Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2013 April 24

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April 24[edit]

Category:Formula One magazines[edit]

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. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:17, 1 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Underpopulated category with only two articles (one of which is up for deletion), and unlikely to expand as most publications that pass WP:GNG are included in the more broad Category:Auto racing magazines. QueenCake (talk) 21:30, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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.

Category:American women novelists[edit]

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: The result, by a fairly large margin in both numbers and arguments, is in favor of merging the categories back together at Category:American novelists, while keeping the women novelists separate Category:American women novelists because it is a recognized field of study in the literature. {{All included}} and/or {{Distinguished subcategory}} should be kept on the latter so that this does not happen again. Can someone with AWB or a similar tool do this soon, given the frighteningly large amount of media coverage focused on these categories and related discussion? Thanks, Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 20:15, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: As per gender neutrality guidelines, gender-specific categories are not appropriate where gender is not specifically related to the topic. This subcategory also creates the unfortunate side effect that Category:American novelists contains only male novelists. neilk (talk) 19:36, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge I agree does not conform to gender neutrality guidelines, and creates the side effect of a Male Only main page.--Theredproject (talk) 20:16, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Merge"---whatever the motivation, the net result is to remove women from the category "novelists" w/o removing men, which creates an obvious imbalance. [user: Ebenbach]
  • Merge I agree does not conform to gender neutrality guidelines, and creates the side effect of a Male Only main page. --Hoyden1 (talk) 20:39, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge I agree does not conform to gender neutrality guidelines, and creates the side effect of a Male Only main page. --Ojeffs (talk) 20:54, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge I agree does not conform to gender neutrality guidelines, and creates the side effect of a Male Only main page. --Bloomcity (talk) 21:04, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge Yes, merge these. As it is, it implies that Novelists are men. — Preceding unsigned comment added by CAFiorello (talk • contribs) 00:54, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge Not sure I am doing this right, but this is important enough to me for me to jump in - By all means, merge them back - only legit alternative would be to have a "men novelists" category. — Preceding comment added by Jhall251 (talk) 03:21, 26 April 2013 (UTC) [reply]
  • Note. I struck out two !votes as single purpose accounts and will probably followup at WP:SPI which may affect more then those two. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:06, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I just want to register my objection to the striking out of the two votes. These are people who have bothered to get involved. By pushing them out of this conversation, you are contributing to the continuing inability for newcomers to feel comfortable here. Especially women. Which is of course, the subject of the article being discussed. These are primarily contributions from new editors who were outraged by the sexism implicit in removing women from the novelist category. This move went viral on Facebook, and of the hundreds posting on Facebook, these are the three or four who have taken the time to try to take part in the Wikipedia process. By summarily negating their voices, you are just making it worse. --Theredproject (talk) 23:25, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Well, who took this to facebook? If this was raised there, then the votes are probably a result of WP:Canvas violations and that would support pointing this out and discounting those !votes. In the end, the closing admin will determine how much weigh each comment merits in the decision. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:45, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In the end what needs to be done is what is right. Now what stubborn anonymous editors think they can get away with Gem-fanat (talk) 23:13, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The Huffington Post or Twitter may be the reason for this being on Facebook. jonkerz ♠talk 23:58, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nope, this one started on FB, with Elissa Schappell's wall post, which has now been shared many many times. Huffpo is doing what they do best: repackaging someone else's story. Why or how people got interested in getting involved isn't important. What is important is that they are engaged in this question, want to make a contrib to wikipedia, and are being pushed away. And regarding Canvas, there were many many links to the talk page, and this discussion, telling folks that the way to engage with wikipedia is not to "contact the authorities" but to engage in a discussion.--Theredproject (talk) 00:19, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This is also on Facebook via NY Times article. New York Times. It is a pretty polarizing subject that has caused outrage among female novelists. 75.142.205.47 (talk) 18:00, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
When first thing you do after joining Wikipedia community is voting (!) on discussion page, it is not contributing, it is meat puppetry. Know the difference. Netrat (talk) 10:21, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
An article about a problem on Wikipedia which does not ask people to vote (or !vote) is not canvasing. Wikipedia is not a silo and articles which get people more involved are a good thing. RoyLeban (talk) 05:46, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'll agree with RoyLeban here. If you have an objective of getting more people to participate in Wikipedia, striking out the opinions of people new to Wikipedia is the wrong way to go about it. Belittling and devaluing the contributions of new editors is pretty much guaranteed to make sure that they'll never contribute again. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 12:32, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I know Bloomcity and Ojeffs, they are real people who each have only one account. Is there a way I can provide evidence of this? --Jmcdon10 (talk) 14:23, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Knowing them is nice. As noted in the analysis here, those accounts have been blocked as socks. Given this and the likelihood that at least one other account could be a sock, the closing admin will have to deal with these issues and not you. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:03, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The point, as discussed in the New York Times, is that women are being removed from the category of "American Novelists" and placed into Category:American women novelists. Geoffrey.landis (talk)
The "point" is a foolish one, as a subcategory is part of the parent (and is found as a subcategory on any search for the parent, another silly point). I don't see anyone complaining about Category:Pulitzer Prize for the Novel winners being subcategorised. Oculi (talk) 11:55, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The "point" is that women are being removed from the category of American Novelists and men aren't. This is explicit sexism. Not even a borderline case: it is completely unambiguous sexism.
You are wrong. You are welcome to move all the biographies of male novelists to Category:American men novelists Netrat (talk) 07:07, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Your "point" is missing the point. If all the novelists had been removed from "Category:Pulitzer Prizes" but every other prize winner was still listed there by name, yes, that would have been discriminatory against novelists. When you remove women, but not men from the category, that's pretty clearly discriminatory.Geoffrey.landis (talk) 12:42, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The idea that the women were removed or somehow relegated is false. Sub-categories belong to their parent categories and are listed at the top of the category page. The use of categories is not done in a normative or prescriptive manner, only for the purpose of simplifying navigation. - Shiftchange (talk) 11:48, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
How can this be made more clear to readers, some of whom clearly have a different understanding, based at least in part on how we present our categories? -GTBacchus(talk) 13:01, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We seem to have a template whose wider, consistent application would have prevented this whole thing. Daniel Case (talk) 16:05, 1 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The women novelists should all be merged; as for the other women by occupation categories, that needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis. There are a few discussions in the history where it was decided to keep actors and actresses in separate categories, for instance. As a general principle, if there is a "female X" category there should be a "male X" category, rather than "women X" being a subcategory of X. neilk (talk) 01:30, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think you have it right when you said "case by case" rather than generalizing "if there is female X, there should be male X." There is a legitimate academic interest here in the "women X" subset; for other topics the legitimate academic interest might relate to nationality, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Categories must make sense on an intellectual level. There is no "one size fits all" general principle for these things. Carrite (talk) 16:40, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep. Removing female authors from the main American Novelists category is sexist. The American Novelists category should contain authors of both genders. However, it is also useful to have American Women Novelists and American Men Novelist subcategories, in addition to the main category. Salspaugh
    • Sigh. Female authors are not being "removed" from Category:American novelists; they are being sub-categorised. The author of the NYT article seems to be unaware of how Wikipedia categorisation works, and mistakenly assumes at all American novelists are directly categorised in Category:American novelists. This is wrong; a high proportion are already diffused to other sub-categories, such as Category:American science fiction writers. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:23, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • There's a real problem that should be recognized. If people not knowing the precise workings of categorization can't find the content they're looking for, then this sub-categorization is effectively removing those writers from view. There's an easy way to solve this problem - make this a non-diffusing sub-category so that female authors can be found either for readers looking for all females, and for readers looking for all writers. Diego (talk) 10:01, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep. Removing women from the list of novelists is like removing black or foreign-born novelists. Its effect is inherently biased. For those who want to find women novelists, a sublist is acceptable, but it cannot fairly involve removal from the main list. The effect is too discriminatory and drastic. The same applies to all women-nationality lists (not only novelists). I think this kind of category, based on the characteristics of the novelist, is very different from a subcategory based on the characteristics of the novels, e.g., mystery novelists or science fiction novelists. Zaslav (talk) 01:06, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • You must be new to Wikipedia. First, what is discussed here is a category and not a list. Lists and categories are different things on Wikipedia. Second, subcategorizing is not removing. Netrat (talk) 10:45, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep. I think having a sublist of female authors (and male authors, for that matter) for those who might find that information useful is a great idea. However, you can't call one of those lists "American Authors" and the other "American Women Authors". Either have one list "American Authors" with sublists "American Women Authors" and "American Men Authors," or just have the main list ungendered. Bafleyanne (talk) 01:40, 25 April 2013 (UTC) — Bafleyanne (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]
  • Merge - You can either merge the "American Women Authors" into the entire category or add a category, "American Men Authors" and pull all of the men out as well. I would think that the same problem exists for the other nationalities. This is my first participation in such a discussion, though I've done a few minor edits before. So I'm not sure of the etiquette. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bikeknit (talk • contribs) 01:17, 25 April 2013 (UTC) — Bikeknit (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]
Partially agree This actually touches on a very good point that I didn't consider. The necessary difference between this categorization and others like ethnicity is that this is based on a binary. Short of a category containing nothing but subcategories, exploiting a binary like gender requires that one take precedence over another. The method by which one category takes significance over another, no matter how it is decided, is highly troubling when applied to gender. Inarius (talk) 02:24, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. Now that I see there's a CfD and looking at the gender neutrality guidelines, I don't see a compelling case for a category of writers who are women. Feminist writers deserve a separate category, as maybe would writers about women's issues, but I don't think gender alone can be justified here for a subcategory.
That said, is it better to leave the subcategory as-is for now and let a bot do the cleanup (assuming such is necessary) after the discussion wraps up? There are editors adding the "American writers" category to every article in "American women writers". —C.Fred (talk) 01:23, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep - this is embarrassing us on a global basis. If you don't segregate males and gender unknowns, then don't segregate women (and that's how it's being perceived). --Orange Mike | Talk 01:26, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep: Obviously these women writers should not be removed from the main page. It may however by useful for some purposes to have easy access to gender-based lists (as for other qualities of writers, including religion, nationality, etc.): so we should have a sublist for American Men Novelists as well. (Note that significant traffic may also be driven by the recent article in the New York Times about this. Mundart (talk) 01:44, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Mundart, FYI the comments on the talk page, and this thread began after Filipacchi's Facebook post, but well before the Huffington Post article, or her own NYT article were published.--Theredproject (talk) 01:51, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge: I can see a significance for the category, but that significance has not been given so this category need not exist. Intersections by ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality must be significant enough to warrant "a substantial and encyclopedic head article (not just a list)" for the category. Until that head article is written, this category has the reasonable potential for negative connotation and should be merged and removed. --Inarius (talk) 02:08, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep: I think it's useful to see individual categories by sex of writer, but women should absolutely not be removed from the list of American novelists. It's disgraceful that this stealthy recategorizing of women into "the distaff side" of novelists got this far to begin with. JLeland (talk) 02:33, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • As pointed out in the New York Times op-ed www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/wikipedias-sexism-toward-female-novelists.html, removing women (bur not men) the category of "American Novelists" on the basis that women (but not men) should be in a subcategory is rather blatently sexist. I suggest immediately going through the Category:American women novelists files and putting every one of these back into the "American Novelist" category since (self evidently, I hope!) all American women novelists are also American Novelists.
Whether, after this is done, this category should then be deleted is a separate issue, on which I have no opinion. Geoffrey.landis (talk)
  • Merge and keep.(edit conflict) I can see both sides of the argument here. I can see why having a subcategory for women novelists might be a good idea, especially given that there are entire courses devoted to women's literature (and of course then we could subdivide by national/ethnic origin ("African-American female novelists"), sexuality ("Lesbian Ameican novelists") for the same reasons). But it should not require that we exclude all women from the main category, not when we gave it a gender-neutral name.

    The appropriate precedent is Category:American basketball players and Category:African-American basketball players, where it was decided to use both categories even though "African-American" indicates nationality as well. Daniel Case (talk) 02:49, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum: Actual example of this that I went and found, very relevant to this discussion: Eminem is categorized both under American rappers and one of its subcategories, American rappers of English descent. Daniel Case (talk) 18:11, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Just for the record, as the person who originally wrote most of WP:CATGRS, I can clarify that this very situation is exactly why that policy always contained an explicit proscription against ghettoizing people: a subcategory for women or racial minority or LGBT practitioners of an occupation was not supposed to be created unless the category was already completely diffusable on other criteria as well. For example, Category:American women writers is acceptable, because all writers are supposed to be subcatted by their particular kind of writing instead of appearing directly in Category:American writers — and thus the women-specific subcategory isn't preventing women from being categorized directly alongside men who were also American writers, but rather is supplementing other categories which keep men and women together. But Category:American women novelists was not supposed to exist, because Category:American novelists isn't realistically diffusable on other criteria — so the women-specific subcategory has the effect of replacing rather than supplementing categories which keep men and women together, thus turning the main category into a men-only grouping with women hived off into their own separate corner. If this kind of grouping is desired, it should be done either in list form or by manually generating a category intersection for Category:American novelists + Category:American women writers — but it should not exist as its own separate category. Gendered categories are useful in certain circumstances, certainly — but any situation in which women get a gendered subcategory while men are still left in the ungendered parent category is never one of them, and the policy around gendered categories has always been quite clear about that. Merge per nom. Bearcat (talk) 02:41, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge as a non-notable intersection that has the unfortunate side-effect of othering and inappropriately ghettoizing its subjects. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:58, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - bad faith nomination to single out the American category. Nominate all or nominate none. --Mais oui! (talk) 03:10, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is not bad faith to start with one problem rather than trying to attack every single similar problem on Wikipedia at the same time. Yes, other categories should also be fixed. RoyLeban (talk) 05:46, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note to closing Admin - that comment let's the cat out of the bag. This is clearly a strategy to try to delete an entire category system by a concerted attack on a single member. This has become far too common over the past year at CFD, and must be nipped in the bud by Sysops.--Mais oui! (talk) 07:56, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Objection: This is the Slippery Slope Fallacy. Fixing this case is, if anything, a precedent for fixing other cases of discriminatory sexism (splitting an evenly-distributed binary such as gender into a "normal, no need to state which it is" and "the other one" implies inferiority). It does not provide precedent for getting rid of any and all categorisations, even on gender, where those are both neutrally done (calling out both explicitly, rather than just one) and merited by the subject matter. For writing in general, where gender distribution is itself an area of sociological and literary study (which is at least an indicator of relevance), it is; for novels, I understand that no such indicators exist, and thus it is not - Merge. If there are, "Merge and Keep", by creating an "American Men Novelists" sibling category. 2620:0:1040:203:BAAC:6FFF:FE86:1ADE (talk) 10:22, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note to closing Admin It's clear that Mais oui is has a strategy to use fallacious arguments to continue a sexist practice. By attacking the nomination as bad faith, by accusing me of having some hidden strategy, they have assumed bad faith. In fact, I have no strategy whatsoever, and I have no relationship to the nominator. When I become aware of problems, especially really bad ones like this, I speak up. There are a million problems like this on Wikipedia. The fact that other problems exist does not mean we shouldn't fix this problem (hopefully that sounds familiar). In fact, we should work to fix all the problems. But we can't fix them all at the same time. RoyLeban (talk) 06:21, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep To build on Bearcat's comment, I don't see a problem with the sub-category. I see a problem with the parent category. The list of American novelists is far too long, and by itself I think it's useless. Really, how do you navigate a list with 3,000 to 4,000 entries? I'd vote for completely clearing out the "American novelists" category and properly placing everyone in a sub-category. There already exist numerous genre-specific categories, and if necessary an additional "American Generic Fiction Writers" category could be created for people that don't belong to any existing genre (i.e. American fantasy writers). Assuming all American novelists are correctly placed in at least one sub-category, then the parent category is redundant and the women category is ok (given that said women are also categorized in the genre specific categories). --SlowWalkere (talk) 03:14, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge - this is clearly a ghettoization problem, though there could be a limited case for keeping it as a sub-category (additive, not as a replacement). All the rest of Category:Women novelists by nationality should be checked to make sure we don't have this problem in other nationality lists as well. Kate (talk) 05:25, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge per nom and Bearcat's nuanced explanation of the issue. -- Green Cardamom (talk) 05:27, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge I agree with the nomination and also with Bearcat's comments. And with the New York Times Op-Ed piece[1] = it's sexist. It also increases the (correct) view that we are male-dominated and that doesn't help us get female editors. Dougweller (talk) 05:31, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge, duh it's a no brainer. The idea that Wikipedia should be inaccurate or sexist or biased because a category is too large is a really bad argument, especially since anyone who thinks the category is too large now will still think its too large when all the women have been removed. What happens next? Removing the men whose last name begins with S into an American male novelists whose names begin with S and then removing them from American novelists. After all, you're not an American novelist if your name begins with an S. To those who argue that a bonus category for American women/female novelists is useful, a much better solution is to allow you to view the pages that are in the intersection of two categories. Someone should add that to MediaWiki. And there should absolutely not be an American women/female novelists category unless there is also an American men/male novelists category. RoyLeban (talk) 05:46, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • RoyLeban is only of many contributors to this discussion who appear not to have read WP:Cat gender, even tho it is linked in the nominator's rationale at the top of the discussion. That guideline is quite explicit that a Category:Female fooers does not necessarily need to be balanced against a Category:Male fooers.
      I quite agree that Wikipedia:Category intersection would be a good idea, but it has not been implemented. This discussion has to take place within the context of the technology which we actually have, rather than what we might like to have. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:43, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not the one who didn't read WP:Cat gender. The very first line says "A gender-specific category could be implemented where gender has a specific relation to the topic" (emphasis mine). Where is that specific relationship here? Their chromosomes? If a specific relationship exists for women, then I would contend it also exists for men. If there is no specific relationship for men, then there is none for women. Period. There is just as much a specific relationship for women as there is for American novelists over 6' tall. Obviously, tall people have a different perspective which affects how they write. Should we move them out too and remove them from the American novelists category? Of course not. If you want a category for novelists who write about women's issues, or men's issues, or write mysteries, etc., that would make sense, because what novelists right and what they write about does have a specific relation to the topic at hand. And guess what? Those categories already exist and they overlap with lists of novelists by country. Of course they do. You wouldn't say someone isn't an American novelist because they write mysteries. RoyLeban (talk) 06:40, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Are you sure you read it? It says, "As another example, a female heads of government category is valid as a topic of special encyclopedic interest, though it does not need to be balanced directly against a 'Male heads of government' category, as historically the vast majority of political leaders have been male." Maybe this is different, but there's no need to be hostile. AgnosticAphid talk 08:19, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I wasn't trying to be hostile, just emphatic. The earlier poster accused me of not having read certain guidelines because I disagree with them. That's not good faith. Is your argument that Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, etc. should be excluded from regular lists of political leaders because they're in the Female heads of government category? Because that's the argument that's being made by some people here. RoyLeban (talk) 23:23, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Um, RoyLeban, as you probably know, lots of our decisions about what to include in Wikipedia are based on real-world notability. In the real world, I'm not aware of anyone writing about or studying the topic of "tall writers", whereas there is considerable academic energy put into studying women writers. Should we ignore this state of affairs? Shouldn't we implement categories that are proven to be of interest to large segments of our readership? -GTBacchus(talk) 08:26, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • You missed the point. I deliberately chose something a bit ridiculous to make a point. Substitute whatever you like for "tall". Tall, short, blonde, one-armed, Christian, Jewish, etc. Pick something that somebody is writing about. Should anybody in that subcategory be removed from the main category? Of course not. What if it's about what they are writing? E.g., writers who write about Christianity or write Christianity-themed literature (as opposed to being Christian). Certainly there are people discussing that. Should we remove all those writers from the list of novelists? Of course not. RoyLeban (talk) 23:23, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Well, maybe I missed the point; maybe I didn't. Did I suggest removing anyone from a list of novelists, ever? No, I didn't. Does saying we should implement a specific category mean we should also depopulate its members form the parent category? Hell, no. Are women writers a topic of interest? If so, we should have the category, but the women writers should stay in the parent category, as well. Are men writers a topic of interest? That's a valid question. Are tall writers a topic of interest? Are blond writers a topic of interest? These are all empirical questions, but none of their answers begin to suggest that large categories need diffusing.

