Wikipedia talk:Categorization

See also: Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories

Diffusing deaths into executions

For a while I was away frem the subject Political repression in the Soviet Union, including Great Purge and stuff. To my unpleassant surprize, the huge Category:Victims of Soviet repressions was annihilated, en masse with other repression categories with a highlhy dubious rationale "They are unavoidably subjective and sometimes intentionally misleading or in the service of propaganda/apologetics" and "NPOV nightmare" I understand this in the faraway 2010 when people had limited clues what is NPOV and how to deal with it. But as a result, a person executed, say, during the Great Purge, now is calmly lain into the really cool neutral category:1937 deaths. Therefore for starters I would like to diffuse this and other years into category:Executions in 1937 by country--> category:People executed in the Soviet Union in 1937. But first I would like to ask, maybe someone has a smarter opinion? --Altenmann >talk 08:49, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

PS. Heck, the even ain't no any Category:Deaths in Soviet Union; certainly, Category:Deaths in Lesotho are way more frequent and important to know of :--) --Altenmann >talk

PPS. Ive found soomething to compare/start with: Category:People executed by the Soviet Union. --Altenmann >talk 09:12, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

@Altenmann, we do have Category:Deaths in the Soviet Union. It's one thing to factually state how people died; it's POV to call it repression. Mclay1 (talk) 00:50, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Colleague, thank you for fixing my ignorance with the definite article: I missed that it is the Soviet Union. However your answer is deficient in two respects;

• The concept that POV is bad is related to POV of wikipedians see WP:NPOV, WP:FALSEBALANCE. If something is called "repression" in numerous reliable sources, then it is repression. But its beside the point.
• Second, You have to learn to read posts to the end, not only first sentence, so you did not answer my actual question I asked.

Anybody else? --Altenmann >talk 05:08, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Ordering of numbers

From memory, numbers used to order "alphabetically" in categories, meaning we'd get 1, 10, 11, 2, 3, etc. This no longer appears to be the case and numbers are sorting numerically. We currently have this guideline:

To get the correct sort order, zero padding may be required, thus the actual sort key in this case is John 09 – this ensures that Pope John IX sorts before Pope John X. If we ever get to the hundredth Pope John, we would need to use three digits: "John 009".

Is this now redundant? Mclay1 (talk) 00:46, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

That guidance is for Roman numerals. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:11, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 That's not the point. The zero padding no longer appears to be necessary. If you make the sort key in that example "John 9", it will now sort before "John 10". Mclay1 (talk) 01:15, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Is this your untested hypothesis, or have you adjusted the sortkeys on Pope John IX and Pope John X to check whether your hypothesis is true? If it is, the guidance can probably be removed unless there is some other situation in which it applies. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:58, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

I tested it with test pages in the test category, Category:X1. Mclay1 (talk) 03:45, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

I think that it's about nine years since proper numeric sorting (1, 2, 9, 10, 11 instead of 1, 10, 11, 2, 9) was provided. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:18, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Good memory! Here's a VPT thread from September 2016. The bit of help text highlighted above is explicitly mentioned in that thread. We get around to fixing things eventually. [Edited to add: An editor from the WMF fixed the page in 2016, but someone apparently added back in text about padding. I haven't looked through the history to find out who, when, or why.] – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:24, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Categorizing draft pages

Under WP:CATDRAFT, we list four ways and say only two of them {{Draft categories}} and prepending a colon) are recommended. Why do we even list the other two (HTML comment and nowiki) if they're not recommended? Can I just delete those two? RoySmith (talk) 11:05, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

Categories per secondary school

join: Wikipedia_talk:Overcategorization#Categories_per_secondary_school --Altenmann >talk 23:17, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Strange sentence at CATDEF

Categories should not group subjects by trivial characteristics that have little relevance to the topics, unless it can be shown that such a characteristic or grouping is notable. This is a bit like "I distrust people with blue eyes unless their eyes are brown." Shouldn't everything after the comma be removed? If it's serving a valid purpose, it isn't clear to me what that is, so maybe it needs to be rewritten. Largoplazo (talk) 15:24, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Categorization by former subdivisions of former countries

I run across Category:Slutsky Uyezd. Do we categorize populated places in this way in Wikipedia? --Altenmann >talk 17:05, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

If WP:CATDEF isn't met, then we shouldn't. In the context of that category, most of the articles in it mention nothing related to Slutsk in their bodies, so it seems unlikely to be defining for them, at least not as we look at them today. A few of those articles do mention "Slutsky district"—is that the same thing? One mentions the Principality of Slutsk. Even in those cases, it doesn't appear defining. Largoplazo (talk) 17:22, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

I suspect the whole tree of Category:Uezds of the Russian Empire has the same issue. --Altenmann >talk 17:11, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

I also find Category:People from the Grand Duchy of Finland (by province) and Category:East German people by district a bit peculiar. Kaffet i halsen (talk) 17:25, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Categorizing people in this way is reasonable, because it is their verifiable birth place and it is fixed in time and space. Whereas categorizing the obscure village of Backwaterowice by various nation owners and various administrative restructuring of a country is pointless. --Altenmann >talk 17:59, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

I agree with you about that. If articles about people born in Slutsky Uyezd say they were born in (town), Slutsky Uyezd, then it makes sense to categorize them as such rather than on the country's subdivisions as they stand a century or two later. Largoplazo (talk) 18:46, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

We don't categorise people by the birth place but the more vague "from". We currently include more than 300 people who were born before 23 July 1952 (article source for creation of bezirks) in the Category:East German people by district categories. But if it would be birth place, is Benjamin Fuß's (maximum) 98 days in Bezirk Suhl defining? Fuß is already categorised in Category:People from Bad Salzungen which is geographically more exact. We have overlaps between Category:Athletes from Magdeburg and Category:Athletes from Bezirk Magdeburg but one cannot be made a subcategory of the other because not all athletes from Magdeburg are athletes from Bezirk Magdeburg and the other way around.

For the original question about Slutsky Uyezd, I would say it's not functional to categorise places by former subdivision (if that wasn't obvious from the side-discussion). Kaffet i halsen (talk) 13:30, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

Request for assistance

Do any of the watchers of this talk page want to help us understand the meaning of 'defining' and 'non-defining' with respect to applying categories to an article describing a collection of multiple different events? If you do, please join the discussion at Talk:2025 British anti-immigration protests#Bad categories?. -- DeFacto (talk). 13:18, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Category creation assistance

Hi there! I am seeking help in starting a category for state freedom caucuses. There are currently three pages, but I plan on creating pages for the remaining nine. Jcgaylor (talk) 03:44, 21 October 2025 (UTC)