[WikiEN-l] - category clutter on biographical articles

[Bryan Derksen]

Cool Cat wrote:
> I guess I am taking things for granted too fast... Any recent US president
> has way too many categories. They are merely the example symptoms of the
> problem.

But what exactly is "too many categories"? _Why_ is that number of
categories "too many"? The only times I can recall encountering articles
and thinking "this article has too many categories" it was because the
article was redundantly categorized, not because of just the raw number.

> Getting rid of some of these excess categories is something hard to do. Of
> course this isn't a battle, but people are often emotionally motivated on a
> number of topics and they sometimes create categories for that end.
> Especially if a person does not understands the spirit of NPOV, we end up
> having categories with not very objective titles and a subjective inclusion
> criteria.

Categories with bad titles or inclusion criteria should be renamed or
deleted, true, but this is a separate issue from how many categories in
total there are.

> An average cfd discussions get very little attention unless it is on a
> controversial issue. In your average cfd on a potentially controversial
> issue, people tend to vote based on their belief system and not based on
> stuff like usefulness/objectivity/subjectivity of the  inclusion criteria of
> the category in question. For example, although a word to avoid,
> [[Category:Terrorists by nationality]] has been around for quite sometime.

I've just read a bunch of the CfDs in this area (I'm sure you have too
since you initiated several of them, but for the benefit of other
editors see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Terrorists>)
 and I'm wondering how you're determining whose "votes" are based on
their belief systems and whose are based on usefulness/etc. I've seen
several opinions supporting keeping the category that appear to me to be
based on usefulness etc.

But we seem to be straying from the original subject here, which is the
"too many categories" thing. Or are you suggesting that the reason we
have too many categories is because it's too hard to delete them via
existing mechanisms? If so, it looks like the old
deletionism/inclusionism dilemma transported to another namespace.