      To make my point quite clearly: Whether or not a subcategory is of interest is precisely the question we should ask regarding the creation of that category, but it has absolutely no bearing on whether it should be a diffusing subcategory or not. Do you disagree? -GTBacchus(talk) 23:30, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • I do disagree. In my opinion, at the moment, we can't separate the issues. We should merge the categories, period, to undo the huge mistake that was made. And, yes, we should do the same many places on Wikipedia, anywhere where sexism, racism, or any sort of bigotry or exclusionism has cropped up. After that point, we can talk about whether certain non-exclusive subcategories should exist. In this particular case, I don't think such a non-exclusive subcategory should exist. My wife happens to be an American female novelist. The environment in which she is writing is very different from the environment that Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Louisa May Alcott wrote in. When people study the history of women writers, when and who are they studying? I don't pretend to know the answer, but Wikipedia should reflect that with articles and/or subcategories rather than an arbitrary category which is essential self-sourced and/or original research. Same goes for Writers of the (name a time period) categories. RoyLeban (talk) 17:57, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge; existence of this category leads to removal of women from the main category. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:07, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge, same as Anomalocaris above. The all-male American novelists page gives rather the wrong sort of impression. aliettedb (talk) 07:23, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Instead of allowing readers to search for women writer's, the merge would render them invisible. This is sexist.It ignores Women's writing in English as a specific area of study. It denigrates the related lists : List of women writers, Women in speculative fiction, List of biographical dictionaries of women writers, and List of organizations for women writers irrelevant to the entire category scheme. Dimadick (talk) 06:46, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge back into main category - intentional or otherwise, removing women from 'American novelists' is deeply problematic. Euchrid (talk) 07:22, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge or Merge and Keep -- The case for re-merging is obvious, though the parent category is possibly too large for its own good, even without half the population. But that's obviously not the fault of the women whose entries were improperly shunted off to their own subcategory. There is some possible utility to the subcategory, just as there would be for the hypothetical male counterpart subcategory, but not at the expense of the continued presence of women on the primary list. As an aside, I would note that this is rapidly approaching snowball status here. Ray Radlein (talk) 07:48, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge - It looks sexist, it sounds sexist WP:QUACK Nicholas Perkins (T•C) 09:05, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge or Merge and Keep - per Bearcat's very articulate discussion. Watermaren (talk) 11:35, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep The overall novelists may be a large category, but reducing it by purging women authors is sexism, pure and simple. Artemis-Arethusa (talk) 12:48, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Merge I agree does not conform to gender neutrality guidelines, and creates the side effect of a Male Only main page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ktsetsi (talk • contribs) 12:56, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I have created a number of articles on 19th century American novelists, some of whom happened to be female. It NEVER occurred to me to look for a "female novelist" category, though I see some of the ones I wrote were later categorized so by other editors. Its stupid. We either have two categories for female and male, or none.--Milowent • hasspoken 13:08, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge Bearcat has eloquently and clearly stated the problems with retaining this category. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 13:16, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep I'm perfectly fine with a list of American Women Novelists. I'm FURIOUS about removing them from the list of American novelists. Chip Unicorn (talk) 14:07, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say you're categorically mistaken. It's a category, not a list; and they're still listed as american novelists, as you can see at the bottom of this page. AgnosticAphid talk 08:32, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge at it is unambiguous sexism. fraise (talk) 14:10, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep This is a terrible story for Wikipedia and is making the community look bad. People do study and seek out "women writers" for a variety of reasons, so that page should be kept, but the "American authors" page should include *all* American authors of note. Wichitalineman (talk) 14:11, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Merge It would actually be okay IF it was a subset of the Category:American novelists but removing them from that category is a clear violation the gender neutrality guidelines, and is also bizarre. --Jmcdon10 (talk) 14:16, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It IS a subset of the Category:American novelists. Netrat (talk) 11:12, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge I recognize the fact that this category is a sub-category and articles should be tagged with both, but the actual practice has not been as clear as the rule, and now women are being removed from the main category which will continue regardless of how many times we reiterate that rule. In light of the bad press we are getting,[2] [3] [4] [5] which I recognize shouldn't dictate policy to us but it does give a sense of urgency for the resolution, and the general consensus that I see emerging I think we can WP:SNOW.Coffeepusher (talk) 14:20, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge Many have made the obvious point that, whether or not there is a category of American Women Novelists, it's grotesque to be removing women from American Novelists. But I don't see anyone making the more fundamental point. As soon as you create a subcategory of "American Woman Novelists" without also creating a subcategory of "American Man Novelists," you reveal that you think being male is the norm and being female is different, or exceptional. Likewise when you set apart "African-American Novelists", etc., but not "White American Novelists". Of course this applies across Wikipedia, not just for Americans and novelists. JGleick (talk) 14:30, 25 April 2013 (UTC) Joyce Carol Oates (the American Novelist) makes the same point here.[reply]
  • Merge I am flabbergasted that there is even a discussion about this. Removing women from the main category is pure unadulterated sexism. It is the same as removing black authors, or blue eyed authors. The category "American men novelists" was just created and currently has only two entries. No one would think to put Orson Scott Card only in a male specific category.
When J. K. Rowling first published, she choose to use her initials, instead of her full name, reportedly because of concern that sexism would affect sales. If she wasn't so successful, many would not know if she was a man or a woman. Putting her only in a "woman's" list, would make it impossible for someone to find her in a male only novelist's list.
Saying that the category is too long, and some entries that fit some sub-category should be moved out is absurd. There is nothing wrong with keeping a subcategory for women authors, or black, or American or whatever, but they should not be moved out of the main category. EricKent (talk) 14:38, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
There is something wrong with categorizing articles both under a category and its subcategory, it ruins the very concept of categories. Netrat (talk) 11:18, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If there were an article American Presidents Who Died in Office, is it inappropriate to leave those presidents in the category American Presidents? Jodie (talk) 15:54, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for this example, Jodie! Netrat's comment seems to assume that we have categories in order to satisfy some abstract notion of categorization and order, when in fact we have them for one reason only: readers' convenience. If readers find it convenient for categories to feature a certain amount of redundancy, then that's precisely what we should do. We're not trying to make a point about categorization, only to serve readers. -GTBacchus(talk) 06:32, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge I agree does not conform to gender neutrality guidelines, and creates the side effect of a Male Only main page.Scorcha79 (talk) 15:04, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep: Not having American women novelists on the main American novelists page is sexist and disgraceful. However, worth keeping as a subcategory to facilitate users' research on American womens' literature. Rinne na dTrosc (talk) 15:08, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep. It's great to have a separate list of "women novelists" -- people do look for such things -- but having that list override an author's membership in "novelists" is inarguably ghettoization. Serpyllum (talk) 15:16, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep: Subcategories for men and women seem fine, but neither should be removed from the default category. I agree with others who have stated that pruning the default category should be done by characteristics of the works of the author (such as genre) rather than characteristics of the author (such as gender or race). Lateralus1587 (talk)
  • Keep- create "American men novelists", and move all the men over. In this way the two genders are treated equally and an overstuffed category branches nicely. Rklawton (talk) 15:28, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree that an "American Men Novelists" category solves the problem. The more general category is necessary precisely because people do not look for novels by the gender of the author. They look for novels. To split and empty the larger category in favor of two gender-based categories implies that the gender of the author is the single most important distinction in a work of fiction, which is simply not so. Artemis-Arethusa (talk) 15:49, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge Teemu Leisti (talk) 15:52, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep: Subcategories are fine but women should absolutely not be arbitrarily erased from the list of novelists in the unnecessary interest of "trimming the length". It seems suspicious that the response to this perceived problem was to start by removing women. --lainzilla (talk) 15:59, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge I agree does not conform to gender neutrality guidelines, and all female-only categories should be eliminated. --Mattbucher (talk) 16:09, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep. Many great comments.--Brad Patrick (talk) 16:16, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep. Bearcat is correct. Women novelists should not be removed from the category of American novelists. And yet it is valuable to be able to identify women writers. Why not merge them back in, and yet add another category to identify women, as that is clearly valuable meta information? Also, this is being framed as a correction of some past decision to move women en masse out of the American novelists category. I can't find any evidence of that happening. So, the merge request, if it doesn't keep the "women" categories, may have the undesirable side effect of erasing much hard work to identify women as women authors. Strong KEEP! --Lizzard (talk) 16:20, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Note: Actually, there was a concerted effort by a particular user to move women into the "American women novelists" category and remove them from the main "American novelists" category. Take a look at April 13 and earlier here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Johnpacklambert Whatever decision is made on this matter should really be communicated to this individual, as he appears to be responsible for a similar recategorization of "Television actresses" and some international authors as well. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JLeland (talk • contribs) 17:47, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep Clearly an undesirable gender imbalance retaining this (sub)category without moving them back and adding male novelists to the men equivalent . Mootros (talk) 16:27, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep with the explicit understanding that future removal of the subset of female novelists from the superset of American novelists should be regarded as actionable. Carrite (talk) 16:33, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Procedural close Why would you nominate just this one category and ignore the scheme at Category:Women_novelists_by_nationality? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:40, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Also I just looked back over the spammy votes at the beginning and due to the media scrutiny on this categorization scheme, I recommend closing this discussion and starting a new one about the parent scheme of women novelists by nationality tomorrow or possibly after 48 hours. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:42, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The issue relates to the exclusion of those included in the American Women Novelists category from the American Novelists category, a really bad decision by somebody. The answer isn't to remove the subcategory, it's to reinclude those falling in the subcategory into the larger category. Carrite (talk) 16:45, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Merge I agree does not conform to gender neutrality guidelines, and creates the side effect of a Male Only main page. --Lexinatrix (talk) 16:51, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep Removing female authors from the main American Novelists category is sexist. The American Novelists category should contain authors of both genders. However, it is also useful to have an American Women Novelists and American Men Novelist subcategories, in addition to the main category. Salpsaugh —Preceding undated comment added 17:07, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep and Merge Removal from the original list is a bad idea, but the list as a subcategory for those interested in researching American women novelists. Keep the list, but also merge all back into the main list (American novelists). Whether to put it under Women novelists by nationality is a good question, too. --Synaptophysin (talk) 17:16, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep as is People totally are misunderstanding categorization with their arguments here. Anyway, the people making these arguments are making outrage out of nothing. The general rule is that articles should be in only the most applicable category. There is no reason to put an article in both a general category and a subcategory. The rhetoric about "back of the bus" is just toally misunderstanding the whole issue. To put people in both categories creates needless category clutter. If people can not be bothered to click on subcategories that is their problem. The idea that we should put people in both categories will lead to having way too many categorizes on some people. Simplicity is the best appraoch, and simplicity means that we just use one category. Also all the rhetoric about "list" is wrong. Categories are not lists. We have all sorts of sub-cats of Category:American novelists and we should not be putting people in both the main category and the sub-category. The tendency of some editors to do so is what makes that a problem. I really think it is way out of line for people to try to turn this into some cause of war, as people have done by writting articles about it. That mainly shows people just do not understand how categorization works. We do not put articles in all applicable categories, only in the most specifically relevant ones. Attempts to mandate multiple levels of categories just lead to massive overcategorization that is not helpful to anyone.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:46, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It is unfortunate that Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality no longer has the clear guidance regarding diffusion that it used to. But basically, the problem is that (1) inclusion within ethnic, gender, religion, & sexuality intersectional categories is appropriate, where those categories are "recognized as a distinct and unique cultural topic in its own right" -- for instance, women writers, African American scientists; but (2) diffusion into those subcategories is inappropriate, because it serves to ghettoize. So the appropriate solution is that for those folks who have relevant cultural identities (like "woman writer") have that intersectional category as well as the appropriate super-category. --Lquilter (talk) 22:49, 25 April 2013 (UTC
The argument posed by John Pack Lambert is an example of throwing barriers of technicality. An example of confusing people with machines. And 'limit the discussion to "those who 'understand these things' ". All that is missing is a 'pat on the head' and holding out a dish towel. And a whiff of 'ownership'. Neonorange (talk) 02:01, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I would totally support creation of Category:American male novelists or a similarly named category. I think that would actually be a workable solution. As it is we seperate out Category:American women writers from Category:American writers we do not put people in both categories. The attempts to make this into a fight zone are very disturbing to me.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:46, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Procedural objection The objections here would actually apply to Category:American women writers and Category:Novelists by nationality. No one has presented any reason to treat this category differently than those. Well, other than some person who wants to influence wikipedia policy has decided to instead of directly seeking change in the normal ways sought to use outside sources to cause scandal and get people to react to it. We have for a very long time had Category:American women writers and no one has objected to it. We should not respond to such pressure tactics that ignore the way we actually run categories.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:49, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment People are not removed from the novelists categories, they are put in sub-categories thereof. All this rhetoric about "removal" is ignorin how categories actually work.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:50, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge Gender neutrality. No reason I can see to categorize them differently. I don't see a Category:American male novelists. – Muboshgu (talk) 17:51, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment The point of the articles involved seems to be to attack those of us who try to avoid too many categories. In fact, much of the work on creating this category was done by moving people in Category:Women novelists to specific nationalit based sub-cats. That category had stood for years, but was unreasonably large while at the same time covering only a very small percentage of women novelists. I have to say that I am quite glad in a way that my work has become widely recognized, even if it is by people who do not understand it and attack it. TThe fact of the matter is because women and underrepresentied in writitng, being a woman writer is notable, and we thus categorize by that. Creating sub-cats does not remove people from a category, and categories are not lists. The whole outrage over this comes from not understanding how categories work. The fact of the matter is that creating these sub-categories make things much easier for people who want to study women in writing.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:56, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment While this is a useful general rule for categories, it does not and cannot always apply. If Wikipedia editors (as you suggest) "do not understand" how categories work, neither will the general public. Having an "American Novelists" page that has only men looks extremely odd to any general reader. Sometimes there are good reasons to have overlapping categories, and this is one of those cases. Economy should not trump clear understanding or usefulness.Wichitalineman (talk) 18:09, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • I second that. "The whole world is reading me wrong" is rarely sensible: the whole world won't change just because it is being inconvenient to one person. But it's an especially bad approach for an encyclopedia, the whole point of which is to be broadly useful. William Pietri (talk) 18:27, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • Comment Are John Pack Lambert's personal Mormon beliefs getting in the way of his gender neutrality? Looking at his edits, he seems to be a repeat offender when it comes to ghettoizing women into secondary, separate, and implied-to-be-lesser categories. Editors must be impartial and this is disturbing.Claudelemonde (talk) 23:07, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • It sounds like you're saying that all members of a subcategory are conceptually members of the main category. That may well be true, but the current Wikipedia interface doesn't reflect that clearly. Instead, the current interface shows a list of subcategories and a list of members of the main category. If you want to change the Wikipedia interface so that it shows all members of all subcategories, that might be an interesting way to resolve this--but it would mean that high-level categories might have millions of items on their category pages. At any rate, with the current Wikipedia interface, the strong implication of the way things are presented is that the list of category members at the bottom of a category page is a comprehensive list. So when you remove entries from that list, then yes, it comes across as implying that they aren't full members of the main category. --Elysdir (talk) 21:51, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. As aforementioned, if you must have seperate categories, don't make male writers the default - Make 'male' and 'female' writers categories. Doing otherwise would contravene the gender neutrality guidelines, and incidentally be as sexist as all hell. You shouldn't define only women by their gender. -Netchiman (talk) 8:20, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
  • Merge and keep The creation of a subcategory as American women novelists is a good idea. But moving women novelist’s names from the main American novelists page looks biased.Else another category as american male novelists can be created and the main list can be kept in its original state.--Napithakrish (talk) 17:59, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. Alternatively, create an American men novelists category and move all American novelists into either American men novelists or American women novelists wherever their gender is known to be one or the other. Klausness (talk) 18:11, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We actually do have Category:American men novelists.John Pack Lambert (talk) 18:23, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Now we do. It was only just created, in response to all this. -GTBacchus(talk) 18:48, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You are confusing a list with a category. They are not the same.
I don't think John Pack Lambert is confusing a list with a category. From his comment here, it looks like he is very Wikipedia-savvy and knows what he's doing. It's NYTime author who's confusing a list with a category. Netrat (talk) 11:40, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • That people are using the encyclopedia differently than you'd like them to doesn't make them disingenuous. I think her critique is reasonable. Whether or not there are other places on Wikipedia that one can get an ungendered list of novelists doesn't matter. If one looks at us as they did, which is a reasonable use case, then Wikipedia looks to be ghettoizing the female writers. It shouldn't. William Pietri (talk) 18:35, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Since we have Category:American men novelists, I would say many of the previous comments are based on faulty understanding of the actual issues invovled.John Pack Lambert (talk) 18:25, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Given that the category you mention dates to 25 April, while the discussion here dates to 24 April, for most of the period of this discussion we in fact did not have the category mentioned.
An example of this is Hailey Abbott who is in Category:American women novelists and Category:American romantic fiction writers, the later is a sub-cat of Category:American novelists.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:04, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
John, just because you've been categorizing some of these articles, no one is saying you were being "sexist" despite the drama of the NYTimes op piece, it was just well-intentioned category creep. Filipacchi's whole point is that subcategorization of only women is ghettoization, and not what is permitted per Bearcat's comments.--Milowent • hasspoken 19:09, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wait for consensus. This issue is currently being discussed on the parent category's talk page. Until that discussion is resolved and the immediate situation addressed, we should not make dractic changes to these categories. -- LWG talk 19:24, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
LWG, do you mean the talk page for American Women Novelists or the one for American Novelists? Is there an official priority/hierarchy between discussions on talk pages, versus discussions on CfD pages? Especially as this thread seems longer and in ways, more robust than the other two.--Theredproject (talk) 20:07, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion at American Novelists is addressing the overall issue of male/female subcats and how to address them, and the outcome there will affect individual cases like this one. I have no problem moving that discussion here or whatever, but we shouldn't decide on action here if the opposite action is going to be decided there. -- LWG talk 20:50, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The problematic article is Category:American women novelists This is the proper place to discuss the problem. To move the discussion would raise barriers to participation. Neonorange (talk) 01:48, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • That discussion began after this one did. If anything, the discussion there should be put on hold pending a consensus here. Just because people at the main category didn't notice there was already a discussion here isn't a reason to uproot this discussion and move it somewhere else. AgnosticAphid talk 08:48, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Request for Information. John Pack Lambert insists over and over here that most of us "do not understand" "how categories work," and that a principle of economy dictates that any given Wikipedia entry should appear in as few, or as few overlapping, categories as possible. I'd appreciate it if I could be directed to the policy discussions that explain why this is so and how it was decided. It seems quite unclear to me that we operate this way, and if I look at the pages for important entities (e.g. The Beatles), I find them listed with numerous overlapping and hierarchically-inclusive categories, which allow me to explore based on any entries. It seems to me that the principle of maximal inclusion rather than minimal inclusion is most helpful to users, but it appears I have missed an important community decision about how categories function and I'd like to read more about the policy before commenting further. Wichitalineman (talk) 19:57, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Categorization_and_subcategories#Subcategorization:

