- Category:Men sociologists (talk|edit|history|logs|links|watch) (XfD|restore)
The administrator that deleted this category has admitted he thought it should be deleted. Thus, he should have participated in the debate, not imposed his will by closing the debate. The weight of the arguments was that whether or not this category should exist should be tied to whether or not we kept Category:Women sociologists. That category has not been deleted, and seems unlikely to. In discussions with the administrator about the deletion a strong argument was put to not delete this put not the other, but he suggested doing a DRV, so I figured that was the best course.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:16, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment I would have no problem with endorsing this closure if the discussion on Category:Women sociologists does in fact close as delete. However they clearly need to be linked. This is not US senators where less than 3% of the category is female.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:26, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- what the...? The administrator that deleted this category has admitted he thought it should be deleted. Diff, please? I have made no such "admission", and I was the admin who closed it. I have suggested that I thought it should be deleted based on the discussion, but that's entirely different and that's what a closing admin is supposed to do. Also, given the nominator's comments, shouldn't this DRV await the closing of the discussion for Category:Women sociologists, as I suggested earlier? Good Ol’factory (talk) 03:27, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- No, you said you thought it was a POINTY creation in statements on your talk page. That shows clear bias against the category, especially when no one used such attack phrases in the discussion of it. That was not an issue brought up in the discussion. That is what you said on your talk page. An actual reading of the discussion shows that the actual points brought up say that this should close like the women sociologist category, which means you should not have closed one and not the other. Of the people who argued for deletion, one ignored the fact that there is lots of evidence that shows people do treat men sociologists as a group, the other made unsupported statements to the effect that men are normal and women are unique in sociology, a view that I do not think we want Wikipedia to endorse. Anyway, it is a wrong closing to have this category deleted while the women sociologists category exists.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:43, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- I think you need to assume a little good faith and not jump to the worst possible conclusion you can from a comment another makes. Bringing up WP:POINT is not an "attack phrase"--it was an observation that the creation of the category was prompted by the nomination of Category:Women sociologists for deletion, which the category creator has acknowledged and the nominator mentioned in the nominating statement. (This is contrary to your view that the issue was not brought up at all in the discussion--it was, in the nominating statement!) And John, just because you and one other user say something does not mean that that is what the consensus of the discussion was; in this case, you were two people out of six that participated. In this case, I didn't regard your opinion as representative of the consensus found in the overall discussion. Good Ol’factory (talk) 04:30, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- There were at least three people who said it should be kept. You totally just disregarded our statements, which were supported by evidence. Statements with evidence should not just be wiped away. People cited multiple sources that show that men sociologisits are a matter of study. These should not be brushed away and ignored.John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:02, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- How do you know what I disregarded and what I regarded? Were you with me when I closed the discussion? Can you read my mind? Sheeesh .... Talk about making assumptions. Good Ol’factory (talk) 15:26, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- I would say that a closing statement would have helped here. We should be able to know what you disregarded and regarded. Not all discussions need a closing statement, but close ones generally benefit from one. Hobit (talk) 19:05, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- That's a fair statement, but it's not really directly related to the point I was making. (I don't really care if this close is overturned, but I do care when users accuse me of doing things when they don't know what they are talking about.) A closer does not make a statement, so others don't know what the closer disregarded and regarded. I agree, and this is exactly the circumstance in this case. And yet Johnpacklambert thinks he can come here and willy-nilly make allegations that I disregarded this and ignored that. That's an assumption of bad faith. Maybe he should ask me instead of assuming. Good Ol’factory (talk) 19:47, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn (no consensus). I do not read a consensus in that discussion, and neither do I see a rough consensus, and the closing statement provides no reasonable explanation. As mentioned in the discussion, this category, Category:Men sociologists, should be tied to Category:Women sociologists, which remains unclosed. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:42, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- An issue here is that for some years, DRV has been quite heavily populated with people who think the CfD process is broken, but CfD doesn't agree, so we tend to get decisions from CfD that DRV overturns and relists, and then CfD comes back with exactly the same decision again. That's a logjam that we'll need to tackle at some point because I can foresee it happening again here. I think that if a discussion like that was closed as "delete" at any other deletion venue, then we would certainly overturn it.
