Wikipedia talk:People by year

For the September 2004 debate about deletion, see /Delete.

Just a thought: it would be less ugly, and more sensible, if these additions were put AFTER existing categories. Norris Bradbury is more usefully a participant in the Category:Manhattan Project first and a Category:1997 deaths second. I'm not sure if this sort of logic is codified officially with the categories or not (better/more useful categories going first), but it ought to be, and this will make this People by year thing less annoying (it is really annoying to write a biography on somebody and then have them categorized primarily by the year of their death, as if that was really the most important aspect of their life!). Edward Teller is more importantly a Category:Physicists first, and a Category:2003 deaths second! It's insulting to do it otherwise, and even if "left-most is first-most" is not official, it certainly reads that way in English. --Fastfission 00:18, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I agree, even though I think that the page about category style says that categories should be given in alphabetic order, ie numbers first. ✏ Sverdrup 19:48, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I agree also. Alphabetical order makes sense if there is no other logical ordering, but it's silly to list categories such as birth year and year of death before more significant categories such as profession. The first category listed should be the one of most use to people unfamiliar with the topic—or at least, it shouldn't be a birth or death year (which implies that the person's birth or death is what makes them most interesting). --[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 19:55, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The current ordering works as follows:

• pywikipediabot removes all categories and interwiki links form the text, than readds them after the article text in alphabetical order (/a predefined order for interwikis). Thus it's likely that the sort order will be changed on the update of the interwikis as well.
• If a category is added through a template (e.g. Template:1911, Template:Bio-stub) that category will appear before all the others.

Personally I prefer the current order, but I use the "Cologne Blue" skin displaying the categories on the top right corner, there the ideal sort is probably different. For Monobook (which aligns that categories on the bottom of the page), I agree that the year categories are not necessarily the ones needing to be listed first, but I think they are preferable to the Category:1911 Britannica which may preceed them.

Either way, the D6 wont change articles which already have both categories. -- User:Docu

It seems that you are also inserting deaths before births... needless to say I find this to be a little silly. Can't you just make it add the categories, first birth, then death, after the existing categories? It would save a lot of cleanup for those of us who care about such things... --Fastfission 23:14, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

As the order is alphabetical, the birth category should always come first (Robert_R._Wilson did have a leading space on one of the category names). As not all lists in Wikipedia contain both years, some people do have only a category for their year of death added first. I will do a query to find those who are supposed to have died before being born. The checks before uploading the categories didn't show any. It's possible though, that multiple lists in Wikipedia list the same article for two different people. Another query will show those with multiple years of death/birth. -- User:Docu

Where is this style guideline mentioned above for the order that categories appear on a page? From what I could see, Wikipedia:Categories contains no such thing. Within a category, alphabetical is the rule of thumb, obviously, but as for the categories that appear on an article? Alphabetical is totally arbitrary and makes no sense. As categories function as classifications on an article, categories should be ordered by their relative importance to the page. The more important categories are the ones central to why the article was likely written in the first place, the categories that you are most likely to be looking for. Otherwise, a slew of trivial categories could obscure the more important ones, and the year that someone is born in is very trivial compared to what notable things they have done in their lives. The birth and death ones should go last in order. Postdlf 04:23, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It's not really a style guideline, it's just the way pywikipediabot works. In order to avoid undoing an in depth sorting that may have been done, I will try to avoid adding the categories to articles which have already more than two (not template based) categories.

(Read: by bot (D6) at the beginning of articles) -- User:Docu

Further, I will check manually articles that already have tons of categories, e.g. Lyndon B. Johnson. -- User:Docu

I'm not convinced that having the birth/death categories listed first is any improvement over not having them at all. --[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 19:19, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Personally I prefer this, but I wouldn't to impose this on carefully sorted long lists of categories. BTW I saw one that listed them chronologically. -- User:Docu

I removed the articles with more than three existing categories from the upload list. There are now about 80 that need to be added manually at the appropriate place (beginning, end, chronologically, e.g.): Wikipedia:People by year/Reports/Manual_categories. -- User:Docu

The Birth and Death categories shouldn't be added at all right now. This move was nearly unilateral on the part of Docu, even in the face of numberous objections in Category talk:Years and previous WP:CFD discussions. Docu wrote this page, but did not solicate advice before setting his bot to perform hundreds of edits. -- Netoholic @ 04:41, 2004 Sep 23 (UTC)

I agree as stated on the years talk page. Docu should also sign his name with date, preferably. Cool Hand Luke 18:39, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

At the very least, the script should be stopped for now to put birth/death categories at the end. Humans are much better at evaluating the importance of these categories, and I think Docu realizes this with the way he fixed Joseph Smith Jr. for example. Cool Hand Luke 18:50, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'm also concerned about articles that already have too many categories. (For example, J. R. R. Tolkien, where with the addition of birth and death categories, the category list in the default style goes onto two lines with my resolution. I don't even want to think about what happens to folks with their resolution set to 800x600.) We had already been discussing eliminating some categories from the Tolkien article. The last thing we need is to add more. --[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 13:15, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

J. R. R. Tolkien doesn't have that many categories. As long as all the categories are appropriate and of some significance to the article's topic, there shouldn't be an arbitrary limit on the number of categories. Would anyone support a limit saying that all list articles should contain no more than 25 items in the list? Nope. And categories shouldn't be limited simply because they take up multiple lines on the page. —Mike 23:31, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

Yes they should be. They are clutter. List articles are specifically designed to list things, so it's a poor comparison. Everyking 21:31, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Netoholic; I have expressed my opposition to and annoyance with these categories on several occasions and I've been more or less ignored. It's very irritating to have to wade through hundreds of these edits every day, and even more so when you believe that they are essentially useless and a waste of time and space. Besides, as is being noted here, they aren't even always being added properly. Everyking 20:04, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I too dislike the categories.

Could someone at least redesign the old Wikipedia skin, which some of us still prefer, to put the categories at the bottom? It looks just awful when there's a batch of them on top. Opus33 03:48, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

An option to somehow hide less-interesting categories on a page if so desired would help here, i think; the person would still be in the category, but won't clutter up the category box on the page. Pyrop 22:03, Sep 26, 2004 (UTC)

I'm in general agreement with Netaholic. We need to develop much better guidelines about when categories should be used.

Adding a category adds size to every constituent article, whereas a list keeps its size to itself. For this reason, I think there should be some threshold of specific relevance of a category to an article which must be met before a category is added. For example, an article on the U.S. Democratic Party would clearly belong in a category of U.S. political parties, but not in a category called "things than begin with D" or "organizations with which Bill Clinton has been involved".

Really, if we are to have Category:1909 births, why not Category:People Stm-Stn and such things? Lists have worked for those, and they can work for birth/death years as well. --Saforrest 18:24, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)