A page or category should rarely be placed in both a category and a subcategory or parent category (supercategory) of that category (however, see directly below). For example, the article "Paris" need only be placed in "Category:Cities in France", not in both "Category:Cities in France" and "Category:Populated places in France". Since the first category is in the second category, readers are already given the information that Paris is a populated place in France by it being a city in France.

Note also that as stub templates are for maintenance purposes, not user browsing (see #Wikipedia administrative categories above), they do not count as categorization for the purposes of Wikipedia's categorization policies. An article which has a "stubs" category on it must still be filed in the most appropriate content categories, even if one of them is a direct parent of the stubs category in question.

Hope this helps. Netrat (talk) 12:01, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
There is more specific discussion of this problem at the Wikipedia guideline page Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality, which I've quoted below (labelled "Relevant Guideline).--Carwil (talk) 13:16, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
"Relevant Guideline" is relevant to entirely different topic than rised by Wichitalineman. What Wichitalineman asked was where "don't include an article into partent category and child category at the same time" policy comes from. Netrat (talk) 15:27, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep. I approve of having a sub-category that identifies women novelists, but not their removal from the American novelists category generally. Removing American women novelists from Category:American novelists implies that they are somehow deservedly excluded as American novelists. This seems to violate gender neutrality guidelines. I also agree with those who have pointed out that gender, unlike nationality or ethnicity or genre, is a binary. Amphiggins (talk) 20:03, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
"I also agree with those who have pointed out that gender, unlike nationality or ethnicity or genre, is a binary." Seriously? Perhaps you should visit the Category:Gender category - it might blow your mind. You're the second or third person in this argument who has called gender a binary variable. There's a lot more than just "men" and "women" in this world...--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 04:02, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • delete entire Category:Women novelists by nationality tree and upmerge into Category:Novelists by nationality tree. JPL is absolutely correct that having separate categories for women novelists elsewhere implies doing the same in the USA category structure. It can be argued, though, that this is a triple intersection (woman/novelist/country) and therefore is discouraged. In the longer run we need to bite the bullet over whether sex is notable in writing any longer. At any rate the solution of double-listing the women in both levels needs to be absolutely excluded. Mangoe (talk) 20:09, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Having read the Wikipedia:Categorization page more carefully, I am wondering whether the issue here is not at all the one we have been debating, but rather two linked separate issues. If it's true that "American Women Novelists" is a formal subcategory of "American Novelists," and therefore everyone voting for "merge" is actually voting for things to remain as they are (without most of us realizing it!), then the questions are 1) Why does the current page template not display the inclusive higher-level categories as well as finer-grained subcategories (ie, why don't women writers display both the "American Women Novelists" and "American Novelists" links in their footers; 2) Why do the pages for the high-level categories not inherently include all the subcategorized members that belong to them? Wichitalineman (talk) 20:32, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge - and quickly. And then let discussion proceed. Some errors are too egregious to permit to stand. The effect of having a separate category 'just for women' while keeping a higher category that leaks authors into the segegated category is exactly what it seems: non encyclopedic, sexist, and a public relations disaster. Neonorange (talk) 20:43, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Oddly enough, we do exactly that for many sportsperson categories. I have tried in the past, and met with a lot of resistance, to rectify that. Yet here, when it involves authors, the outcry is immediate. I am puzzled. Powers T 21:00, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge this one and all others like it or Create separate category system for male novelists and/or non-categorizable novelists The problem as I see it is not that there is a category tree for women novelists but that there is one for women but not for men. So we have two equally valid solutions: Either we delete the women-related category tree (and all similar ones) or we create a new tree for men novelists and keep Category:American novelists and similar ones solely as a top-category that only contains sub-categories but no articles. Personally, I think both solutions are valid but I'd actually rather favor the second approach: Most subjects will fall into one of the current sub-categories and should be placed there anyway (SciFi-novelists into Category:American science fiction writers, thriller-writers into Category:American thriller writers etc.) while we can sort the rest that does not fit into any sub-category into either Category:American women novelists and Category:American men novelists or a new Category:American novelists without clear genre (or similar). This solution would not only avoid the whole sexist distinction we currently make but it would also benefit the readers who after all should find categories useful to navigate articles. Regards SoWhy 20:58, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Arbitrary break[edit]
  • Merge - what, is this the middle ages where women are a subcategory of humanity instead of just people? They are American Novelists. You cannot catigorise like this. Many have their own pages so if you're unsure of their gender you can always link through to their main page. There is no way to justify this separation. 188.221.73.75 (talk) 21:11, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Don't spout idiotic nonsense about the middle ages please. BTW, "you cannot categorize like this"--well, actually we do this all over the place. Surely you've been to a public bathroom. None of this means, of course, that we should do this. Drmies (talk) 14:48, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • All the people in the category have article pages, so the "many have their own pages" argument does not really hold. There are a few articles where the gender of the subject is not revealed, but those are extremely rare.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:18, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep: It is reasonable to have "male" and "female" American novelist subcategories but the main category of "American Novelists" should be gender-neutral. Not sure why this should be so difficult to understand. Trixi72 (talk) 21:35, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep Obviously the category "American novelists" should not consist of only male novelists as it says nothing about gender or sex in the label - it is gender neutral. The category "American women novelists" should be kept because it is a "recognized as a distinct and unique cultural topic in its own right" (as WP:EGRS specifies). American women novelists are the topic of university courses and women writers often have their own sections in bookstores. This is a recognized subdivision in the study of literature and in the popular imagination. Wadewitz (talk) 21:36, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. Female Authors are American Novelists too. Putting them in a sub-category is sexist. I noticed there was an American Men Novelists Category that had about 15 men, whereas the American Women category had 50+ women just under A. hsgray —Preceding undated comment added 21:41, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Depopulate Category:American novelists, except for subcats, and keep this as one of its subcats. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:45, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. As per gender neutrality guidelines, gender-specific categories are not appropriate where gender is not specifically related to the topic. This subcategory also creates the unfortunate side effect that Category:American novelists contains only male novelists. 24.151.50.173 (talk) 22:03, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge: While I can appreciate the logic behind keeping the category for authors whose gender is especially relevant, it's hard to imagine that this won't just become a magnet for every American woman to write a novel, the same way that "In popular culture" subheds might initially contain some worthwhile content but inevitably turn into listcruft. — Bdb484 (talk) 22:06, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. No rationale has been offered for removing the American category while keeping the other 50 subcats of Category:Women novelists by nationality. We should either upmerge Category:Women novelists by nationality in its entirety or keep it all.
    Also, please note that if the nominated category is upmerged, it should be merged to both parents: the other is Category:American women writers. Per the head article Women's writing in English, women's writing is a distinct area of literary study, and the novel is a very important literary form in that field of study. Per Wikipedia:Cat gender, "a gender-specific category could be implemented where gender has a specific relation to the topic" ... and in this case it has a very specific relation to the topic. Please note that many of the arguments raised at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 March 23#Category:Women_writers are relevant here. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:33, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - The Category:American women novelists subcategory is a perfectly appropriate national subcategory of Category:Women novelists by nationality, and Category:Women novelists is a well-defined topic and cultural concept, "recognized as a distinct and unique cultural topic in its own right" (Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality). As I wrote above, the solution is for articles to be categorized in both appropriate categories. (Repeat: It is unfortunate that Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality no longer has the clear guidance regarding diffusion that it used to. But basically, the problem is that (1) inclusion within ethnic, gender, religion, & sexuality intersectional categories is appropriate, where those categories are "recognized as a distinct and unique cultural topic in its own right" -- for instance, women writers, African American scientists; but (2) diffusion into those subcategories is inappropriate, because it serves to ghettoize. So the appropriate solution is that for those folks who have relevant cultural identities (like "woman writer") have that intersectional category as well as the appropriate super-category.)--Lquilter (talk) 22:49, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep An author's gender is undoubtedly relevant to their notability in numerous circumstances. Do I really need to explain that one?--The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 23:22, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep - It is my belief that female novelists should appear in the parent category; however, as has been pointed out, many people study specifically woman-authored literature. This entire discussion seems to me more of a problem with categories themselves than with this particular category. Not that categorization should be eliminated, but perhaps it would be more useful to automatically display ALL entries in the parent category, not just those specifically assigned to it. Or, as others have suggested, allowing users to search for the intersection of multiple categories. That is, rather than having a specific subcategory for "American women novelists", Wikipedia should have the categories "Americans", "women", and "novelists", and a user could search for pages which fall under all three categories. Lunaibis 23:53, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This is a good idea, although people at Semantic Mediawiki have been working for years on an interface and backend that would make this possible. It is a very complicated technical problem, made all the more difficult by the massive size of Wikipedia, the number of potential categories and category members, the speed at which editing takes place, and the relatively small number of servers that Wikipedia runs on (compared to Google, Facebook, etc.) The current system was designed on a shoestring budget almost a long time ago, and it isn't ideal for sure. Stu (aeiou) 00:20, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep this category and Depopulate Category:American novelists, putting all articles in relevant sub-categories. A 4,000 member category is too big to be useful. Otherwise, if Category:American novelists remains populated with members, merge such that every article in this category is also in Category:American novelists. "Man is default, woman is different" is a longstanding societal problem, we shouldn't perpetuate it. Google takes "American novelists" to that category page, which should be kept in mind. Given that there is much confusion about whether and why subcategory members don't appear in parent category pages, we should think about the implications of this decision for how readers will view and interpret these pages. Stu (aeiou) 00:20, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I've asked this question a few places, but received no answer yet: Why is a 4000-member category too big to be useful? What if I find it useful? Who decides which categories are useful, those who use them, or those who set them up? -GTBacchus(talk) 06:35, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep. The case for an exception to the general most-specific-category rule is pretty strong here, if only to avoid the misunderstandings that are on prominent display in the reporting on this issue. -- Visviva (talk) 00:46, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Creator - Merge - I'm the editor who created the category. I now feel the category should be merged to avoid further proving that Wikipedia appears institutionally sexist, and at a later date address category problems in an imaginative way per Lunaibis, BrownHairedGirl and Stu. I have also created many of the other women novelist, poet, and essayist nationality categories, which should be part of this discussion. I did this in good faith, I hoped for this to be an inspiration to young women to know how many others have written before. It was my eventual hope to have both male and female novelists categories as subcats of their respective nationality categories, as well as all combined in the general novelist category. This appears to be a normal practice in other professions, such as sport. Many general profession categories are just far too large to navigate. I regret not starting the male category when I created the women category. This has justifiably opened Wikipedia up to accusations of markedness. I opened this Pandora's box after noticing a tag requesting that the Category:British women poets be populated, it appals me that there are less Wikipedia articles on women poets than pornographic actresses, a depressing statistic that can never inspire young women. I do wish I had a right of reply to Amanda Filipacchi's NYT article. I sympathise utterly with her sentiments, in my lack of thoroughness in creating a male subcategory I have outraged the very people I wanted to inspire by initially creating a category for women, in a misguided attempt to shed light on women writers. I would tell Filipacchi and others decrying our awesome project that I have created many articles on significant women, and am proud to have created almost every article on albums by women jazz singers. I have delighted in raising awareness of neglected feminist icons such as Clementia Taylor and her Aubrey House, British Prime Minister's spouses, and some of our sadly most obscure female creatives such as Morwenna Donnelly and Dorothy Annan. It saddens me to see allegations of sexual assault and misconduct are demoted from biographical articles, I situation I expericed with Mohamed Al-Fayed, and first realised when finding the rape scene in Blade Runner written up as seduction. Wikipedia needs millions more female editors and editors from marginalised minorities. This should serve as a wake up call to all of us to create more content on marginalised figures, and invent more imaginative ways to navigate categories. Gareth E Kegg (talk) 00:57, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge but - given the Creator's statement above, I will go with his desires BUT in the longer term we should keep an eye on ways to more appropriately handle this. Women's literature is a legitimate area of study, and having such a subcategory should be of use... but it should never be the first subcategory that the writer is placed in. As long as the writer is placed first in a genre or similar subcategory, this would alleviate the concern that placing a person in a gender category is eliminating them from the main list (as they would already have been removed from there), and would encourage attention and building of the category system. She's a science fiction novelist and a women novelist; he's a satirical novelist and a 19th century novelist and a male novelist. --Nat Gertler (talk) 01:40, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with you - even the 'but'. Two days ought to be enough to correct the most egregious problem. And then the universe. As to the length argument raise by some comments above - at 4000 entries, the list is mostly a roster; subcategories will end up more used. But subcategories should not be created that result in an exclusive men's club at the top of the hierarchy. ...there are too many of those as is. Neonorange (talk) 02:14, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Delete. Good grief the news media is now chock full of outrage against this sexism, and Wikipedia is now an international laughingstock. If someone wants to make a List article of List of American Female Novelists, let that happen, but for heaven's sake don't segregate out novelists because of their gender. And who the heck named these categories, a three-year-old? "women novelists" and "men novelists"? Are you kidding me? Softlavender (talk) 02:36, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • "Chock full of outrage"? "International laughingstock"? What's in your coffee, dude? Two people wrote articles, and 99.9% of the world will never, ever care. Is there any reason at all for this hyperbolic language?