On this specific issue I'm broadly with those who say: Either a person's sex is a defining characteristic or it isn't. If it is, then we need categories for women and men sociologists. If it isn't, then we need neither. Therefore this is intrinsically linked to the CfD on women sociologists and should be closed in the same way. This position was argued in the debate, but if that was considered in the close, then it's not mentioned in the closing statement. Subsequent to the discussion close, the closer mentions on his own talk page that it's commonplace for categories relating to one sex to be kept and the other sex to be deleted; but, previous decisions do not carry weight on Wikipedia. OCE and all that. I see that as a discussion without a consensus.—S Marshall T/C 08:11, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn (no consensus). For what it is worth, the vote count was:
- Assuming the decision on the women's category is to keep, which seems likely, that makes three votes to keep, three to delete = no consensus.
- I was going to wait for the outcome on Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2013 July 29#Category:Women sociologists, then raise this at CfD only if the outcome was to keep the women's category, but I suppose it can be discussed here now. Assuming the women's category is kept, this category should also be kept. WP:Cat/gender is the relevant guideline. Based on that sensible guideline, having a category for women but not for men would only be appropriate if women were a very small minority of sociologists. That is not the case. The two deletion discussions should have been considered together, and either both categories kept or both deleted. Keeping one and deleting the other is the sort of decision that has drawn a fair amount of public ridicule of Wikipedia lately. https://www.google.ca/search?q=wikipedia+sexist
- Was it Pointy to create the men's category? That was not intentional. I created it after seeing the discussion on deleting the women's category, thinking about whether readers would consider a sociologist's gender relevant, and decided they often would. Gender crops up in all areas of sociology: family, religion, health, education, occupation and so on. Men are likely to have different perspectives from other sociologists, so readers will be interested in seeing their gender identified. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:15, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- endorse closure. This is not a !vote counting exercise, and the closing admin has discretion to weigh arguments more or less, which I think they did correctly in this case. Categories are based on things which are DEFINING - my comments on the "Women sociologists" CFD detailed all of the different ways in which our society discusses women sociologists as a special class, whereas male sociologists are not discussed with anywhere near the same level of interest. There aren't societies for male sociologists, special standards, studies, lists of top 10, lists of famous male sociologists, and so on; in addition, when introducing a male sociologist, they are rarely defined as such, whereas for women sociologists - more notably the earlier ones, they *are*. There is absolutely no requirement that we must always match gender categories - for example, I'm sure gender is important to feminism, but we don't have "female feminists" category to match the "Male feminists" category, because female feminists are not called out as a special group worth of special research. This all has nothing to do with whether gender influences how you think about sociology - arguably gender influences EVERYTHING you do, no matter what your job. The closer correctly read the arguments, and does not have to close in the same way as the women sociologists discussion because the policy explicitly states that they don't need to match.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 14:56, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- The policy says "A gender-specific category could be implemented where gender has a specific relation to the topic." It gives an example of female heads of government, which does not have to be balanced because historically the vast majority of political leaders have been male. It then gives examples of categories like male golfers / female golfers and actors / actresses that are balanced, with articles split between the male and female categories. Since women are far from a tiny minority of sociologists, we cannot say that women differ from the norm but men do not. If a sociologist's gender is relevant the categories should be balanced.
