Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2019 April 5: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:12, 13 April 2019

Revision as of 00:13, 13 April 2019

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:Some individuals and some families remain closely immersed in one part of that heritage, others much less so. This can happen even within one generation.

:So the question is how much of this vast kaleidescope of complexity Wikipedia tries to capture in its category system.

:Ten years ago, I would have been inclined to be answer "as much a possible". But I no longer think that approach is sustainable. Too few of our articles capture enough of the complexity of ethnicity and identity to allow meaningful categorisation. The binary nature of categorisation doesn't capture the vast difference between someone whose ancestors assimilated three centuries ago and someone whose family maintained the old ways until a generation ago — in categorisation policy terms, we are looking at an attribute whose [[WP:DEFININGNESSDEFINING]]ness can be anywhere from 0% to 100%, and often unclear.

:So I conclude that the category system is just to crude to do a decent enough job on on this to make such categories any more than a poorly-sourced, woefully incomplete, ill-defined and disastrously un-nuanced mishmash.

:Of course, theses issue should be discussed within the article, subject to all the usual policies: [[WP:V]], [[WP:RS]], [[WP:WEIGHT]] etc. But this is one of the jobs which the category system can't manage. --[[User:BrownHairedGirl|<span style="color:#663200;">Brown</span>HairedGirl]] <small>[[User talk:BrownHairedGirl|(talk)]] • ([[Special:Contributions/BrownHairedGirl|contribs]])</small> 20:11, 12 April 2019 (UTC)