      As for your point about the names being silly, I whole-heartedly agree. -GTBacchus(talk) 06:39, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Merge and Delete. I see the original creator's point per the Women novelists by nationality category, but maybe that entire page shouldn't exist at all. If you are researching writers who are women, perhaps a list would be far more helpful. Also, if someone could explain the grammar of "men writers" and "women writers" please do, it really disturbs my ear. Jodie (talk) 17:28, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge or Move to American female novelists iff we create American male novelists I'm completely ambivalent between my two proposals, but having a category for female novelists, and not one for male novelists is foolish. Ryan Vesey 02:41, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We have Category:American men novelists, so you are ignoring the situation we actually have.John Pack Lambert (talk) 02
57, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
On a broader note - the obvious misunderstandings demonstrated above of the intent of wikipedia's gender classification schemes in categories suggests that a broader conversation should be started after this closes, perhaps at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality and notifying Wikipedia:WikiProject_Gender_Studies.
Nonetheless, for those who have repeatedly said "having one for female is silly when you don't have one for male", I point you to WP:Cat gender, which states "As another example, a female heads of government category is valid as a topic of special encyclopedic interest, though it does not need to be balanced directly against a "Male heads of government" category, as historically the vast majority of political leaders have been male by default." Wikipedia is chock *full* of categories where there is a female category without an equivalent male category, which to me makes "male" seem like the norm. And even though the guidelines state that females should not only be diffused but rather included in both cats (to avoid the ghettoization problem), this contraindicates every other categorization guideline, by which we always diffuse and don't keep cats in the parent - having a special exception for gender is just confusion (as you can see above) - and in any case people don't follow that guidance.
If you look at a similar discussion I started a little while back for Women and death, which I also felt seemed to indicate some sort of special relationship with death that women have whereas no-one had bothered to create Category:Men and death, you'll also notice that no-one is calling for a merge up to Category:Death. Here's another example: Category:Murderers_by_nationality - which has Category:Female_murderers_by_nationality - although I seriously doubt such a category would merit a NY times article nor the accusations of sexism and bias shown above - but such sub-categorization does reinforce the "male" as normal and the female as "exceptional" - so I do hope that this guideline will be rewritten, and that we (almost) never ever again create a female cat in the absence of a male one.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 03:50, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Some interesting data:
Category name contains Number
"women" 8,177
"men" 6,006
"female" 1,946
"male" 1,201
And I just found another category to debate: Category:Male prostitutes by nationality but we have no equivalent Category:Female prostitutes by nationality. Oh dear...--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 04:17, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Procedural point The initial nomination is procedurally unsound. We cannot just merge this to Category:American novelists because this will remove the contents from its other two parents, Category:American women writers and Category:Women novelits. If we were to merge this category we should also make sure that all the contents are placed in those two categories. That will probably need individual precision in the case of Category:American women writers because in the process of building up this category I often left women in that category if they were notable for writing biographies, memories or other things that we did not have a specific women category for. As it is, no one has explained why this category should go when we have sister cats like Category:American women essayist, Category:American women dramatists and playwrights and Category:American women screenwriters. Since I created the last category I can tell you why I did so. I created that category because Category:Women screenwrtiers with over 600 articles was getting large, and it is generally acceptable to diffuse categories by nationality. I did not realize that Category:American women essayists even existed when I started working on diffusing Category:Women novelists into nationality categories, so there are in fact some people left in Category:American women writers because they were essayists. I think we need a logical discussion of this whole issue, without people resorting to accusing those who hold other opinions of being "sexisits".John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:12, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment for what its worth, based on the guidelines on categorization by gender, I would say we should leave this category, but remove [[:Category:American women essayists]. Why do I say that, because Category:American novelists has 10 sub-cats that are genere related instead of being related to ethnicity, gender, or being specialized prize-winner categories, while the essists category has no such sub-cats. Specifically it says "Also in regards to the "ghettoization" issue, an ethnicity/gender/religion/sexuality subcategory should never be implemented as the final rung in a category tree", thus the women novelists is not the final rung, because we have Category:American historical novelists and the other nine genre sub-cats, but in the essayist category it is the final rung.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:20, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment As of a few minutes ago, we had finally added back all of the removed "American novelists" categories to all the women in the "American women novelists" category. But now JPL is re-doing his removals, despite clear consensus on this page and elsewhere that that was the wrong thing to do. It's not clear what's going to happen to the categories in the future, but it's absolutely clear to almost everyone here that the situation where only male authors are listed under the main category is a bad idea. So I'll repeat publicly what I just put on JPL's talk page: Please stop re-removing "American novelists". You're not helping. Now that we're back to where things were before your well-intentioned but ill-considered changes, please let the Wikipedia discussion process come to a decision about how to move forward. --Elysdir (talk) 04:25, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, adding back removed "American novelists" categories was not helpful. It's double categorization what should be avoided. In any way you should have waited until this discussion is closed before changing actual articles. Even if there's a consensus on not having males in parent category and females in child category, there are more than one solution to do so. And JPL seems to be the most reasonable person in this whole discussion, please don't attack him. Netrat (talk) 12:50, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The nomination has not closed. There is no consensus to do anything. Anyway the specific cases involved not only reversions of this specific category but other categories, and the total removal of this category. Categories that still exist should not be removed from people who clearly fit in the category. In fact what was done in those cases was an out-of-process, backhanded deletion of the category which is clearly against the norms of wikipedia.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:38, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
"The nomination has not closed. There is no consensus to do anything." John, that's precisely when you should most of all refrain from making edits. Focus on the discussion - in particular, focus on listening to others, until a consensus emerges. THEN, act. -GTBacchus(talk) 06:41, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sorry, bud, but this is really your (compatriots'?) bad. You (all?) should never have "added back all of the removed 'American novelists' categories" when we were in the middle of a discussion about whether to delete or merge or keep the American Woman Novelist category. You don't get to unilaterally decide the consensus mid-discussion. So it was a mistake to add the categories back before the discussion was closed, and you should probably have known better even if you weren't aware of this discussion. Now, does that excuse JPL re-removing the categories? I'm not sure. Obviously edit wars are unproductive and undesirable, but at the same time it was premature to re-add the categories. But regardless, I don't think the righteous tone is super helpful. AgnosticAphid talk 09:07, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. I've been making this argument for six years, and I see no reason to stop now. The diffusion of women into a separate category leaves only men in the main category, and this is a mistake. I know that quite a bit more Category:Women by occupation subcategories have popped up in recent years, and I think the reaction on the internet shows why they're a problem. Let's turn this car around.--Mike Selinker (talk) 04:36, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
comment Not sure if I would agree with a wholesale merge of the women by occupation cats. I just think that if we *ever* create a woman-specific cat, we should create a male specific cat, and always diffuse. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 04:41, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Why "always diffuse"? What about the heads of state example? Being a female head of state is notable. It doesn't, however, mean that one should not be browsable as a generic head of state as well. -GTBacchus(talk) 09:59, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment As I said before we have a long list, it is List of novelists from the United States. It includes both males and females, it includes people of all ethnicites, it includes at least in theory the many romantic fiction writers who were not put into a gender category, but were not found in the American novelists category because they were in Category:American romatic fictions writers which is a sbu-cat of the novelists category. Categories are not meant to be overly large, and the effect of recent edits has actually been to add people who were in genre-sepecfici subcats of Category:American novelists into the non-genre specific subcats. The whole nashing of teeth about this and calling people "sexist" is totally uncalled for. As BHG pointed out we have a long and thought out reason to divdie out women in writing seperately, and it is not a result of sexism by people in wikipedia.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:03, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Support While I don't agree with all of JPL's arguments, I think his reasoning here is sound - people are massively misunderstanding the purpose of the Category:American novelists category - it is really a holding ground for people who have yet to be categorized into a more specific sub-cat. I do think not having a Category:American male novelists category is problematic and leads to the ghettoization problem, but if you have an author already in Category:American fantasy writers there is absolutely no reason to bubble them up to Category:American novelists also - it's not some sort of club that you have to be part of - if you are in a sub cat, you are by definition a member of the main cat - that's what sub-category membership implies.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 04:46, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
There is one for American male novelists, though not with that specific name, and John's been working to add articles to it. Someone has nominated that one for deletion too (see the log for April 25).--The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 04:55, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment The closer should consider that the use of terms like "sexism" in describing this issue by the New York Times and others may have scared away some editors from commenting on this. To some extent this seems to be a case of trying to bully people who hold different views. I also can't help feeling that the fact that this has been presented in very biased ways in the media, such as ignoring the 10 genre sub-cats, is argubably a form of unacceptable canvassing.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:48, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with the sub-cats is that people aren't properly diffused into them. There are 4,000+ authors in the main "American novelists" category. You can't say with any amount of honesty that the majority of them don't belong in a genre sub-category. So it comes back to the point that several people made earlier - either merge or completely diffuse. I like the idea of diffusion, as a list of 4,000 people is useless from a navigational perspective. But maintaining a parent category that has any substantial number of articles is wrong if you're removing people to put them in a sub-category. Either everyone belongs in a sub-category (genre first, gender secondary), or everyone belongs in the parent category. Your arguments throughout this whole conversation have ignored that problem. --SlowWalkere (talk) 05:15, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I would question the dogma that a list of 4,000 people is useless from a navigational perspective. I've seen in the course of this very controversy someone talking about how they have wanted to search for an American novelist based on nothing but a vague idea of their last name. What this person wanted was precisely a list of all the American novelists covered by Wikipedia so they could go through it and try to jog their memory. I'd say in general that people may use the category system in ways that we don't always foresee. -GTBacchus(talk) 06:28, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Construct a category "American male novelists". The reason for having a separate category for each is that they may be looked for separately--in the creative arts, many things are valid distinctions. We're a NPOV encyclopedia, and any distinction people make should be recognized, whether or not we think making such a distinction socially desirable. It's only our continuing sexism that makes us think female anything a subordinate category, a survival of the early 20th century when it was an exception for those in any profession to be women, and even from the 19th, where those women in a profession were thought to be in some way inferior to the men -- a time when male novelists were assumed to write serious fiction, and women to write what by comparison was trivial. If we think this separation to be ghettoization, that indicates we subscribe in our own minds to those antiquated ideas, or, to word it more charitably, are at least are afraid that we might be thought to so subscribe. Myself, I am not just constructing a hypothetical argument, when I say the category women novelists is helpful because those are the ones I find I prefer to read. In a practical sense, in another field of the arts I am adding biographies of women because I think them under-represented here, and to do this I make use of such books as directories or encyclopedia of women in that field. Is it wrong to have such books? Is it wrong to add articles on that basis?
In actual practical terms, as pointed out on Jimmy's talk page, cross categorization by intersections is the way to resolves all the sub-categorization dilemmas; then those who wish to look for any arbitrary group of anything can find what they are looking for. In the meantime, all divisions by sex or nationality or religion should include everybody in reciprocal groups. (and to deal with those in more than one group, to list them as many times as necessary, and, if needed perhaps because of lack of information, to have a group of unclassified.) The basis of censorship is to not include or to deemphasize information that we think might be put to a bad use. DGG ( talk ) 05:13, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Another issue that people seem to be ignoring is that this is probably a justified subdivision of Category:American women writers based on the size of that category, at over 1,400 articles. For example I just added Rochelle Alers to this category, without removing her from any category using the word "novelist" mainly because she was in none. Ms. Alers is in a novelist category called Category:American romance fiction writers, which is up for consideration of renaming to use "novelists", a discussion that I hope some people who have contributed here would join. If we merge this category its almost 300 articles will be added to the large and broad Category:American women writers. Considering that it is really only through the end of the Bs that this category had been implemented, and it has not really been applied even that far to most of those articles in genre or ethnic sub-cats, I would expect that this category would come close to 1,000 entries when fully developed.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:50, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I wish people would understand "assume good faith" and stop with the accusations of sexism. They would have a lot more credibility if they had not cherry-picked this one cateogry out of a whole slew of sub-cats of Category:American women writers, or ;Category:Women novelists by nationality. As long as Category:Women novelists by nationality exists, to remove this category makes no sesne, unless someone comes up with an American specific reason to delete this cateogry, and "the New York Times ob-ep said we should" is not a good enough reason.John Pack Lambert (talk) 06:47, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Unless the decision is made about Category:Women_novelists as a whole and all its subcategories - there are 51 subcategories in Category:Women novelists by nationality! And 115 subcategories in Category:Women writers by nationality, there's no point to do something about a single given category. It's a shame we doing all this buzz just because someone who does not anything about how Wikipedia works wrote some column in NYTimes. Netrat (talk) 07:07, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment The "wikipedia bumps" articles were also disingenous. In the case of Category:Australian women novelists a large percentage of the contents were moved from Category:Australian women writers and Category:Women novelists without having been directly in Category:Australian novelists (although many of these were also in Category:Australian children's writers, which some may have felt was more or less a sub-cat of novelists, even though it technically is not). With the case of Category:Scottish women novelists, some of them were and are in Category:Scottish historical novelists and I found them to add to the women category by going through that category. They may have been "bumped" from Category:Scottish women writers by this process, but before and after they remained in Category:Scottish historical novelists.John Pack Lambert (talk) 07:27, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment the rhetoric of "exclusion" ignores the fact that we have just over 200 articles in Category:American historical novelists, a great many of them not in the parent, and probably none or virtually none of them should be in the parent. The diffusion of this category has been less than fully done even were articles have been put in sub-cats. Some of the recent edits have made this problem even worse.John Pack Lambert (talk) 07:40, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment The guidelines make it very explicit that the head article need not exist, jsut that it can exist. Not only could we write a substantial head article, but Barbara Christian wrote a book entiteld Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, so there is probably enough material to justify as a sub-category of this category Category:African-American women novelists. I think if those who made a stink about this had faced up to the fact that James Baldwin is not in Category:American novelists and told their readers why, there would be a lot less accusations of discriminatory intent invovled here. Why is James Baldwin not in Category:American novelists, my guess is because people decided that 32 categories was enough, and there was no reason to put him in multiple levels of the same type of artistic endevor, since he was a poet, playwright, essayist and short-story writer as well as novelist.John Pack Lambert (talk) 07:49, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment someone said "people do not look for novels by the gender of the author". Well, this category is not about articles on novels, it is biographical articles on people. For that we have Category:American novels, which interestingly enough does have a sub-cat Category:American novels by ethnic background.John Pack Lambert (talk) 08:08, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I am really outraged at the bold-faced lies told about this. We have List of novelists from the United States that covers everyone in an alphabetic list. The people who have written about this have ignored that list. We should not encorage such ignoring of the reality. Category:American novelists is not meant to contain all American novelists in one setting. Those who are objecting to this thing do not even understand how categories work.John Pack Lambert (talk) 08:08, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, you missed the point. You wrote: We have List of novelists from the United States that covers everyone in an alphabetic list." But this discussion is about categories, not about lists--your comment about lists is irrelevant. The point here is that the category in fact did not "cover everyone in an alphabetic list"-- it had been a category from which women writers had been removed. If you remove women novelists from the category "American novelists," it is very hard to escape the conclusion that, in Wikipedia's view, women are not novelists. Those who are objecting to this do not understand that if you leave some people (but not others out of a category), that implies that according to Wikipedia they are not in that category.Geoffrey.landis (talk) 13:12, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
No, Geoffrey, *you* missed the point. Several of the newspaper articles and blogs have called Category:American novelists a list, and have mixed up lists and categories, and have implied that wikipedia has a master list of novelists and women are being removed from it. As your comment above shows, even you - a seemingly experienced editor, massively misunderstand categories. From whence do you get this notion that "it is very hard to escape the conclusion that, in Wikipedia's view, women are not novelists."?? The wikipedia categorization system is meant to aid in navigation, it is not meant to be the end-all/be-all of who someone is. Let's take a different example - I'm going to use your same words: "If you remove mystery writers from the category "American novelists," (to diffuse to Category:American mystery writers it is very hard to escape the conclusion that, in Wikipedia's view, mystery writers are not novelists." Do you see how ridiculous that sounds? It's simple diffusion to a more specific sub-category. By moving them down, you are *not* removing them from their claim to membership in the parent. I could come up with 100 other examples but I won't bore you - just take a browse around the wikipedia category system, and read the guidance on categorization, which explicitly states that you should not put something in the parent and the child. There may be an exception proposed here for gender and ethnicity cats, but even that IMHO is problematic and way too prone to error.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 15:00, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Women in fields of arts are a typical, specific study object. No objection if people want to create and populate similar "male" and "other" (unknown, couples, ...) categories. Representing this as if the women are removed from the category is showing a misunderstanding of how our categorization system works; a subcat is an integral part of a parent cat: if you recategorize someone from "people from country X" to "people from city Y", you are not ghettoizing them, you are not removing them from the country category; you are making the category more specific to improve searchability and usability. Just look at the difference between Google Books for "American women novelists"148,000 results vs. "American male novelists"109 results or "American male novelists" 5979 results. Fram (talk) 08:21, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment the claim that Caegory:American novelsits is not realitically diffusable is higly questionable. I think we can diffuse it. I think we should do so on a variety of criteria, but with 11 by genre (well, if you count "children's novels" as a genre) sub-cats, I think we are well on our way to diffusing it.John Pack Lambert (talk) 08:26, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. It's pointless to categorise people by gender unless their gender has a definite bearing on their role. In the case of writers it clearly does not. -- Necrothesp (talk) 09:25, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Clearly? These booksdisagree, as do many substudies (Black American women novelists, Native American wome novelists, ...). Fram (talk) 09:35, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • So, we're going to sub-categorise every single profession by race and gender are we? Or are we just singling out writers because their gender might (and only might) impinge on their writing? Because the vast majority of the novels I've read could quite easily have been written by someone of either gender. Utterly pointless and needless overcategorisation. We should categorise if things are relevant and only if they're relevant. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:08, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • Yes, of course the vast majority of novels could have been written by anyone; that's why we don't categorize novels by the gender of the author. However, categorizing the authors by gender is a different story. Like it or not, but there are still aspects of being a female author that have notability relative to being a male author. The sources Fram provided make that clear. Powers T 11:58, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep and make category for male novelists, and unclassifiable, too. My reason is that I can see a female novelist category being useful if I were a student of women in literature, or gender studies, and likewise a male category would be potentially useful. I don't support blaming visitors for not immediately noticing the subcategories and reject the argument that being moved to a subcategory is no change in status from being in the supercategory. My preferred solution is to list all novelists as "novelist" and "[gender] novelist", because there is a clear use case for a complete list of American novelists without regard to gender (i.e. an American literature student). Suitov (talk) 09:38, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - The topic of female novelists is very important and heavily documented. WP readers doing research often will need access to this particular subset of writers. Keeping this gender-based category will lead to the creation of a "Male novelest" category, which is not ideal, but that is the lesser of two evils. Merging both genders into a huge category deprives readers of important information. --Noleander (talk) 10:27, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Both gender categories would still be huge. All can be kept in "American novelists" even if women also had a separate category for women. As someone who writes and researches novelist articles, the gender split would be nonsensical and disruptive to me.--Milowent • hasspoken 13:07, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I propose a change to the way categories are handled, which would avoid this and other similar issues. It would, however, require a change to the way WP handles categories.

Instead of having to separately categorize an author into “American”, “Novelist”, “Women”, “Fantasy writers”, etc., create a sub-category for each permutation of type of writer, genre, nationality, gender, etc.

