Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geography/Archive 8

Organizing categories for subfields of geography
The category for the Four traditions of geography has been deleted, which has caused some issues that need to be discussed to reorganize the categories for geography. The initial consensus to delete had relatively little discussion, and after I preposed for deletion review, the deletion was endorse with the encouragement to discuss organization structure in this group. This is a complex discussion on the ontology of geography, and the book "The Philosophy of Geo-Ontologies" by Timothy Tambassi is one of the best sources to understand this. The four traditions are not the only method, for dividing geography; various methods have various levels of support in the literature, and the reorganization largely involves three former categories now that the four traditions are deleted.

tl;dr at the bottom.


 * 1. Before deletions, the category for the four traditions of geography was a container that held Category:Spatial analysis, Category:Human-Environment interaction, Category:Regional geography, and Category:Earth science. The Four traditions of geography are likely the most consistent and strongest supported method of dividing the discipline proposed in the past century, originating in the 1960s, a search on Google Scholar shows the original peer-reviewed publication has over 600 citations, with other well-cited papers on the topic existing. This topic is taught to geography undergrads, and the paper is required reading for many geography graduate programs in my anecdotal experience with two of them. Outside the practical usefulness, being one of the four traditions is a defining characteristic of each subcategory that reliable sources commonly and consistently refer to in describing the topic (The Human-Environment interaction category now is just in the general Category:Geography as it's only parent category was the four traditions.)


 * 2. Category:Branches of geography was parallel to the "four traditions of geography" within the category Category:Subfields of geography. It is a container with holds Category:Human geography, Category:Physical geography, Category:Technical geography. Branches of geography are less consistent within the literature then the four traditions, with different sources having different organizations for what they call a "branch" (this is important to note, as specific term choice for the branches is less well supported then the four traditions). The three branches here are based on a few sources, but mostly the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. This is also in line with Tambassi's spatial geo-ontologies (SGO), physical (or natural) geo-ontologies (PGO), human geo-ontologies (HGO) model, which adapted Patterson's "Spatial tradition." Branches are a term that exist in the literature to organize the discipline (you can read about them on the main geography page), so we can't just dump all fields into them or it's original research on ontology.


 * 3. The category "Subfields of geography" was created to maintain consistency with other disciplines on Wikipedia within the category Category:Subfields by academic discipline. This category does not have strong supporting outside literature, so the idea was to have the various approaches to organizing the discipline serve as categories within it.

Now that the four traditions has been deleted, "Subfields of geography" and the "Branches" seem redundant, but just dumping everything into either one is not ideal, and choosing one over the other would need to be carefully considered. Furthermore, there are many approaches such as the Five themes of geography, and it may be good to leave room for non-western models as well. The simplest compromise I can prepose for discussion here is to create Category:Traditions of geography to replace the deleted four traditions category. Within the literature, there are preposed "fifth traditions," Exploration and Discovery", or Environmental studies. Eliminating the "four" from the title increases flexibility and offers room to include these and other proposed amended traditions. One of the arguments for deleting the four traditions category was the lack of growth potential, which this addresses.

tl;dr: The preposed organization would be "Subfields by academic discipline">"Subfields of geography" to maintain internal consistency with other disciplines on Wikipedia, and then within "Subfields of geography" would be the two container categories "Branches of geography" and "Traditions of geography." This should satisfy the two largest historic models for organizing geography and keep the geography subdivisions in one category within the "Subfields by academic discipline" category.

Please discuss my preposed solution, or offer alternatives, with consideration to outside literature and Wikipedia policy/recommendations. Tagging several users from the previous discussions: @Hobit, @S Marshall, @Qwerfjkl, @Robert McClenon, @ gidonb, @fgnievinski. Pardon my verbose explanations, I just want to make sure everything is addressed, and feel free to ignore this if you aren't interested in continuing discussion here. Hopefully we can get interaction on this discussion.

- GeogSage  ( ⚔Chat?⚔ ) 22:00, 3 January 2024 (UTC)