaking countries and territories
 * Nominator's rationale: Rename. To match the vast majority of the sister categories. I think that the whole tree is perhaps amiss since inclusion in the category has no obvious bounds either in time or in how many inhabitants spoke the languages in question at any time or whether the languages had any official status or whatever, but that's for another day, let's just get the naming the same as most of the others for now. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 21:04, 18 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Split (with no objection against renaming to the proposed format), all other sister categories are by single language, while this category is for a family of languages. Marcocapelle (talk) 05:16, 19 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment I do understand the value of consistent naming and structure for categories, and that would favor splitting this into separate categories for each language. And yet... one of the examples of bad-practice given in WP:SMALLCAT is Category:Catalan-speaking countries which was deleted precisely because it contained only one entry. A hypothetical Category:Cornish-speaking countries and territories is also going to be pretty small. I like the nominator's original proposal except for the fact that Celtic is a language family, and so to write of "Celtic-speaking" countries and territories would be incorrect when people there actually speak Welsh, Gaelic, etc. We seem to lack consistency in how we name categories for language groups, with Category:Finno-Ugric countries and territories following the Celtic model and Category:Northeast Caucasian-speaking countries and territories going the other route. Rupert Clayton (talk) 05:15, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete, I changed my vote because you're actually right that splitting will lead to one-item sized categories. There's really no point in categorizing languages by country if they're spoken in one country only. This type of categorization is just meaningful for languages like English, French and Spanish . Marcocapelle (talk) 09:00, 22 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep -- This is an odd category, as it includes places where Celtic languages have not been spoken for centuries, such as Galatia and Asturias. It probably needs purging of Great Ireland a place known largely from Norse legends.  It is not going to be feasible to determine robustly what is a country and what a territory, as this may have varied from time to time during history.  Peterkingiron (talk) 21:35, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't agree with Galatia and Asturias being in this category. If we allow that, where does it end? The whole of France and large parts of Italy have been Celtic(-speaking) in ancient times. It seems like listification is more useful than categorization for a purpose like this. Marcocapelle (talk) 07:13, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Categorizing places by who may or may not have formerly lived there is probably not useful and lists would be better, but that's a bigger discussion. Marcocapelle brings up a good point; moreover, we end up with issues such as whether England belongs in the Category:French-speaking countries and territories because its ruling classes spoke French rather than English for quite some time; and even perhaps England ought be in Category:German-speaking countries and territories because those Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Hannoveran monarchs spoke German; and if we go down the slippery slope invited by this category as articulated by Peterkingiron, perhaps England gets categorized in literally hundreds of these types of categories as one can hear those languages spoken in most large English cities: London, Manchester, Birmingham, and the entrepots of Dover & Liverpool, and the ivory towers and hallowed halls of Oxford and Cambridge. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 19:05, 21 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep as is, or better yet split (ancient & contemporary) or (best of all) delete Hopeless concept, as the comments above indicate. Johnbod (talk) 03:36, 22 August 2015 (UTC)


 * The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.