These categories should then automatically roll up to the parent categories, i.e. American Novelist, etc. This way the master lists don't need to be separately maintained. This would solve multiple problems with the current system. The parent categories would be very large, but that is a the way they should be. Adding a search by name, last initial, or something similar, would help navigate the category. EricKent (talk) 13:12, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • "A gender-specific category could be implemented where gender has a specific relation to the topic."
  • "Dedicated group-subject subcategories, such as Category:LGBT writers or Category:African-American musicians, should be created only where that combination is itself recognized as a distinct and unique cultural topic in its own right. If a substantial and encyclopedic head article (not just a list) cannot be written for such a category, then the category should not be created. Please note that this does not mean that the head article must already exist before a category can be created, but that it must at least be possible to create one."
  • "For example, LGBT writers are a well-studied biographical category with secondary sources discussing the personal experiences of LGBT writers as a class, unique publishing houses, awards, censorship, a distinctive literary contribution (LGBT literature), and other professional concerns, and therefore Category:LGBT writers is valid. However, gay people in linguistics do not represent a particularly distinct or unique class within their field, so Category:Gay linguists should not be created."
  • "As another example, a female heads of government category is valid as a topic of special encyclopedic interest, though it does not need to be balanced directly against a "Male heads of government" category, as historically the vast majority of political leaders have been male by default. Both male and female heads of government should continue to be filed in the appropriate gender-neutral role category."
FYI—--Carwil (talk) 13:13, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Request for Clarification (second time) I continue to think that there is an ambiguity in this discussion that has to do with display. If I am understanding the category hierarchy correctly, a women in American Women Novelists is in American Novelists. Yet for any given writer, only one of these will appear on his or her page, and clicking on Category:American novelists lists only those novelists not in a subcategory. This is not necessarily how most people understand categories and subcategories (in general, not just on Wikipedia) to work. At the very least, the page displayed when someone clicks on Category:American novelists should have an option to display "all members of subcategories." Right now it creates the wrong impression that subcategory members are not part of the higher-level category. That is factually wrong, but difficult for users to see, and is the cause of the current confusion. How about a fix in the way category pages are displayed, either including subcategory members, or providing a clear toggle to allow this? Right now, the top-level category page looks as if members of the subcategory are not members of the top category, which is not true.Wichitalineman (talk) 13:28, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I cannot see why you are saying "Right now it creates the wrong impression that subcategory members are not part of the higher-level category?" when it does not create such impression (not to mention that any impressions are way too subjective to ever consider them - different people will have different impressions, just like tastes). Subcategories are clearly listed at the top of each category page. Any subcategory is a part of its parent category by definition. This is what sub- prefix means! If people fail to understand such basic things, they should get some education. They could read subcategory article at the very least. And by the way, making any change to MediaWiki software is waaaaay harder than anyone here can imagine. Netrat (talk) 15:41, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
"If people fail to understand such basic things, they should get some education" is not one of the principles by which I understand Wikipedia to operate. We do our best to make it as transparent and easy to use as possible. People *are* widely misunderstanding, and it does a disservice to the users--including those trying to educate themselves by using Wikipedia--to suggest that they need some arbitrary level of education in order to use it. Yes, they need to read, etc., but the proper members of classes and subclasses (esp. when there is nothing directly on those pages to explain this) is not the philosophy of Wikipedia as I understand it (I think there are even some explicit principles regarding this but I'm rushing right now). Wichitalineman (talk) 16:02, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This has performance implications - because you're not just talking about subcats, if you're serious about capturing everyone, you'd have to recursively pull in all of the subcats of the subcats of the subcats. In any case, this CfD is not the appropriate venue for a technology challenge such as that - maybe to go village pump.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 15:09, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Saying that the category should not be merged because there are other sub-categories of writers that are not, is disingenuous. The problem came to attention with this specific category, but the solution should apply to all sub-categories. Not merging women is sexist. Not merging black writers is racist. Saying that this is the way that it has been done, is the equivalent of those who said that women shouldn't vote, or that slavery shouldn't be abolished. When something this egregiously wrong occurs, it will attract the attention of the general public. Saying that they don't understand the way WP works, and therefor should be ignored, is irresponsible. This will seriously damage the credibility of WP. EricKent (talk) 13:29, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Nothing disingenious about it, just a difference of opinion. You support the notion that pages should be in subcategories and in parent categories, not just in subcategories. Others disagree. A random example: Susanna Carr is a member of Category:American romantic fiction writers, but not directly of Category:American novelists (nor of Category:American women novelists). Does this mean that she isn't considered to be an American novelist? Not at all. Can people understand it in this way though? Apparently they can. Most people only choose to read it like this only for the "women novelists" cat though, and not for other cats. This selective outrage seems to be either fake or a case of incorrectly applied political correctness. No one seems to be saying though that people who genuinely misunderstand this or disagree with the method of categorisation in general should be ignored: people are looking for a solution (e.g. the many "merge and keep" votes), but there probably won't be a solution that pleases everybody, and rushing to a solution because of some rather inflammatory newspaper reports is rarely the best way to proceed. Note that e.g. Category:British women writers exists since 2007 without apparently any problem (it doesn't even have a talk page). Fram (talk) 13:47, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I agree with the editor who suggested "Keeping this category and Depopulating Category:American novelists, putting all articles in relevant sub-categories". Invertzoo (talk) 14:14, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment As I said before we have a long list, it is List of novelists from the United States. It includes both males and females, it includes people of all ethnicites, it includes at least in theory the many romantic fiction writers who were not put into a gender category, but were not found in the American novelists category because they were in Category:American romatic fictions writers which is a sbu-cat of the novelists category. Categories are not meant to be overly large, and the effect of recent edits has actually been to add people who were in genre-sepecfici subcats of Category:American novelists into the non-genre specific subcats. The whole nashing of teeth about this and calling people "sexist" is totally uncalled for. As BHG pointed out we have a long and thought out reason to divdie out women in writing seperately, and it is not a result of sexism by people in wikipedia.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:03, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment I am asking again of John Pack Lambert, specifically because you are the editor who is most responsible for this action and you refer repeatedly to the proper understanding of category application: why can't the category pages include a toggle to display or not display members of subcategories? This is a very standard way for categories to operate and the lack of such a toggle is in large part responsible for the misunderstanding that is driving this controversy. It is going to come up again and again if the "lowest-level category only" rule keeps being applied. Wichitalineman (talk) 14:38, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure why you're asking him - go ask over at the Village Pump or ask the media wiki developers. They're not going to add this because for higher level categories there would literally be millions of pages - it's not just direct sub-cats, it's their subcats too. If you want all members of a cat and subcats, there are external tools which allow this but they are slow - for a reason.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 15:09, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I was asking him because his responses seem to depend on the availability of such a function--otherwise his continual references to the subcategories "being part of" the larger categories is not that useful, since users can't see that. If there was not some other goal in operation here I would think he would agree with my point about display, because display is the issue that people have been pointing to, whereas John Pack Lambert keeps pointing to the underlying "reality" of the categories. As a side note, if there are truly categories with millions of pages, that would seem to suggest that the top-level American Novelists (and even above that, American Authors, and above that Americans?) is never going to be too big, as it will never grow beyond hundreds of pages. However, I agree now with the solution below from Carwil that this problem is solved by making American Women Writers a "non-diffusing" "distinguished" subcategory. Wichitalineman (talk) 15:25, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, try this. Click on a category. See the bottom part of the page? That shows all the pages that are directly in the category. See the middle part of the page? The part labeled "Subcategories"? Those are all of the categories that are members of this category. That's what JPL means when he says the subcats are PART OF the larger cats - as they are, and are displayed that way on the screen, and can easily be navigated to from the category screen. Also I didn't say there are cats with millions of pages (though those also exist), my point was once you start adding subcategories recursively, many higher-level cats could end up with millions of pages from their children, and thus become basically useless.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 15:36, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I understand and had understood the subcategory point you are making and knew they are displayed on the higher-level pages; my point all along has been that it is not transparent to users that the subcategories available there mean that members of those are members of the top-level class (via set-theoretical commutation). On the second point, I see what you are saying about the "millions" issue. I'm still interested in the raw numbers: how big is too big for any given level of categorization? Who decides? Wichitalineman (talk) 15:55, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep—The category is notable, it should just be marked by Template:Distinguished subcategory. Also, reply to John Pack Lambert's last comment: A system where men appear in the default category while women are appear in the women's category looks sexist. I don't care if you are sexist, just whether Wikipedia's interface is. Fundamentally, your arguments ("Categories are not meant to be overly large") are about our filing system, and not about how users access human knowledge, so please get over it. Wikipedia is mostly visited by readers, not editors. It's our job to make their lives and visits easier, not to make ourselves happier about the simplicity of our filing system.--Carwil (talk) 14:36, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment Thank you for this, which I agree with. Can you clarify about how "distinguished subcategory" works? I have checked Wikipedia:Categorization and it isn't explicated at length. Is the point that "American Women Novelists" should be a "non-diffusing category" (Wikipedia:Categorization#Subcategorization)? Wichitalineman (talk) 15:25, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • Non-Diffuse, or better yet, make a separate category, please Wow, this forum has become nearly unnavigable due to such interest! I've gleaned that there is a popular point, which I will try to put in my own words: •It's sexist to subcategorize women authors but not men (Therefore, either 1- subcat neither, Or 2- subcat both). I disagree—not that it's sexist, but that either of those two solutions is good. We NEED to acknowledge that women novelists are important as a category unto themselves, much like Category:Female heads of government — I mean, editors aren't making a category called "Male heads of government", nor should we. However, don't hide the American Women Novelists, especially if there isn't a further subcat inside it. Previous commenter makes an important point: Wikipedia:Categorization#Subcategorization suggests this can be a non-diffuse category. HOWEVER, there's an even better way, as per Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality which states:

QUOTE ... Also in regards to the "ghettoization" issue, an ethnicity/gender/religion/sexuality subcategory should never be implemented as the final rung in a category tree. If a category is not otherwise dividable into more specific groupings, then do not create an E/G/R/S subcategory. For instance: if Category:American poets is not realistically dividable on other grounds, then do not create a subcategory for "African-American poets", as this will only serve to isolate these poets from the main category. Instead, simply apply "African-American writers" (presuming Category:Writers is the parent of Category:Poets) and "American poets" as two distinct categories. ENDQUOTE

Let's fix this, but let's fix it in a smart way that doesn't downplay women novelists as a distinct group worthy of recognition, yet also doesn't force a "male novelists" category in useless pursuit of gender parity. And let's do it also in a way that lets Harper Lee, Ralph Ellison, and Robert Heinlein be in the same category of American Novelists. (As a purely personal opinion, I'd mention that we don't have to include Gloria Tesch, John Ringo, or Joy Deja King; they can go in subcats). Mang (talk) 15:41, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

