Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 February 25

Award categories with no articles about the awards (countries A–B)
,, , , , I've just noticed your collective votes for deleting these categories, but I'm confused as to why this was necessary, or how it helps our readers not to have these categories linking recipients of the awards. I have never heard of the idea that there has to be an article in place before a category can be created. Is that written down somewhere? Personally I would have thought that as long as the concept meets WP:GNG (which most of these awards do, as the highest honours bestowed by their respective countries, and definitely subject of coverage in reliable sources), and *could* be turned into an article, it is legitimate to have the category. If nothing else, it serves as a placeholder for the fact that an article is needed, and at least having something in place for these important topics, even if it is not yet a full article, helps counter the WP:SYSTEMICBIAS and WP:WORLDWIDE issues that often Wikipedia faces. Thanks &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 12:37, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
 * First off, I did not participate in the discussion but simply closed it based on the consensus of the discussion. Awards categories are generally covered by WP:OCAWARD.  Guidelines like WP:GNG cover what is needed for an article to exist.  I'll leave it to the others to provide more details. Vegaswikian (talk) 17:01, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
 * It is a good idea to place at least one article in the category either before creating it, or very soon afterwards (i.e. within four days); this is because a category which has no members (whether articles, subcategories or other pages) is liable to speedy deletion under WP:CSD. -- Red rose64 (talk) 18:27, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Categorization of people should (IMO) mostly be limited to what the person is notable for (artist, biologist etc). If we are to categorize people by awards at all, it should only be where it really is a defining characteristic for all its recipients. Nobel prizes satisfy that (it's hard to imagine it not being mentioned in the lead of any recipient's article).  There may be a few other awards that are the top international award in a significant field (e.g. Abel Prize) that are sufficiently defining.  Afaik there's no policy linking existence of an article about an award to existence of a category for its recipients.  However, in practice it's unlikely that an award that doesn't have an article in en wp comes anywhere near being an exception to WP:OC. The "placeholder for the fact that an article is needed" should be a redlink in the article text ("He won the Foobar Award."). Not categorizing on every fact mentioned in an article helps our readers by making categorization easier to use and indirectly by reducing the editor workload (e.g. caused by watchlist noise).  If a reader wants to know if person X won award Y they should be looking in article text (where it can be cited and contain extra information such as the year or that it was awarded jointly with person Z) - not looking at a long unstructured list of categories (and there's also WikiData). DexDor (talk) 19:40, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Alright, thanks, , that makes sense, I hadn't thought about it from that angle. Thanks  &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 21:30, 5 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment (nominator). I agree with everything that has been written above in response by other editors. It is true that my nomination rationale did not cite WP:AWARD, which is also a supporting reason that I think these categories should have been deleted. However, because some editors have issues with how WP:AWARD is interpreted and applied, I used the nomination to pull back a bit and make a more general claim—even if we might be able to justify an awards category as existing (and that's going to be debateable under WP:AWARD), cannot we all agree that we should not have an awards category when we do not yet have an article about an award?! Creating the category before the article really puts the cart before the horse. After the article is created, and a corresponding awards category is created—then is the appropriate time to turn to the debates around WP:AWARD. Good Ol’factory (talk) 21:34, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
 * As I said above, I am satisfied that we don't need to categorise people by these awards, WP:AWARD is fine, and thanks for clarifying that your delete request was in relation to that policy. But for the record I don't particularly agree that it should be a requirement to have an article before we have a category. Certainly the subject should be notable enough that it *could* have an article, but in areas such as our coverage of Benin, unfortunately we don't have enough editors around who are interested in working those articles, so there are a lot of redlinks around on notable subjects where we don't yet have articles. That's the whole point of efforts to counter WP:SYSTEMICBIAS. By arbitrarily banning categories we are just placing more of a restriction on our available coverage of areas that are already poorly covered. Not particularly regarding the Benin honours, but on other topics there might be some use in it. Thanks &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 22:03, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, it's not intended to be a blanket "ban" on creating such categories. The nomination was meant to get a read on if there was consensus agreement for the approach I took. I think it makes a lot of sense to create an article about a subject before trying to categorize according to that very subject. First demonstrate that a thing is even notable—then move on to determine if it is a defining characteristic or a person or thing. Good Ol’factory (talk)