On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 9:33 AM, sashi <learning(a)creoliste.fr> wrote:
Given that the category French Jews contains more
members than the category
French Roman Catholics, and that there are living people included in both
categories...
I would again recommend caution in looking at numbers, because
Category:French Roman Catholics itself has many subcategories, which
likely contain a few thousand entries in total.
I seriously wonder what it is that motivates folks to
anonymously tag others in this way (i.e. whether they want to be tagged or
not).
Probably the same thing that motivates them to create categories for
fictional characters with plant abilities or rail transport in
Karnataka. I can't say whether such categorization is healthy, but
it's certainly pervasive on Wikipedia, and is probably not usually
malicious. (Not everyone edits anonymously, by the way!)
I looked into one of the many BLP entries with an
unscourced Category:French
Jews tag, and found a review of a book they wrote. In that book, the person
stated that while they had a Jewish mother, they did not consider themselves
Jewish.
This is a limitation of categorization systems. In an article's text,
you can just say "X's mother was Jewish, but he did not consider
himself Jewish," but either a category has to lump a lot of things
together or you have to have a category to reflect every distinction
you want to make: Category:American Cultural Reform Jews? (You can
factor out the "American" part if you have category intersections, but
the level-of-detail problem still remains.)
Of course, you can just decline to categorize by religion (or
ethnicity, or nationality, or sexuality), or decline to mention it at
at all in an article unless it's unusually relevant, but I imagine
you're going to encounter pushback to the effect of "what part of 'the
sum of all human knowledge' don't you understand?" A lot of
Wikipedians (and I might count myself among them) see the challenging
nature of some topics as an invitation to address them thoroughly, not
to refrain from addressing them.
On en.wp people being
labeled as Jewish/Catholic, etc. tend to be industrialists, politicians,
journalists, bankers etc.
I'm not seeing the same thing in my cursory look at the categories. If
anything, artists, scientists, and academics seem to be the ones who
are overrepresented in Category:French Jews. In any event, to the
extent that this appears to show stereotyping, it is merely making
transparent the systemic biases in who has an article on Wikipedia in
the first place.
Though I clearly don't agree with everything you say, I do appreciate
your raising this issue. By the way, your messages don't seem to be
getting through until a few days after you sent them. I'm not sure
whether that's an issue on your end, or my end, or if they're just
getting caught in the moderation queue.
Emufarmers