- The closure was incorrect because there was no consensus, and the tight linkage between the two discussions was ignored. The closure should be reversed, and then the two discussions treated as a whole and a policy-based decision made to either keep both categories or delete both. Aymatth2 (talk) 15:56, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- the heads of state thing is an EXAMPLE - it never says "You can only have an unmatched gendered category if the gender in question is a huge minority". We are also not saying that women differ from the norm - in the same way, having African-American baseball players category but not one for whites, or oodles of categories for LGBT people but none for straight, none of which claim the people in this groups are different from the "norm". The claim made is that the outside world discusses in much more detail and with 10-100x the sources "women sociologists" as a group compared to "men sociologists". Otherwise you could make the same argument you're making above to claim that we should have "men X" for every single scientist, politician, writer, etc category, which is not previous consensus. Consensus is of these discussions is not agreement, it is rough consensus viewed through the lens of policy and guidelines. The closer weighed the evidence correctly in this case.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 16:06, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- As pointed out in the hastily closed discussion, a Google Books search for "male sociologist" gave about the same number of results (228) as a search for "female sociologist" (231) after scrolling to the foot of both lists. I just rechecked and got 261-279. There is roughly equal coverage of both gender-specific categories. There is certainly no reason to keep one and delete the other. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:36, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn as not just no consensus, but consensus being neither possible nor relevant. It's not that CfD is broken but tat the entire category system is broken. Perhaps people don't participate at CfD because for the same reason I usually don't: there is no rational basis for many of the decisions within the current system. Categories are applied without consideration of where they fit within a system, decisions like whether to use ethnic of gender qualifiers are applied based on the current version of political correctness, there is a unresolved contradiction between categories a a practical finding aid and as a classification of knowledge with rationales varying from one to the other, categorization is used to continue and extend disputes over articles,
- For at least the qualifier problems like these there is an obvious fix, that has been suggested continually since I've been here: category intersection, letting people use whatever combinations they think helpful, not only the ones we permit them to use. People would then be able to say: Sociologists AND men|women, or if they preferred, Sociologists NOT men|women, or just plain Sociologists, or whatever they were actually looking for. Encyclopedias are for use, and the content and arrangement equally are meant to be helpful to users. In the paper era, the makers of an encyclopedia had of necessity to fix a small number of possible ways of access, but WP is NOT PAPER, and we should not just permit but facilitate all organization methods anyone wants to apply. There is no need for consensus about what specific categories to use: anything technically possible should be permitted. DGG ( talk ) 17:45, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Easy with the baby and the bathwater. I am personally a big fan of category intersections, and have done some work on them. See a pilot here: Category:Singaporean_poets. One of the early wikipedia developers put together a script that makes it dynamic - instructions are on my homepage for an even better version than the Singpore poets version. But we aren't there yet, so complaining about the category system is irrelevant to this DRV. If you want to help, drop me a line.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 18:22, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- "... anything technically possible should be permitted". Oh gad. I look forward to the resurrection of Category:Bands that suck and the like. Good Ol’factory (talk) 19:56, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- I agree with DGG that using software to automatically combine categories on demand with simple and/or/not formulations is the way to go. This does not mean allowing silly or subjective categories. But as Kenobi points out we are not there yet. We have to work within the current framework until the software is improved. WP:Cat/gender implies that entries in an unbalanced gender-specific category should also be filed in the gender-neutral category. This will seem redundant to many editors, but we do not want category:sociologists to hold nothing but men, with the women "ghettoized" into a sub-category. Or vice-versa. That is likely to be the effect of an unbalanced sub-category. Splitting the category into sub-categories for men and women avoids the issue, as does deleting both sub-categories. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:32, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Well, not quite. We have many such categories, but you are correct, all the women should go in the gender neutral category - but it doesn't mean you always need to match genders - this is an interesting mirror argument, as many of those !voting to keep american female novelists were shocked, appalled, and flabbergasted at the idea of an American male novelists category, but that one did have sources. I think google search results for "male sociologist" is not sufficient - I'm talking about conferences, meetings, awards, top-10-lists, and organizations devoted particularly to this issue. In any case re: ghettoizing, I hope ppl learned that lesson from the American novelists fiasco.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 20:36, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- See above. Google book search results give almost identical counts for men and women. I cannot accept that all the male results were casual mentions and all the female results were in-depth coverage. 261-279. That is good enough for me. Keep both or delete both. Both discussions should have been reviewed and closed together. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:55, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- "everything technically possible" means every combination technicallypossible of WP descritors, not of every possible noun and adjective, pair. Some will