      • Exactly, the "non-diffusing category" American novelists would be marked by {{All included}} (perhaps with non-difusion only applying to ethnicity/gender subcategories) and its ethnic and gender subcategories would be marked by {{Distinguished subcategory}}. Both are mentioned on the Subcategorization page. (The fact that the templates have more common-sense names, while the policy pages have more technical names is part of the user-friendliness vs. technical aspect of our wikipedia culture.)--Carwil (talk) 15:15, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • comment This whole discussion is frankly ridiculous and full of exaggerated rage and bogus accusations of sexism. Why aren't the NY Times and Huffington Post and all of the SPA commenters in this discussion going after THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS - which, not surprisingly, has the same cats as we do here: American novelists, and American women novelists. Here is a book by Anne Rice - who is a pretty famous novelist if you ask me - and she is categorized as a woman novelist and not as a novelist. Are you guys all ready to start writing letters to the library of congress to deal with this? And are any of those who are outraged by this willing to do the actual hard work to clean up not just the American category, but all 50 other countries where this is an issue? --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 15:30, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The U.S. Government also supported slavery; its not the same thing. I'll volunteer to clean up any categories for every country, once we have the resolution straight, I am sure I can recruit others. But it better not including putting Dawn Langley Simmons in Category:British intersex novelists.--Milowent • hasspoken 15:53, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Wow. I think you just won the Godwin award. Well done. I'm not quite sure how your deft logic works, but I remain stunned that you were able to link the library of congress categorization scheme to slavery, and using only 11 words. Awesome!
As to Intersex novelists, that's an interesting one. Why not? If there is a field of study around media/art/books/etc by intersex people, why wouldn't we create such categories? I guess we sort of do, since we have Category:LGBT writers from the United Kingdom - not sure if Dawn fits into the 'T' there.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 16:01, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, speaking of Godwin, this whole activity is akin to nazi soliders "just carrying out orders," glad to see you make the comparison. For my next trick I shall link Rebecca Black to the Justinian Code. As to Intersex novelists, its fine to have a "women's writers" or "lgbt writers" category, but not as a subcategory of novelist. Novelists are novelists, this division of all novelists by gender instead of using additional separate cats is arbitrary and stupid.--Milowent • hasspoken 17:46, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I second calls for lowering the wikistress on this. The major media coverage is clearly deteriorating the Assume Good Faith ethic. -Aerolit (talk) 08:37, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Another break[edit]
  • Comment The claim that I am "the editor most responsible for this" is debatable. If we look at the article on Emily M. Danforth we see that a-it was created with ;Category:American women novelists but not Category:American novelsits back in February. I never edited any article into this category until earlier this month, in fact I think up until then I did not realize we even had by nationality sub-cats of Category:Women novelists, although this one existed since last October. It would really help if there was an easy way to trace edits adding to a category, since some people have decided to act as if I changed the nature of this category, when all I did was chagned its size.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:15, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It is additionally hard to justifiy claiming I am "most responsible" since I have never edited the catgory itself.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:16, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Are you denying that you added and removed categories on dozens of female author's pages earlier this month? No one else has engaged in such a concerted effort to remove women from the category of "American novelists", so you are, in fact, the "most responsible" for this particular effort. It seems clear that it was originally a good faith effort and not a sexist purge, but you really ought to spend a little more mental effort trying to understand the issues of visibility that resulted -- and that people have explained over and over in these comments. Moving women to a subcategory while leaving men in the main category has the effect of making those women less visible to people browsing the main category -- that is just the way it is in the Wikipedia interface. And please don't respond by saying "we have a men's category, too!", as you already have multiple times. That category did not exist until after this controversy began, and YOU PERSONALLY made no effort to create such a subcategory as a complementary effort as you were moving women out of the main category earlier this month. JLeland (talk) 16:48, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You are accusing me of being sexist when I followed the clearly existing at that time consensus that the intersection of women and writing is notable and having such an intersection is not important. The clear consensus is that having a category for men does not neccesitate on for women, nor the other way around. I have in fact created many categories related to men, siuch as Category:German male dancers. Anyway, the fact that I did not create the category, nor was I the first to put women in it and not in the parent you seem focused on (while not focused on how this makes women novelists less visible from the main category page of Category:American women writers) suggests that I was not the person who developed the scheme.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:57, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Where did I accuse you of being sexist? I specifically said, "It seems clear that it was originally a good faith effort and not a sexist purge". Regarding consensus, the gigantic discussion that is taking place makes it clear that if there is a consensus, it does not match what you thought it was. There are legitimate points being made about a lot of topics here, and whatever solution is chosen needs to take into account the very real issues of visibility vs. ghettoization vs. logical subgrouping by interest that commenters have brought up. JLeland (talk) 17:25, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The rhetoric of "purge" has no part. A purge is a systematic killing of people. No one was injured in this process, although with the amount of hullabaloo some have created you might think someone was.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:19, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I suggest you look up the definition of the word "purge". It does not mean "a systematic killing of people". The point at which you willfully start misinterpreting the English language just to bolster your sense of persecution is the point where you really ought to step away from the conversation and calm yourself down. JLeland (talk) 15:10, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • All this just confirms you started doing something and really had no clue what you were doing. And now you're trying to make something out of nothing, hoping that this shit storm will blow away with a token effort and a lot of playing the victim (below--"I find it higly objectionable"). I find it highly objectionable that we're the laughing stock of the internet because you weren't thinking. And to everyone else who says "oh they just don't understand how Wikipedia categorization works"--that may well be true but it's pretty much irrelevant. Such big things should have been realized beforehand to be big things, and they should be discussed. Drmies (talk) 15:01, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I was not the one who created this category. I was not the first person to move categories into it and out of the parent category. Even some of the editors above who have said this should never be done have actually done it. I think this points out that it is not workable to have categories be non-diffusing outside of award categories, because it creates too much category clutter. Your not seeing a problem with personal attacks as have gone on above is odd.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:21, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Drmies, your assertion that one ill-informed NYT op-ed makes us the "laughing stock of the Internet" makes it very hard to take anything you say seriously. I tend to agree with your overall point here, but the histrionics do you no service at all. Please calm yourself. -GTBacchus(talk) 00:56, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
GTBacchus, if you think the NYT is the only place/source/person/site/venue that has noticed and reported this Wikipedia gaff, then you are sadly out of touch., and it's impossible to take you seriously.
I don't. I've read about it in at least three different places, all of which referenced the NYT piece, and some of which criticized IT as failing to understand Wikipedia. None of that justifies your histrionics. "Laughingstock of the Internet" is a ludicrously over-the-top phrase, and I think you know that. This is a tempest in a teakettle, and I think you know that. -GTBacchus(talk) 12:07, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I find it higly objectionable that somone has tried to attack me on religious grounds in this discussion.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:19, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I would additionally say that the attacks on me on religious grounds are bigoted and narrow minded. It is telling that people who want to yell "sexism" are so quick to attack others religion. It is also very telling that their conclusions fail on any normal test. I was just reading Carol Cornwall Madsen's (an article I created) biography of Emmeline B. Wells and learned that in 1914 the magazine that Wells edited, the Women's Exponent shut down, partly because "The cuses that had given in life and relevance - women suffrage ... were part of the past" (Carol Cornwall Madsen, An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emeline B. Wells, 1870-1920 (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2006), p. 28), I would note that the elided part totally does not change the nature of the quote. Women's suffrage was no longer an issue to Mormon women in 1914 because in Utah where most then lived, they had had the vote continously for 18 years, and had it earlier but the federal government had rescinded it. Yet this was 7 years before women had the vote throughout the United States.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:05, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • The attacks on me are out of touch with reality in other ways as well. I actually opposed the creation of Category:Portuguese actresses when it was under discussion at first early last fall. I was persuaded by the eloquent arguments of Brown Haired Girl that in fact splitting acting categories by gender made sense and should be done. Those looking for some negative agenda in this recent editing are just plain wrong. I have created a whole slew of articles on women, such as Mia Love, Patricia T. Holland (which survived a recent delete attempt), Camille Fronk Olson (which did not survive a delete attempt, she is a women who has written book length works on women in scripture), Valerie M. Hudson (one of the leading advocates of the idea that violence by a state is closely linked to violence against women), Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill (who has also advocated some of the same ideas), and many more. The attempts to accuse people of sexism do not make sense in light of the articles I have actually created. Creating more articles on women who have made notable contributions to academic disciplines is not a sexist activity, at least not in the sense of being "anti-women" as the term is generally meant to be.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:46, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • JPL, religious attacks are out of line, but you have been an outlier view when it comes to come of these cats. I understand you think female presidents should be called "presidentess", as has been noted on twitter. That's far outside the mainstream.--Milowent • hasspoken 18:01, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • So much for truthful representattion of someone's views. To begin with, if what I think is being discussed her is what is being discussed here, than it does not relate to any opinion I have ever expressed on wikipedia. I have never favored we start refering to Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as a "presidentess". In fact if my statement so characterized is the one that is under review, it is my statement that people who are currently most commonly refered to as "mission president's wife" should be refered to as "presidentess". Few people refer to the wife of the mission preisdeent as a "president", she is most often refered to as "the mission presidents wife". More or less, this is like advocating that we should refer to Michelle Obama or Laura Bush as "presidentess" (although this would only really be analogous if Mrs. Obama was a regular member of the cabinet). Thus, while I might if I could get people to embrace this langauge refer to Bonnie Oscarson as having been presidentess of the Sweden Goteborg Mission, I would not say that she has such a title in her present postion. That said, Eliza R. Snow was refered to by some people as "presidentess of women" in the LDS Church (see [6] this Nov. 21, 2009 Deseret News article) so I did not invent the term. However it is disingenous to say that I "think female presidents should be called presidentess". The people I made this comment about are not at present normally refered to as president. That is a total misrepresentation of my views.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:56, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • To give you a feel for the language currently sued to describe the postion I mentioned we have this line in the biography of Susan W. Tanner, one of the 347 women who currently holds the postion most often refered to as "mission president's wife", "Tanner is currently serving with her husband, who is president of the church's Brazil Sao Paulo South Mission; this assignment began in 2011 and is expected to end in 2014." I think I made a comment along the lines of using the term presidentess to this article [7] in the Deseret News, which says "the Mission Leadership Council, which will consist of the mission president and his wife, the assistants to the mission president, the zone leaders, and sister missionaries holding a newly created leadership position called sister training leaders." Making it clear at least in this usage her title is "mission presidents wife". A few paragraphs down "They will work closely with the mission president’s wife, who is now being asked to play a bigger role — depending on individual and family circumstances — in training and caring for sister missionaries." Thus the people I advocated we refer to as "presidentess" are not currently refered to as "preisdent", so the above comment totally misrepresents my argument. My comment on the article that is relevant here was " I have see some suggest calling the mission president's wife the "mission matriarch", in fact I have done that. She is also at times called the "mission mom". I have also known people who refered to the time when they presided over the mission as being "mission presidents" in the plural, suggesting both the husband and wife is president. Personally though I think the best term is "mission presidentess", and think I will start using the term." Well, actually it is probably not at all relevant here, in any way, but since I was attacked for it, I felt I needed to explain the circumstances involed, which do not match the accusation.John Pack Lambert (talk) 22:34, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep and merge There should be a general American novelist category with all novelists in it. Not just the men, or white men, or white straight men. Or whatever. I assume this will apply to novelists of other countries as well Peter Isotalo 16:49, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge, and diffuse all. Even white straight men deserve to have some sort of descriptor of who they are as novelists, no? They should not be the default, "neutral" listing. There shouldn't be individual pages in this Category at all, it is far too broad. Apparently an American woman being a novelist is still remarkable, but that should not be her main subcategory. There can be, and is, a LIST of women writers towards the purpose of research. Jodie (talk) 18:31, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep There is applicable guidance to this on the page Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality, which leads me to conclude that the appropriate resolution is a gender neutral listing (but not a "list") of pages in the category, as well as a subcategory of American Women Novelists, since this is of specific interest, but not a "defining" subcategory. The category of American Male Novelists is specious and a false parellelism, since there is no abiding interest in examining such authors as a subcategory. Removing "women novelists" from the listing of "novelist" pages while leaving men in the listing of pages is bizarre and inappropriate, and really amounts to vandalism. Taking it to the other extreme and just making this a category of subcategories, with few if any pages, makes no sense either. However, if one wants to go that way, it would be appropriate to have a (gender-neutral) category of American General Fiction Novelists (or similar) where Louisa May Alcott and John Updike can happily coexist. Separate but equal is inherently inequal. Here is the guidance of which I speak: "As another example, a female heads of government category is valid as a topic of special encyclopedic interest, though it does not need to be balanced directly against a "Male heads of government" category, as historically the vast majority of political leaders have been male by default. Both male and female heads of government should continue to be filed in the appropriate gender-neutral role category (e.g. Presidents, Monarchs, Prime Ministers, Governors General). Do not create separate categories for male and female occupants of the same position, such as "Male Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom" vs. "Female Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom"." Gsshatan (talk) 18:24, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong keep This is a critical category for the sake of women's history and feminist research. It provides readers and editors easy access to articles related to the subject. I also think articles should of course be listed in as many categories as relevant to the subject, of course. If this means we keep the generic American novelists category then women should be listed there, too. SarahStierch (talk) 18:44, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: we seem in danger of getting side tracked by supposed press "outrage". The editors crying that categorisations are sexist seem to be suggesting that there is some grand plan behind cat development. Categories grow and develop in the same way as most low-traffic articles - that is when one or two interested individuals focus on them. There maybe various editors keeping an eye out, but there is, to my knowledge, little overall monitoring of how categories are developing. People who get excited about articles on fly fishing target species spend their time organising the category. Like most of WP it grows organically and is unplanned and it will continue that way. The decision about the American novelists cat should be made in light of the whole cat system. Do we have a problem with category:Russian actresses, category:Turkish male figure skaters, category:American actresses, category:17th century men, Category:Female British police officers, category:Australian male cyclists? Are these 'ghettos'? We're only focusing on this one category because of press coverage, which makes no sense at all. Span (talk) 20:06, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge because it doesn't conform to gender neutrality guidelines. It also seems that diffusing all according to gender would explicitly exclude those who don't experience binary gender.Zentomologist (talk) 20:48, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Someone above says "no one is saying you are being sexist", well a previous commentor basically made a comment that if taken at face value would lead to us excluding people from editing because they believe in unapproved religions. Of coruse the person really, really does not get it, and probably should go read [8] since it might lead them to express less hostility toward Mormons. Ooops, should I link there. Maybe now someone will say BYU is sexist because it has a women's studies department, and I guess racist too since it has a Latin American studies department. Focusing on the intersection of being a women and being a novelist is hardly sexism. If someone was really sexist they would want to hide the fact that women do culturally helpful things like writing books, not make it even more obvious. The claims that these edits hide anything ignore the fact that sub-cats appear higher on the page then direct contents. It might have made sense to have this rhetoric if we still had the system where sub-cats only appeared on one page of a multi-page category, but we don't so a lot of the rhetoric here seems to come from not having ever dealt with the fact that when you go to a category the first thing you see at the top are the sub-cats, telling you that there is a whole sub-cat for women novelists.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:04, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I would actually argue that this category should survive, but Category:Haitian women novelists should probably be upmerged, although that would maybe have allowed the NYT to inflame even more knashing teeth. Of course why the New York Times did not deal with the many sub-cats of Category:Novelists by nationality that do not have a women sub-cat, like Category:Hungarian novelsits and Category:Brazilian novelists is slightly beyond me. Actually the easiest explanation is the person who wrote the inflamatory editorial went up to Category:Women novelists by nationality instead of to Category:Novelsits by nationality. At least64 novelsits by nationality categories do not have a women subcat. Of course some like Category:Afghan novelsits contain no one at all (and only four article), the same with Category:Cypriot novelists although it has only one. Category:Malagasy novelists does contain a woman (she is even in Category:Women novelists, but it also only has one article. Of course Category:Senegalese novelists has no direct contents, all articles involved there (also only one) are in the sub-cat Category:Senegalese women novelists.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:18, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If you really don't understand why the NYT (and every other media outlet in the world) has jumped on this, you clearly don't live in what we call reality. "Inflamatory editorial"--blame the messenger. Hey, JPL, where you gonna stick the transgendered people? And what if someone doesn't have a gender, or doesn't disclose it? Drmies (talk) 15:06, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It is not "every other media outlet in the world". I have searched the Washington Post and the LA Times and found no mention. Just because one writer decides to turn this into a personal crusade and gets other people to react, does not mean we should act rashly and jettison our policies. It certainly does not justify religious attacks on other editors, or lieing about what they have said. Both of those have been done against me.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:34, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
"Every other media outlet in the world"??? And you say I'm the one who can't be taken seriously? Rich. Keep it up. -GTBacchus(talk) 12:09, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep - some years ago the categories for American novels were all diffused (extremely long discussion here), which I disagreed with and still disagree with. Why we can't have American female novelists appear in the parent category and the sub-category is beyond me, but that, in my mind, is how they should be categorized. Truthkeeper (talk) 21:14, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Few people above have explained why they find this category troubling but not its parent Category:American women writers. My general reaction to Category:American writers is it needs to be split more finely, it has 2,800 entires, 36 sub-cats, several of which in turn have over 10 sub-cats. It did up until just now include the article Stephen Frey directly, which illustrates another reason why the hullabaloo misses a point. Frey was not in Caegory:American novelists at all, because he was just in the higher up writers cat. I would hope that this hubbub would get more editors to focus on fixing the specific lack of diffusion of Category:American writers, but the current process sees many editors fighting diffusion, with some adding people into Category:American novelists while they are already in genre-related sub-cats.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:35, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep, I think. This discussion is fascinating. It has revealed a fundamental problem with the "American Novelists" category and by implication with similar, high-level categories: The impulse to create and diffuse separate sub-categories relating to specific groups (e.g., American women novelists or American thriller writers or what have you) can have serious negative effects. Listen: Because the American Novelists category generates BOTH a list of subcategories AND a list of members of the American Novelists category, it appears - to the casual reader or inexperienced editor - to be compiling an inclusive list of the set "American novelists." (The separate existence of a List_of_novelists_from_the_United_States is not material to the question of the existence of an apparent list of American novelists on the "Category:American Novelists" page; we are talking about perception of this particular page.) Now, the current brouhaha resulted, it appears, from the recent energetic effort of one or more editors to follow up on the statement at the top of the "Category:American_novelists" page that "Pages in this category should be moved to subcategories where applicable. This category may require frequent maintenance to avoid becoming too large. It should directly contain very few, if any, articles and should mainly contain subcategories." What is the problem with this statement? Most sub-categories of novelists relate to (1) genre, (2) race, or (3) gender. The problem is that (as the root of this discussion shows) if this policy is actually pursued to its logical conclusion, AND the members of the subcategories are excluded from the higher-level "Category: American Novelists" - as the "Category diffuse" statement directs - one of two results occurs. (1) The list of members of Category:American Novelists becomes empty. (2) The list of members of Category:American Novelists dwindles to the set of white male straight cisgendered literary novelists - with the label "American Novelists" attached to them as if they are the only American Novelists. The question before the community is whether either of these is a desirable result - OR whether the community should put up with the existence of extremely large and truly inclusive categories like "American Novelists" rather than create the appearance of sexism and racism (and, for that matter, genre-ism). HistorianK (talk) 21:45, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge, for reasons detailed by Bearcat. Lookit, having women diffused into a gendered subcategory with men left as the sole occupants of the parent category is obviously unacceptable. Plus, gender neutrality guidelines is clear that gender-specific categories aren't appropriate where gender is not a specific aspect of the overall topic. Diffusion itself is not necessarily a bad thing, not at all; we just need to deal with this particular case now, and THEN perhaps clarify the policies on categorization and gender neutrality for the edification of all. JustDerek (talk) 22:26, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. It's the best of the bad choices under the current category system; having separate categories for male and female novelists is untenable, and having separate categories plus the umbrella category would be unnecessarily redundant. In the longer term, the entire category system needs to be replaced by a more flexible tagging system; see Crotalus's comment over on the discussion at American novelists. — Shmuel (talk) 22:31, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep seems to provide the best solution in terms of usefulnesss to readers and editors. Rjensen (talk) 23:14, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Whatever the outcome of this discussion people in Category:American mystery writers should not also be in Category:American novelists. There is no reason to not diffuse American novelists by genre, I wish people would stop undermining this diffusion.John Pack Lambert (talk) 23:15, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Some authors write in more than one recognized genre, while also writing in the (presumably default) category of "realistic fiction". Karen Joy Fowler is a good example. She has written some important speculative fiction novels, but is most well-known for her realistic novel "The Jane Austen Book Club". It simply doesn't make sense not to include her in the larger category. The more I consider it, the more I think that this concept of diffusion into subcategories is inherently flawed. JLeland (talk) 00:13, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep. In general. Women novelists should be included in the main American novelist category, and also in their own category. On the whole, the biggest problem here is that the category system is poorly designed and unmanageable. john k (talk) 23:39, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Agree that the problem is how the membership of categories is displayed. People go to the category and just see the male American novelists - shock horror! While this particular discussion is about a particular subcategory, the same discussion could be had about many subcategories all over WP. Yes, those of us who understand categorisation know that a member of a subcategory is a member of a parent category. Sadly, vast numbers of our readers don't know this. They just see the list of pages displayed when they click on the category. They don't realise they are expected to engage in a tedious recursive process of clicking every subcategory (and its subcategories) to obtain a complete list of category members and it's unrealistic to imagine our users will do that when there is a complex set of sub-categories. We need to think of a better way of managing display, or this discussion will just keep recurring. Kerry (talk) 00:08, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment People should really recall what Wikipedia is not before using this page to express their views and beliefs. Netrat (talk) 02:46, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • ""Merge."" A category of "Women Novelists" is simply not logical when compared to the other categories within American Novelists. Women write Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Mystery, Detective and any other category of fiction you can devise (except Men Novelists). The male authors are sorted into groups by the type of literature they write, not by their sex. The female authors should be sorted into categories in the same manner. It is simply laziness to throw any female novelist whose work you can't define or haven't bothered to read into "Women Novelists" and just move on. It is not a meaningful manner of sorting them. Women whose work does not fit into one of the substantive subcategories should simply remain in the top list -- although it would be neatest to put all the uncategorized authors of either sex into a subcategory called "uncategorized" and that way it doesn't give readers the impression that the really "important" authors are on the main list and "less important" genre authors are in separate genre pages. ALKinNYC (talk) ALKinNYC —Preceding undated comment added 03:48, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge: Friends, this needs to be switched back. Sincerely yours, an American woman Wikipedia editor since 2003 or 2005 or something equally forever ago in Wikipedia years. jengod (talk) 04:23, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge I would have thought that WP:Cat gender was clear enough on this subject. Hawkeye7 (talk) 06:00, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I dunno; that guidance is a big ambiguous. For instance it says "As another example, a female heads of government category is valid as a topic of special encyclopedic interest ..." Novel-writing was predominantly male for centuries ... women only became prominent after, say, 1900. For that reason, literary experts do often treat female writers specially (e.g. devoted essays & theses). WP categories should support researchers that want to study that gender-specific topic. --Noleander (talk) 12:38, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. Women writers are not placed on separate shelves in the library. --Bluejay Young (talk) 08:04, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep and do the same for all the other nationalities, occupational labels etc. too. Start now to design a new category and search system where users define queries based on single attributes like "female", "American", "novelist" applied to articles, rather than applying prefab categories like "American women novelists" at the article level. Such combinations should be user-defined search queries. (My second preference, for now, is Merge.) Andreas JN466 12:30, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep - If we're to have categories for easy searching, it is critical that we keep this category. However, the main category shouldn't be stripped of female novelists, leaving only men in the category. The main category should contain both, or none. Cheers, AstroCog (talk) 13:23, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I oppose the "merge and keep" option on grounds that categories are supposed to be hierachical. An article should not be included in both a category and a subcategory of that category. James500 (talk) 15:56, 27 April 2013 (UTC) If we allow articles to have redundant categories here (i.e. be in both the "American novelists" and "American women novelists" categories) that would have to be done as a decision to allow redundant categories everywhere. That would be a complete about turn on what we have been doing for years and would require massive changes right across the encyclopedia. James500 (talk) 22:37, 27 April 2013 (UTC) I am concerned about the name of "Category:American women novelists". I would be extremely reluctant to describe a female person as a "woman" unless she was actually married. I do not think the word "woman" necessarily refers to a female person who has attained the age of majority. I think that it can mean something rather different which some people would not consider to be a compliment if imputed to someone who is not in fact married. I think that the word "woman" is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for "wife" and that it has, to a substantial degree, retained the flavour of its original meaning in everyday speech. James500 (talk) 17:17, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. Either stick with Category:American novelists, or create Category:American female novelists and Category:American male novelists, but nothing should be done to suggest that "male" is the default. SlimVirgin (talk) 17:13, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep but we also need a male category. My reason for this is that woemn tend to write about different subjects from men. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:27, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The problem (as I understand it) isn't that there is a catagory for women but not for men. Rather, the problem is that female artists are being removed from the main category and placed into the subcategory. As an example, look at the edit history for Harper Lee. Lee is the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, an extremely well known and highly regarded novel. Yet when she was placed in the female novelists catagory, she was also removed from the 'American Novelists' catagory. Which, given she's arguably one of the most famous American Novelists out there, is just silly. mrstu —Preceding undated comment added 21:20, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Bearcat's comments above are not in line with what that editors actual actions have been. Back on April 10th Bearcat removed Fiona Zedde from Category:American novelists and put that person in Category:American women novelists which was then the only novelists category the person was in. Some people have also tried to make it like I was the person who decided to add people to this category while removing them from the parent, I may have done that the most often but other editors had done it before me. People are not really dealing with the fact that it is not helpful to have article in too many categories. That is exactly why we have List of novelists from the United States, because having everyone grouped together there has no negative effects of adding category clutter.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:38, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi John, I thought I explicitly named you when I commented on the issue of "category clutter" above. To reiterate, having a pretty filing system is not nearly as important as what our filing system says to our readers. Ghettoization (as mentioned and defined on Wikipedia:Categorization/Gender,_race_and_sexuality) is a problem for readers, where "category clutter" is a problem for editors. If you still don't get why this is a problem, please stare at these examples until you realize why they are offensive violate gender neutrality: [9] [10].
To zoom in onto these particular pages, having "American novelists" and "American women novelists" on the bottom of a writer's page doesn't take very much space, but does give readers the opportunity to click to one more overarching category. Neither "American novelists" nor "American women novelists" is going to be especially easy to navigate under our current software. Diffusing out half of it simply won't solve that problem (since there are still hundreds of pages on each), but will create a disturbing male default category. Moreover, diffusing the category by gender inhibits browsing for people of non-obvious genders, like an impressive number of novelists.
Now, if you want to argue that category clutter is more important than these issues, argue away, but please stop saying no one is arguing back.--Carwil (talk) 18:44, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment The claims that this category is out of line with rules fails to take into account this [11] which is the google scholar search for women novelists. We get things like "The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century", or "Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers". It is clear that the topic of women writing, and often specificcally women writing novels is a widely studied academic topic that clearly justifies the intersection of being a woman and being a novelist being something that is studied, analized, research and thus is very, very clearly something that is worth categorizing by.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:45, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I just added a link to List of novelsits from the United States at the top of Category:American novelsits. That should have been there long ago. It would have hopefully reduced the among of misguided accusations of bias on the part of some people. On the other hand, if people really wanted to see attempts to exclude a novelsit from being classified as a novelsits, they should have gone through the talk page on that article, and would have seen that at one point back in 2009 someone removed Stephanie Meyer from the list. Actually, since the edit history is direct, it would be able to tell all sorts of interesting things much more easily.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:54, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • You still ignore the fact that the directive urged us to depopulate the category in some way. The most heavy depopulation has not been in favor or gender, it has been into genre categories like Category:American historical novelists. The gnere-categories together are much larger then the gender categories at present.John Pack Lambert (talk) 18:29, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Which directive? Can you give a link? It's always baffled me that we can't have entries in two categories, that somehow categories are mutually exclusive. But I said that above. How do the new categories differ from the existing? I'd like to know which categories to use going forward. Truthkeeper (talk) 18:41, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, spot on. This has been a problem for years. It's often really helpful to have names in the main cat and in subcats, and this is one of those occasions. We should have an American novelists category for everyone (in case we're searching for names regardless of gender), then in addition a male and female one, which are informative in a different way. SlimVirgin (talk) 21:54, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • "but today the term is used for any historical work above a certain length" - not quite. A mystery novel is still a novel; a historical novel is still a novel; a romantic novel is still a novel; a science fiction novel is still a novel; a literary novel is still a novel and so on. Truthkeeper (talk) 20:57, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, that makes sense. Short stories and plays are fictional by definition. Novels are too. To be honest this is a huge mess that was bound to occur some day because not a lot of editors work in literature, fewer still in American literature, and the categories need work - obviously. Which goes to the point below. But we don't have the man/woman power for the maintenance to be honest. And no one has cared until a few days ago. Truthkeeper (talk) 21:33, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I meant to say "any fictional work above a cetain length", but I probably should have said "any fictional prose work above a certain length".John Pack Lambert (talk) 22:07, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment If it was properly maintined List of novelists from the United States would be by far the easiest way to search for a novelist by last name. Even with its size and many subcats Category:American novelists and its subcats are not comprehensive, three of the four articles in Category:American humor novelists were in neither Category:American novelists nor in any of its subcats before they were put in that category. On the other hand List of novelists from the United States seems to be only about a third the size of the direct contents of Category:American novelists.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:28, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I just moved List of novelists from the United States to List of American novelists.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:41, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge per my comments elsewhere on needless over-categorization -- soon to lead to "American female novelists using a male per-name" etc. It is sufficient to categorize American novelists as ... American novelists. Collect (talk) 21:48, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • merge and keep for the time being. merge because, while i understand how the category system is supposed to work, it is considerably more important that wikipedia's face towards its readers not be sexist than that us wikipedia's editors have a category system that allows us to put people into neat little boxes. and it's clear from seeing comments by many readers that the "disappearance" of female writers from the category of american novelists strikes them as sexist. it's not in wikipedia's best interest to tell them that they "just don't understand how the category system works"; it's part of our mandate to make this excyclopedia easy to use. keep (as non-diffusing distinguished per Carwil) because there is specific interest in women writers. creating a similar category for men is a misguided attempt for equity where none is necessary. also, gender is not binary. why is the parent category "too large"? i see only repeated statements that it is; i don't see any reasons. . if 4000 is too large to navigate, 2000 is as well, and 1000 probably too -- how will you solve that? diffusing women from it is clearly not the way to go. if i were looking for the name of an author which i only rememember vaguely, i would want a full listing (all genders, all genres) so i can quickly scan it. if i wanted to do some statistics by nationality, i'd want a full listing as well this discussion is the latest reminder that the category and search system needs a serious overhaul. lastly, John Pack Lambert -- please stop commenting so much. you have said your piece several times over, it creates a lot of clutter. y'all might also rethink editing in and around this category while the discussion is ongoing; it creates additional confusion when you change things underneath people's feet. piranha]] [[User talk:Piranha|(notify) (talk) 04:29, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Another arbitrary break[edit]
  • Comment I just notified the novelist wikipedia project of this discussion.John Pack Lambert (talk) 22:29, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality. This is a case of political correctness gone mad! Men and writing is not an interesting intersection, but the topic of women and writing has been extensively studied in academic literature. Women's studies (previously known as "gender studies") is an established academic field in the US. Therefore it is scientifically justified to have a subcategory reflecting the research interests of scholars in the field. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 23:49, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's an interesting use of the word "scientifically". Is the question of whether a Wikipedia subcategory is justified really a scientific one? That's not what I thought that word meant. -GTBacchus(talk) 00:53, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      There was a long argument in the US whether the politically motivated fields of gender studies and African American studies were real science or just political pseudoscience. Wikipedia does not have an opinion that. We just repeat what reliable peer-reviewed academic journals write on the topic. And they write a lot on women and writing. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 01:42, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      Yeah, I wasn't questioning whether Women's Studies counts as science. That's not a conversation I'm trying to start. Nor was I questioning whether the category is justified; I believe it is. I was questioning whether using the existence of academic disciplines to determine the validity of Wikipedia categories counts as science. Justifying a subcategory simply isn't a scientific pursuit, it's an editorial question. -GTBacchus(talk) 02:07, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      I would say the better way to explain this is "we have reliable, academic sources that study women writers as a topic". We have Women's writing in English which is a workable parent article for this category. We could easily create American women novelists and have that be more than a list, starting with Hannah Webster Foster and her work "The Coquette", discussing her not only publishing her novel anonymously, but also how she tried to frame it as not being a novel. We could move forward to the presence and deal with various reactions to Stephenie Meyer and the M-word that literary critics skip when speaking of her, be it Mormon, mother or morality.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:20, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Petri, a question for you. How many books and articles about "male literature" or "male writing" or "male writers" have to be written for you to consider it extensively studied - are your assertions above informed by fact, or are you just making sh*t up? And do you know the difference between Women's studies and Gender studies? I do hope so, since they aren't the same thing.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 01:37, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • Well the opening line on the article Women's studies is "Women's studies, also known as feminist studies or gender studies", so evidently to some people they are interchangable terms. Of course there are lots of things that could fall under gender studies, like studying issues related to fatherhood, that clearly are not women's studies. So the terms are not really synonymous, but some people clearly treat them as synonyms.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:24, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Just to be clear, this is not just a question for this category pair, but a far wider question that touches upon race and numerous other occupations and nationalities besides American writers. Any category system where top-level, default categories come to be populated mainly or exclusively by Caucasian males is blatantly racist and sexist. And if Wikipedia is not prepared to abolish such racism and sexism, then it deserves to be bludgeoned to a pulp in the media. Andreas JN466 02:10, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Does that describe Wikipedia today? Are most, or even many, of our top-level default categories populated mainly or exclusively by Caucasian males? -GTBacchus(talk) 02:15, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • Well, I observe that Walt Whitman is in Category:American poets, and Alice Dunbar Nelson is in Category:African-American women poets as well as Category:African-American poets. You tell me how many African-American women poets are in Category:American poets. Andreas JN466 02:27, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • It's a category of 3000 articles. Are you seriously asking me for a number? Do you think I'm denying that there is a bias, or asking whether there is a bias? I just opened up 18 American Poet articles at random, and I found one that was certainly African-American, seven that were clearly women (of uncertain race), and most of the others, I couldn't tell their race. Regardless, my question was regarding "most, or even many" of our top level people categories, and I don't believe it's been answered. I'm also not sure we have the facts to answer it now. I'm not even defensive about whether Wikipedia is "blatantly racist and sexist" - we probably are. I'm just trying to determine the scale of the issue. -GTBacchus(talk) 02:39, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
          • The answer to question is simple: yes, when parent categories are depopulated or whatever term is used, that's exactly what happens. If that's what we've been doing to all the categories throughout, then we have a big problem. I know that the novels have been problematic, imo, for years. Apparently the press agrees w/ me. Truthkeeper (talk) 02:45, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
            • Sigh. Yes, obviously that happens when parent categories are diffused into subcategories defined by minority status. My question was not whether we get racist and sexist results when that happens. That's obvious, and I'm not an idiot. My question was how often that happens. Do you know the extent to which this has happened, across lots of categories, or do you not know that? -GTBacchus(talk) 02:51, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
          • The scale of the issue is mitigated by the fact that most people are blissfully unaware of the category tree (which changes daily anyway) and of the pernicious idea that people should be "diffused" into gender- and ethnicity-based subcagetories. The best way to establish the scale of the problem is to go into subcategories for women and ethnic minorities (like categories for women composers, African-American poets etc.), and see how many of them are listed in the default parent category as well. In most cases, in my experience, they are not in the gender-neutral, ethnicity-neutral top category, and that is a problem, as explained by Newyorkbrad on Jimbo's talk for example. Andreas JN466 02:57, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
            • I just looked at Langston Hughes and if you didn't know he was African American it would be hard to find him in the parent category. I placed a few women in the parent category today - well I've place a lot over the years - but those edits are always reverted. Or shall we say diffused. Truthkeeper (talk) 03:02, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
              • I see. We've found the heart of the problem. It's this idea that parent categories need to be diffused into subcategories. Good word: "pernicious". This would not be a problem if we could switch from categories to tags. This is becoming my new mantra, as a direct result of this debate. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:07, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
              • Well, Langston Hughes is double categorised (appropriately so) in many cases: for example he is in African-American poets as well as American poets, even though the former is a subcategory of the latter. Even the one male author of romantic fiction I could find, Johnny Diaz, is double categorised in Category:American romantic fiction writers as well as Category:American novelists, even though the former is a subcategory of the latter. But yes, efforts to double-categorise women seem to be resisted more strenuously. Perhaps what's good for the gander ain't considered good for the goose. Andreas JN466 05:04, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. The only relevant question is this: would such category be useful for at least some readers? One can easily imagine that it would be helpful for someone who is interested in gender-related studies. Hence keep. My very best wishes (talk) 04:04, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge per nom and Bearcat's reasonable explanation of the problems this approach to categorization causes. I will add that I would not object if all novelists were placed in "male" and "female" subcategories in addition to the parent category. (Whether that makes sense from a purely mathematical "set theory" approach is completely unimportant.) -- -- BBlackmoor (talk) 04:57, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and keep as a non-diffusing sub-category . This means that all female writers should be included both in the "women writers" category and the "all writers" category. We already know the solution to the problem, lets to procedure - this is the exact tool the project has devised for cases like this. Diego (talk) 10:04, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
How to do category intersections work[edit]
  • Since many are talking about this, I thought I'd share:
  1. Here is a link to show how many women are Category:American women poets but not Category:American poets: click here
  2. You can also do category intersection, by using the 'subset' checkbox, like this: (list of all Category:American women poets who are also Category:American_Poets_Laureate - note I recursed on the poets laurete tree, since it is multiple levels deep.: click here
  3. List of all Category:African-American women poets who are also Category:American women poets: click here.
This particular one is interesting - should we bubble the African-American women up to the Category:American women poetsand Category:American poets category (and perhaps another parent, Category:American_women_writers? It's a good example of the complexities at play here - bubbling up one level may not be sufficient, and in this case only 7 of our African-American women poets have been so bubbled.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 03:30, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Given the nature of this problem, and the challenges in correctly and consistently bubbling up to the parent to avoid the so-called ghettoization problem, I would guesstimate that anywhere between 70-95% of wikipedia biographies (esp those that are female, or of non-white ethnicity) are incorrectly categorized, at least according to our hopes and dreams.
If we really care about this, though, we should (a) come to a very crisp and clear agreement on the approach here, and for which notions is an exception to the diffusion rule given (e.g. gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race) - are there any other things where an exception should be made? How about nationality? or religion? etc. and (b) we should built bots - it would be trivial for a bot to go through and find all of the women poets and stick them in the american poets tree, but it might be a bit trickier if that bot was to avoid dual categorization of those women were already classified elsewhere in sibling cats, so we'd need to get very clear on the rules for that. But sitting around complaining about it isn't doing anybody any good - so go out and find ways to solve this, preferably with algorithms if you can create a solid-enough rule set.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 03:16, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds like an important and exciting conversation to have. However, I'm pretty sure this isn't the forum for it. Where is the best place to get lots of input on this general question, aside from the current controversy about novelists? At the same time, I'd like to hear more about the feasibility of completely replacing categories with tags. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:22, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps start here WP:Category intersection, and maybe post at the village pump about it to get more eyes on your idea. I don't know what you mean by tags. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 03:33, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. Tags are kind of like top-level categories. People could construct Boolean searches, for articles that have tags A, B and C, but not Z. It's really the same idea as category intersection. There would be no need for a category or tag for American Women Novelists, because those pages would be tagged as "American" , as "women" and as "novelists". -GTBacchus(talk) 03:39, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yup, that's cat intersections; I wouldn't call them tags, that may just serve to confused. That would be great and would solve many problems. But people have been asking for that for a long time, it's a hard problem. But suggest you add your voice to the chorus and let's get wikimedia foundation to put some dev resources to implement this.
Ok, here's a start: Wikipedia talk:Category intersection#American women novelists. First post to that talk page in over six months. -GTBacchus(talk) 04:08, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's basically what they're doing in the German Wikipedia. In the German Wikipedia, Man/Woman, Poet, American, etc. are individual categories applied to individual articles. They do not have categories like "American women poets". The CatScan tool http://toolserver.org/~magnus/catscan_rewrite.php is linked on every category page in the German WP. To find "American women poets", they simply do a CatScan search for Woman + Poet + American. This vastly reduces the number of categories, and vastly reduces the amount of arguments you can have about them, as you're leaving it to the reader to define categories like "American women poets". At the same time, no one is diffused or otherwise spirited out of any category. Female poets have Woman + Poet applied to their biography, Male poets have Man + Poet. Totally simple. Andreas JN466 08:36, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
How hard would it be to implement that here? -GTBacchus(talk) 12:16, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It would be doable: it's been done before, even if never on this scale, and the technology exists. Wikid77 has just brought it up on Jimbo's talk, and further background is at Wikipedia:Category intersection (started in 2006 ...!) and Wikipedia:CatScan. Andreas JN466 13:29, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, as you know from the above, I've posted to the category intersection page just last night. This seems like the direction to focus our energy if we're looking for a long-term solution. Then maybe every single media outlet in the galaxy wouldn't be on our case, right? ;) Thanks for the Wikipedia:CatScan link; I hadn't seen that one yet. -GTBacchus(talk) 13:40, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. As I noted above, the concept of diffusing into subcategories is inherently flawed, because it forces you to pick a main attribute of an article to categorize it. In reality, almost nothing has only one main important attribute, and forcing it into a subcategory based on one's personal assessment of what is most important about it gives rise to situations just like this one. This intersection approach sounds like an elegant (if labor-intensive) solution that will pay huge dividends down the road. JLeland (talk) 15:35, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The "incategory" option also works in the wikipedia search bar. See? No external site necessary.Greg Bard (talk) 03:29, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

