The Cunctator wrote:
I would like to take the discussion back to my original question: May I include both a main category and a subcategory in the same article? I would like to accomplish this without creating an edit war with another editor who thinks it¹s wrong.
Don't.
I disagree. The answer is "it depends", and what it depends on is utility in navigation. There are a number of cases where people have managed to do this and it was the right decision. But, in every case you will have to win a small war over it.
In general if all of the non-sub-category members of a category can be placed in a sub-category then they should, and you should not try and do both.
I think the special case of putting an article in both is when there is a compelling reason for navigation purposes. While not common right now because of the way we do it and because few people have put time into making the Category system an interface to the site, this could become common that someone would use the category tree to "browse". In such a case they should be able to find articles with basic knowledge of the subject. Take for example [[Chess]], did you know it is in the [[Chaturanga|Chaturanga game family]] and therefor [[Category:Chaturanga game family]]. This category being on the article us useful for people already at the article, they learn something new. But for the person who is navigating the category tree this is almost with out value unless he happens to know that the chaturanga game family is and that Chess is a part of it. The person using the Category system (our veriosn of an index) will get as far as [[Category:Abstract strategy games]] and not know where to go. To solve this problem [[Category: Chess]] is a subcategory of both of these even though one is a subcategory of the other. And the article [[Chess]] has all three (though I am inclined to say that [[Category:Abstract strategy games]] should be removed form the article itself.
There is another great example I think involving articles n the individual members of the Beatles and weather they should be included in a category as being members of the Beatles and also as being musicians.
Somethign I wrote about this when I first became a wikipedian comes to ming so I dug it up. It was in the form of a proposal (I do not expect it to be accepted which is why I never formalized it) but I think it is worth thinking about on this issue.
This is from: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Categorization&...
Proposed Guidelines
I have run into this issue a few times in my very short stay (so far) on Wikipedia and did some thinking about the situations where I think an article should be in a category as well as a sub-category. I came up with two guidelines and wanted to see if other people had similar ideas or if I am smoking crack. This seems to be the best place to get opinions on this issue so here I go ....
Qualitative vs. Quantitative
If the articles in a category are fundamentally the same type of article (i.e. about people or places etc.) and the difference between the category and sub-category is fundamentally qualitative then the article should only be listed in the sub-category. This is the example from the main page: Queen Elizabeth should not be listed directly under People, but Queens of England might be a good place for her. To say it a different way Queen Elizabeth would not be put in "Queens of England" just because she was a better/more famous/more notable person. The other side of this is when the difference is primarily quantitative. The example than I ran into that is good here, is the category "Chess grandmasters" and "Chess players". A person DOES go from being 'just' a chess player to being a Chess grandmaster by being a better chess player, so the difference is primarily quantitative and the article should be listed in both. A good way to tell if you are in this situation is: If the sub-category were deleted and all its contents imported into the super-category would it significantly reduce the usefulness of the super category? This brings me to the second guideline.
[However I now think this should be modified by the notion that if all the articles of a specific type, in a category can be put into subcategories they should and the super-category should be dropped from the articles. Using the same example is a set of acceptable and inclusive sub-categories (grandmasters, International masters, masters, ... , unrated) could be agreed on so that no people articles remained then that should be done and the category [[Chess: chess players]] should be restricted to non-people articles. (a good example of this is [[Category:Magnet schools]] which has the schools themselves in sub-cats and only has a few articles on the topic itself in the category.)]
<SNIP OUT MY NAVIGATIONAL UTILITY SECTION AS ITS THE SAME AS WHAT I WROTE AT THE TOP>
Summary: I hope this is the right place for this, and as a clueless newbie I hope I am not re-hashing something that has already been discussed into the ground and resolved. If so and there has been some succinct treatment of the issue somewhere a pointer on my talk page would be awesome, even though I put "Proposed guidelines" above I am really just asking since I keep running into this and I am a but of a meta data freak. Dalf | Talk 02:18, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
SKL