- overturn to NC for now There was no consensus to delete. Policy is split--we have the idea of "defining" characteristic of categories. But we also have a very specific set of rules for categories and gender. One group argued one policy, the other argued the other. The as numbers were close, it's a bit surprising the the more general rule (defining) was found to trump the specific rule that is clearly on point given that the more specific rule had similar (identical?) support. This leaned toward keep (assuming the other cat is kept) if anything. In addition, I'd like to encourage closers to provide a closing statement when acting without numeric consensus. Hobit (talk) 19:01, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- changed my mind I've done some more searches, using a different technique, that unearthed a lot more that I had missed before. There is still many more sources/papers/etc that are ABOUT women sociologists as the primary topic, and then address male sociologists during, but there are also sufficient sources to demonstrate that male sociologists as a class are studied, even if not as much as women. I still think this close was within discretion, so I'd still say we should endorse but allow recreation of the category, but as "Male sociologists" ("men sociologists" is practically non-existent). But I suppose it doesn't matter much either way.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 00:08, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn and keep -- Plain deletion is certainly the wrong outcome. Either we need to split all sociologists by gender and have both "Women sociologists" and "Men sociologists" or we need to merge both to "sociologists"; "Male" and "female" might be better. In some professions (such as lawyers) gender is of marginal significance. In others (such as actors) it is of overwhelming significance, becasue men do not generally play female parts and vice versa (except in cross-dressing roles). The question here is whether gender makes a significnat difference. I lean towards overtern and keep, becasue in studying social relationships, it must be almost impossible for a social scientist not to approach the subject with a viewpoint based on their own gender. How many male lecturers were there in university departments teaching women's studies? That is a more extreme case, but it makes my point. I would not want the principle applied much more widely: some female historians will concentrate on writing about women, but many deal with history generally, which is largely about men. Peterkingiron (talk) 09:39, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- As it happens, the specific example you used is factually wrong. See WorldCat, here , for several hundred books on female lawyers, some quite specifically on the role and perception differences in contrast to male lawyers, both in the profession itself and in the media. This is not "marginal significance." (and I could probably provide similarly overwhelming examples for anything analogous) We are biological beings with social roles; the gender differences between animals of the same species is ever-present and always important in any social context. (If it weren't, the disputes over such categories would never arise in the first place). The basic principle of nPOV is that we do not tell our readers what is important. We provide information, for them to understand, and we have the obligation to facilitate any way they want to organize it. DGG ( talk ) 22:32, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- On the question of male/female versus women/men, Google books gives 275 hits on "female sociologist", 237 on "women sociologist" and 260 on "woman sociologist". It gives 261 for "male sociologist", 149 for "men sociologist" and 178 for "man sociologist". "Men sociologist" seems a bit ungrammatical, but "male sociologist" leaves the sociologist's species in doubt. A move could be discussed once the decision to overturn this closure has been finalized. Aymatth2 (talk) 02:29, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- if you do a scholar search 'men sociologist' barely registers - the problem is 'men sociologist' shows up in searches but it's just those words often separated by a comma - when dsicsusing the class it's almost always as 'male soci
- Overturn (or Undelete). If there is one gender-based category for a topic, there should be both, there needs to be parity. Just because a lot of sociologists would have be recategorized as "male sociologists" doesn't mean that the category should be eliminated. Wasn't this all decided in the decision of "American women novelists" vs. "American novelists"? Either no gender division or both a male/men and female/women categories for biographical articles. Liz Read! Talk! 21:22, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- note: each case must be handled differently. In the same way we don't have 'European-American baseball players' or 'heterosexual architects' we don't always need to match a women cat with a male one. In fact during the American novelists debate, many who voted to keep the women novelists voted to delete the male. In some cases we'll have both, but in many we probably won't - i dont see a need to create a female feminists cat for example. it all depends on whether the category in question is discussed as such in reliable sources and whether this is defining for the people within.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 00:01, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- An unbalanced gender-based sub-category invites editors to ghettoize members of that gender into that sub-category and invites critics to assert that Wikipedia editors are sexist. It is only justified when it is very unusual for members of the main category to belong to the sub-category. Aymatth2 (talk) 01:21, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- that's contrary to established practice so I'd suggest bringing it up at EGRS. Ghettoization can be avoided in any case, and having both genders does not prevent potential ghettoization in any way shape or form.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 02:31, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn There was no consensus. And it seems absurd that discussions about related categories should be closed separately. If there's another discussion, it should take them together. Warden (talk) 18:41, 13 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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