yes but it's not recursive. The tool I linked to is; plus it has a lot more options/flexibility. But that incategory tool is good for very basic questions that don't need recursion.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 03:31, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Merge Having only male novelists on the "American Novelists" page implies that male novelists are the norm from which female novelists deviate. It would not be acceptable to have only white novelists on the "American Novelists" page, and it is no more acceptable to have only male novelists. I like the solution many have mentioned of having "American Novelists" which includes male and female and then separate "American Women Novelists" and "American Men Novelist" pages. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dh66dh (talk • contribs) 04:37, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Because someone created it as an OBVIOUS JOKE, populating it with 2 women with initials in their names to mask their gender. Outdated my ass.--Milowent • hasspoken 05:03, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment For the search string on Google: 'wikipedia american women novelists controversy' 31,900,000 results; nice going guys. Neonorange (talk) 05:23, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm a bit of an optimist, so I actually hope this will encourage more people to join wikipedia. To me, it's really rather useless when someone in the outside world throws rocks at Wikipedia and says "Wikipedia does this stupid thing" or "Wikipedia doesn't have an article about this amazing thing" - If you really care about what wikipedia does or how it behaves, there is one clear course of action open to you - open up an account, join the community, and learn how to edit. If we get a thousand new editors, eager to learn and improve the encyclopedia, then this controversy will have an amazing silver lining- and we do need a lot of work on our category system. But if it just increases the chorus of complainers without any of them signing up to help here, then good riddance, I have little patience for their complaints. WP:SOFIXIT --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 13:49, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I get 1/10th of those hits on Google and when you dig down a few pages most of the results are not about this row at all but are about women writers (and some men and some books) from all over the Americas who've been involved in their own controversies. And the fuss is in certain sections - so far as I've seen it's not made any of the ten best selling papers here. Timrollpickering (talk) 14:28, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and Keep per Wikipedia:Categorization/Gender, race and sexuality. Kaldari (talk) 16:17, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I will try to explain my reasoning about the difference between this category and ;Category:American female singers. In singing the fact that the person involved in female is upfront, obvious, and in a great many cases integral to the singing itself. To consider any of the career of a female singer, such as Selena without considering her gender would be very hard, the same we could say for Luciano Pavarotti. Males and females sing in different ranges, and since so much of singing is public performace, and it is in many cases tied up with dancing and acting, the genders of the people involved matter. On the other hand, the fact that C. S. Lewis is a male and Madeleine L'Engle is female, is not neccesarily entirely obvious to all readers of their works. Thus, in the performing artistic categories of acting, dancing, singing and modeling it makes sense to divide everyone into the by gender categories. No one would deny that Jessica Alba's role as a model is mainly determined by her being female, while it is much less clear that Adeline Pond Adams has been directly influenced in her actions as a historian by her gender. It is definately not the controlling factor in virtually all her roles, as being an actress/female model/female singer/female dancer is. There is a reason why there are lots of people who are identified as having used gender-neutral pseudonyms as writers, but no matter how male an actresses name may sound, no one claims she is actually using a gender neutral name.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:55, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Someone said we should not split journalists by gender. However what about broadcast journalists. Are we really ready to claim that there is not logic behind having Category:Women television journalists? Are we really ready to say that Julie Chang's career is not at some level influenced by her gender?John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:58, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Arbitrary break 4[edit]
  • Merge and diffuse more by genre Category:American novelists is too huge for effective browsing and doesn't directly contain every single American novelist anyway. A lot of the problem and row is based in confusion over how the category system works. Timrollpickering (talk) 14:28, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Some readers find large categories helpful. As for confusion over how the category system works, that's not really a valid excuse. If people are confused, then we're somehow doing it wrong. -GTBacchus(talk) 14:32, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • If they're helpful then why not put every single US biography in Category:American people? And I do think some of the problem has been down to people shooting first, paticularly journalists and columnists who've mixed up the concept of lists and categories. Timrollpickering (talk) 21:44, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • If there's something that makes people likely to shoot first, and we can easily fix it to make that less likey, then we should. We can't control those people, but we can control Wikipedia. Blaming the readers is a losing game.

