Cool Cat wrote:
We do have different opinions on what the category system should be used for and thats the root of the problem. Wikipedia is based on consensus and there is no process for consensus aside from cfd. Unlike articles, the creation of categories should be based on a consensus not someones belief system.
I don't understand. The content of articles and the content of categories are both established "by consensus" in the sense that anyone can edit them, argue about their contents on various talk pages, etc.
The existence or nonexistence of articles is decided by their respective fD processes - AfD for the articles, CfD for the categories. I'm not seeing a fundamental difference here, and I don't see how articles should be based on someone's belief system (I'm not even sure what that means). The biggest difference I can think of is purely technical - categories can't be renamed or redirected, so it requires a lot of bot busywork to shuffle things around. I can't think of a way to fix this by non-technical means, though I have occasionally moved the contents of small categories around "manually" without bothering CfD about it.
Today, any random newbie can invent his/her categorization scheme. We are categorizing people by their appetite by nationality today ([[Category:Vegetarians by nationality]]). Someone not being tagged by a category as a vegetarian does not make them a carnivore.
How does it imply that? There are other options than just "vegetarian" and "carnivore", I'm an omnivore myself. And what does nationality have to do with it? Wouldn't the same issue exist with just plain [[Category:Vegetarians]]?
Or how about [[Category:Terrorists by nationality]]? I could list more problematic examples.
I see nothing problematic about [[category:Terrorists by nationality]] that isn't already inherent in having a separate [[Category:Terrorists]] and [[Category:People by nationality]]. Once one has determined (by whatever means) that someone is both a "terrorist" and an "Elbonian", what problems arise from putting them into "[[Category:Elbonian terrorists]]"?