          The question of whether to put every US biography in one category comes down to the question of whether people would find that category useful. I've seen more than one person in this very discussion say that they find a single huge category of all American Novelists to be useful. I haven't seen anyone claim that they would find a category of all American people useful, but who knows? Whether or not people find something useful is not determined by theoretical reasoning at our end. It's determined by what real people empirically find useful. Is it your position that those claiming to find use in Category:American novelists are wrong? -GTBacchus(talk) 22:28, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Let's tease that out. It's not that they're wrong, it's a question of, how do we best serve their needs? Currently, Category:American novelists contains 3795 articles. However, if you bring in all of its subcats (including novelists by century, and theme, etc), you have 6769 articles total. What you are suggesting is that we do a mass upwards-categorization of almost 3000 articles, just to fulfill a vaguely expressed need by a few editors to see "all novelists", and by the way, those same people apparently don't want to use the already provided List of American novelists. So we have a choice: (1) We can satisfy those few who really need to see the full, unadulterated list with this link that already works, today [13] (heck, we could even place this link at the top of the category so it's literally 1 click) or (2) we can edit 3000 articles to add a (redundant) parent. And let's not forget all of the *other* trees - how do we know someone out there doesn't want a list of all Category:American writers or Category:American fiction writers- shall we add all articles to those categories as well, so as to easily answer such questions for the users? I just think it's doing a lot of extra wiki-work, instead of asking someone who really wants to know an answer to learn how to use a simple tool. I'm all for bringing this stuff more into the UI, and making these tools as easy and braindead as possible, but until then, I'm really not convinced redundant categorization is the answer - especially for thematic or time-bound sub-cats like we have underneath Category:American novelists - cats for gender/ethnicity/religion/sexuality end up being a special case, which has had enough comment for now...--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 23:04, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Wow. That made a ton of sense, and you clearly put a lot of good thought into it. Thank you, Obi-Wan. I see your point. I also read what you wrote on the other page about CATScan. Now I'm thinking three things. (1) Category intersection would be awesome, and I'm willing to help in any way I can with that. (2) It would be extremely helpful in the meanwhile to code up a nice UI for CATScan so that people can use it without feeling they're leaving familiar wiki territory, and then put a link to that on each category page. (3) I'm now at a loss for the best way to handle this "American Woman novelists" situation. I think I appreciate the complexity better than I have until now, so thanks again.

Let's see... in lots of situations, splitting off subcats is uncontroversial. In a minority of situations, however, generally involving biographical articles, it leads to ghettoization. In those situations, the two options for restoring equity seem to be (a) creation of enough sister subcategories so that the entire parent category can be diffused, or (b) redundant categorization between the parent and daughter category. We could also do (c) a combination of the two. If we're not prepared to do either of those things, then it comes down to (d) continuing as if ghettoization isn't a problem because that's not what categories are about, anyway, and somehow communicating this to the people who see it as a problem.

Am I missing anything? I don't think there will be consensus support for (d), at least in this case, although that's the default option for now in every other case that we're not currently staring at. Looking at (a), (b) and (c), I really don't know right now. I don't love any of them, and I can see why they're only being considered because of the ghettoization problem. None of them would make sense to apply globally. Looking back over your comments on this page, Obi, it would appear that you are against redundant categorization in most if not all cases, which would push you towards (a) or (d) here. Is that right? -GTBacchus(talk) 01:58, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks GTBacchus for your kind words. A few things:
  1. I've just posted a long-winded explanation of what I see as the problems inherent in non-diffusing ethnic/gender cats on Jayen's talk page, starting with "Thanks for the response". IMHO they haven't been implemented well b/c they are hard to do right - bubbling up the tree is tricky!
  2. For a great example of how tricky it can be, saunter over here and take my quiz: Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality#Correct_categorization_quiz.
  3. I think you've more or less enumerated the options. My gut/default would be (a), or (d), explained with tools. See for example Category:American novelists, where I've added a link to a tool which gives a full list of everything in the subcats - so if we could change the perception of what it means to be in a subcat (e.g. you retain full rights and privileges of the main cat), and somehow listed members of the subcats along with the parent, then a lot of the brouhaha would go away.
  4. I proposed originally above that if we ever create a cat for women, we should create one for men - and ghettoize each one (if everyone is in a ghetto, no-one is). This is the approach taken in france - for good reason, since their terms for various jobs are all gendered (e.g fr:Catégorie:Skieur and fr:Catégorie:Skieuse) We could certainly learn from the German wikipedia, as has been pointed out by Jayen466, which only has high-level cats for gender. However, I still haven't sorted what to do about LGBT and ethnicity - I'm not sure if I'd like to see Category:Heterosexual writers alongside Category:LGBT writers, that kinda bugs me for some reason. But the more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that most alternatives are band-aids, and moving towards robust cat-intersect is the only way to get us there; in the meantime, the solution that is likely to gain most popular support is non-diffusing ethnic/gender cats, even though they are rife with challenges that I hope wikignomes will fix some day. I pointed out in the quiz that a given person could have 32 categories, covering all sorts of slices of their life, but if you leave out 1 particular parent - boom - you're a sexist or a racist. Take a look at this fine fellow: James_Baldwin - now, with only 30 seconds to stare at his various categories, can you say by looking which ones are missing (and could thus lead to accusations of racism?) Think of it as a pop quiz - you're a drive by editor, hoping to fix his cats - what would you change/add? It's another great example of the challenge of non-diffusing ethnic cats. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 03:13, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I see what you mean about Category:Heterosexual writers. It most cases, I would think we have no idea about a writer's sexual preference, and we can't assume heterosexuality in all such cases. That leads to a situation where the main category consists of heterosexual writers and writers who don't talk about it, which is just bizarre. With gender, full diffusion is much easier to imagine.

It's clear at a glance that Baldwin is in several category ghettos, but to fix it would involve actual work, including an open sandbox, 2-10 other open tabs at a time, and possibly half-an-hour of my life. The more of this that could be done by bots, the better, but programming them seems a steep challenge.

I tried the quiz, and I hope others do, too. Now I'm off to read your post on Jayen's page. Cheers. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:38, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, giving you 30 seconds pop quiz on Baldwin wasn't really fair. Yes, it would take probably 30-40 minutes of thought to classify him correctly. It's cases like his that make me think a bot couldn't actually handle this - there's too much semantic meaning embedded, you have to really think about things, you can't just blindly assign up to the parent. Thanks for doing the quiz, but your results still caused bloggers dismay and made twitter aflutter. :( --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 03:54, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I see two big mistakes already, which might or might not be the ones you're thinking of. Tricky stuff. -GTBacchus(talk) 04:01, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • My understanding based on the history explained in WP:Category intersection is that large categories were initially avoided because of performance problems. Some template changes have occurred since then to remove those performance problems, so there is no need to avoid large categories any longer -- particularly when diffusing leads to user confusion and anger, as it did in this case. There's also the fact that diffusing tends to reduce the actual complexity and variety of the subject matter in favor of an artificially-enforced hierarchy of attributes. It's a huge project to change the category system, but I think it needs to happen. JLeland (talk) 16:08, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment Fifty years ago computer users had to adapt to the limitations of the machines. That should no longer be the case. And it certainly is no longer an adequate political argument. User:Neonorange (talk) 04:24, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge unless both genders are divided in all categories, including "Living People". Jeremy112233 (talk) 22:39, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. There may be use for categories for feminist writers (including male feminists too, if such can be found), and for writers writing about women issues (certainly including some men), but no more for a category for women writers than for a category for lefthanded writers. Saying women writers are in the main category because they are in a subcategory is nitpicking that may make sense to experienced wikipedia editors but not to the general public we address (unless the male writes were likewise moved to a subcategory, which would be silly). Arguing that this subcategory should exist because there are similar subcategories for women writes of other nationalities has some merit - but those categories should go too. As I understand it, it is wikipedia policy that an article put into a subcategory should not be added explicitly to the main category too. In a case like the present, I think all women writers should appear in the main category, and hence not in the subcategory. The best solution would be that users had an option to filter the main category based on gender, handedness, ethnicity, age, or whatever, but we do not have such wiki functionality available, and I find the women writer subcategories completely mistaken.--Nø (talk) 06:09, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. And so should other categories. Otherwise let's also split up categories according to sexual preference, race, age and what not. Men/Women is not the only way to subcategorize a category. Whether novelist or any other one. In fact there seem to be over 300 woman's categories and unless absolutely essential to the topic, they should be merged. Gem-fanat (talk) 23:13, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep (and merge) - What a palaver. As has been stated elsewhere, gender is a non-diffusing category. A category of novelists by gender offers important information. That said, they should not be ghettoised, so the diffusing that has been going on is clearly (unintentionally, I'm sure) sexist. Both "Category:American women novelists" and "Category:American novelists" should include all woman-identified American novelists. -Kez (talk) 10:50, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Unless they have already been diffused to a non-gendered, non-ethnic sub-cat of Category:American novelists - right?? Please confirm your vote.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 11:22, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge differentiation by gender does not make sense when the products are written words. Stalfur (talk) 12:24, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You do realize that there are 397 categories devoted to various slices/dices of women writers. Are you really stating that you'd support deleting *all* of these? Link to all women writers categories --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 13:00, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
so what? Merge them all. If sexism is that prevalent, is that an excuse or even more urgency to correct? What about race? or age? Or sexual preference? or birthcity of their mother? Gem-fanat (talk) 23:13, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge—It is the height of sexism to mark the female category while leaving the male category the default. I thought we'd got beyond this. Tony (talk) 04:45, 1 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Categorization quiz[edit]

You're welcome to participate in a categorization quiz, as a way of understanding and teasing out the complexity of categorization, esp around gender, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity. The more participants the better! Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality#Correct_categorization_quiz.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 22:45, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Arbitrary break 5[edit]
  • Upmerge to Category:Women novelists, Category:American women writers and Category:American novelists. After trying to figure out ways to diffuse the category in a non-gender specific way I have come to realize that a large number of novels we have are identified as being in the genre "novel". I really think this becomes a functional bottom rung category, since the vast majority of novelists can not be really dispersed by genre.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:51, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Merge Though I'd be fine if there were a distinction between men, women, and abstract. Jwt987 (talk) 18:09, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: Diffusion is still incomplete: the all-important Category:Right-handed non-European novelists of European descent who wear glasses still needs to be broken out by gender, nationality, and hair color. These distinctions are crucial for understanding the authors' field of work and their place in the world of literature. How is the hapless reader going to find biographies of these persons if they are comingled with unimportant people who also happen to have written novels? ~ Ningauble (talk) 15:07, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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.

Category:African Development[edit]

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: Speedy rename (due to meeting critera & no objections raised within 48 hours) per rationale C2C ("A rename bringing a category into line with established naming conventions for that category tree") . Timrollpickering (talk) 19:54, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Rename to match parent category Category:International development and to remove ambiguity/capitalization. jonkerz ♠talk 18:52, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Rename Argument sounds reasonable and agree with the point about capitalisation. --BelovedFreak 20:26, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Rename per nom. The current title is rather confusing. Development of what? Dimadick (talk) 20:40, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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.

Category:Gangnam Style[edit]

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: keep. Wizardman 03:39, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Delete. Is there a need to have an eponymous category of a song? Maybe this is a case where a navbox is more in order along the lines of {{Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band}}. There are a number of articles related to it due to its cultural impact but Category:Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was deleted in a CfD. If kept, the parent category needs to be changed to appropriately described its contents (they're not all songs by Psy). --StarcheerspeaksnewslostwarsTalk to me 17:08, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak keep: It's defining for all 6 member articles, so although I can't find any other eponymous categories named after songs, I don't see the harm in it. As a template will be more useful, I've created Template:Gangnam Style, but the category could co-exist. As for the sub-catting, this is allowed by WP:EPON. – Fayenatic London 18:50, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • keep Reasonably-sized category and indeed defining for all articles included. Dimadick (talk) 20:38, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to Category:Psy (entertainer).--Mike Selinker (talk) 04:41, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • That parent has since been renamed as Category:Psy. – Fayenatic London 19:51, 6 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Oo, no, I think merging to Psy would be wrong for most of the contents, as they are other people or other people's works who/which became notable because of this song. Keep or delete, but (just this once) not merge! – Fayenatic London 20:47, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I think with the song instead. Jwt987 (talk) 18:07, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: It's not comparable to SPLHCB, nor does the category title need to be changed. The category has six detailed, full-fledged articles in it so far, and others (even currently existing articles) can and probably will be added, so it deserves to remain a category, even considering the new template. Softlavender (talk) 04:03, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: I see value in this category in terms of linking items that are clearly connected but may otherwise not be linked as such.Jeremy112233 (talk) 22:41, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, good value and defining purpose for this to be retained. — Cirt (talk) 01:43, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, I don't see at all how it's necessary. Maybe merge with Gangnam Style article?; Jwt987 (talk) 18:07, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • A category cannot be "merged" into an article. The GS article is already 235,000 bytes, more than double the Wikipedia limit; the other articles in the category already comprise another 155,000 bytes. Softlavender (talk) 12:47, 3 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That would still bury them in an extremely overlong article. The article already has a See Also list which is 30 links long, and all of them are lists rather than songs or related items. Softlavender (talk) 05:15, 9 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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.

Category:Lists of characters in Magic: The Gathering[edit]

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. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:16, 1 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Only one entry in the category, and of that entry, the template I've submitted for TFD. Izno (talk) 15:27, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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.

Category:Equestrian commanders of vexillationes[edit]

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: Keep. Timrollpickering (talk) 23:10, 1 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: This should be an article (containing a list of examples), not a category. DexDor (talk) 06:14, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep -- The headnote is rather long, but the category now has three members, and seems to be a legitimate category. I suspect the creator is inexperienced. Peterkingiron (talk) 15:26, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep As entry notes, a notable social watershed. -Aerolit (talk) 09:16, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, useful legitimate category with value for researchers of the topic. — Cirt (talk) 01:44, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep A valid category. Hawkeye7 (talk) 08:06, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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.

American local politicians[edit]

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: keep Category:Local political office-holders in the United States; delete Category:American local politicians. Good Ol’factory (talk) 01:35, 27 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is a significant overlap. The two should be merged and renamed to "Local politicians in the United States" because A) there is an existing Wikimedia category: Local_politicians_of_the_United_States, and B) "politicians" is more general than "office holder." It is always possible that there are notable people who were never elected or appointed to anything (i.e. they are notable for something else.) and C) the name is consistent with others. Greg Bard (talk) 05:19, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. I have reformatted this to list correctly and to format the request in the normal way. Vegaswikian (talk) 05:58, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: Until yesterday, when the "American local politicians" category was created, the only one of these redundant categories that existed was the one for "Local political office-holders," which title is consistent with the parent hierarchy in Category:Local political office-holders by country. I definitely agree with merging these two redundant categories, but after reflection I think that Category:Local political office-holders in the United States is the category that should survive. My reasoning is that (1) I believe the main reason why the encyclopedia is interested in these people is their holding of government office, not their engagement in politics, and (2) this is consistent with the structure employed for the rest of the world. Rather than renaming the U.S.-level category to match the state categories for "local politicians", I suggest that the state-level categories should be renamed to match the parent. Local politicians who never held public office cam be adequately categorized elsewhere (e.g., in by-party categories such as Fooian Republicans, in by-place categories such as People from Anytown, and in subcategories of Category:American political bosses by state). The rare case of a local politician who never held public office should not dictate the naming of this entire category hierarchy. Also, Commons category naming does not control category naming at English Wikipedia. --Orlady (talk) 00:04, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • The whole political bosses is ripe for deletion given the purely subjective inclusion criteria and the dreadful state of political boss. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 02:54, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment if someone were making a distinction between politicians who actually held office from those who never did, at least local politicians, the children of the first cat are overbroad and so variously hacked up. Is this distinction meaningful? Presumably few people are notable because they ran for but lost some local political contest and many of the non-local-office holders are notable because of holding either higher office or something unrelated to politics (sport, science, entertainment, crime, etc.). Carlossuarez46 (talk) 00:35, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • In fact, almost all of the people in these categories did hold local elective office. The argument that a "politicians" category is needed for non-office-holders is largely hypothetical. Additionally, almost all of the people in these categories are notable for their activity in government and politics (for example, a county commissioner who later became a congressman); I've only seen a few who are notable for some unrelated reason. --Orlady (talk) 05:04, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sure, it's possible for a person to unsuccessfully run for local office, but then go on to become encyclopedically notable for something entirely different (or to already be notable for something entirely different, yet fall short in a run for local office.) But that then raises the question of whether their unsuccessful run for local office was a sufficiently defining characteristic to warrant being categorized as a "local politician" — most of the time, the answer to that question is actually going to be no. Bearcat (talk) 16:23, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question. In reviewing the contents, is there a better name? Local is rather subjective. If we climb the tree we get to local government which would appear to limit this to mayors and municipal councils but not school boards or county officials. Vegaswikian (talk) 02:21, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Most sources define "local government" as encompassing counties, cities, towns, villages, school districts, library districts, etc. There is a user here who has been pushing the unorthodox view that counties are "arms of state government", based on extrapolations from sources such as a single sentence in 2003 report by the county executive of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, griping about state mandates on counties. I hope we can deal with these categories without getting into a full-blown examination of that user's theories, but that may not be possible. --Orlady (talk) 05:04, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I've never been particularly crazy about the "political office-holders" wording myself, but I've never been quite sure of the best way to articulate my concern — but as long as that's still a standard international tree, there's not much useful reason for the US to be the only country that's left out of it. I'd be more than willing to support a comprehensive reconsideration of Category:Political office-holders in its entirety, but not the notion that it's problematic only for local politicians in the United States. Bearcat (talk) 03:14, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: Think of it this way: We have categories for offices already, and we generally place the people in those categories. We don't need a category for both offices and officials. Greg Bard (talk) 04:33, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I had to sleep on this one in hopes I'd understand your point. I'm still not sure what you are trying to say, but I'll try to respond anyway. The "office-holders" category is for people, not offices. Categories for some types of local offices, such as Category:District boards of education in the United States do include a separate, but related, people category (in that case, Category:School board members in the United States). Consistent with the way way categories are organized in Wikipedia That category also has a broader "people" category for another parent. Until 24 April, when you added that category to the newly created Category:American local politicians, the broad people category it was in was Category:Local political office-holders in the United States. Now it is in two redundant people categories. It appears to me that the question being addressed here is which of the two "people category" names should survive. --Orlady (talk) 13:44, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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