Wikipedia talk:People by year/Delete

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[edit] Category:Deaths by year, Category:Births by year, and all subcats (formerly Category:2003 deaths)

Category:2003 deaths (and all the other years): another example of over-the-top categorization. --Auximines 15:51, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

  • Delete 'em all; we have the year articles for this. -- Grunt   ҈  16:18, 2004 Sep 12 (UTC)

Keep, but complete the death category with a birth one. These categories allow to identify easily biography articles and select them based on years/decades/centuries.

As there are many reasons to link from a year page to an article, these pages can't offer the same as the category. Besides, it's much clearer and easier to assign than, e.g. Category:19th century people. Many of those articles are currently uncategorized and the category system is less error prone and more likely to be corrected than the lists (e.g. Charles Rosen, Gypsy Rose Lee on 1914 [1]).

In other fields, categories based on years complete the categorization of the topic (e.g. Category:2003 albums as per WikiProject Albums|, despite the fact there are already lists.

Deaths by year, Births by year could be used to build the List of people by name. -- User:Docu

  • Keep, if we can use a bot to keep it consistent [[User:Sverdrup|❝Sverdrup❞]] 18:11, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. [[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (talk)]] 18:14, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Delete. Not likely to be used indexically by a user, and thus not a useful category scheme. Snowspinner 18:26, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)
    • Many lists currently include the year of birth and the year of death, as List of people by name. -- User:Docu
  • Delete. This information is better handled on the year pages. "Births in XXXX" and "Deaths in XXXX" serves so little categorization purpose, and only clutters the category space on people pages. Categories should assist researchers in find similar information by subject. These ones are about as useful as People by last initial - completely arbitrary. I've proposed a system which follows along the lines of the "As of" dating system. Not so say my idea is right, but just to give an example of a more useful system than categories. -- Netoholic @ 18:28, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
    • Netoholic: Please avoid removing the categories for now. -- User:Docu
      • Docu: Please don't lecture. I changed that one before I fully realized how many your bot was changing. -- Netoholic @ 18:40, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
      ) --User
      Docu
  • Delete - I still think this is completely redundant with the years articles, and less informative and less useful. Adam Bishop, 18:30, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Browsing deaths is instructive. -- orthogonal 19:10, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Delete. If this were a family genealogy, I would say keep. But because we're talking about a vast number of unrelated biographies the categories aren't needed. —Mike 21:24, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep all. First, the category system allows for an erroneous date of birth/death to be fixed much more readily than if said error is listed in the individual's article, the year's article, or both. (It's quite possible that there are already year articles that disagree with a person's article over what year the person was born or died in.) Second, the category system allows for sorting by name instead of by date as is handled in the individual year articles. Third, I personally don't think that everyone with a Wikipedia article should be listed in the articles for the year in which they were born (and, where applicable, the year in which they died). The year articles should list the famous and otherwise notable people, but the categories can and should categorize everyone with an article. -Sean Curtin 23:08, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep, I see this as congruent with categorising albums by year, films by year, etc., plus I thought it was reasonably well agreed that categories and lists serve different purposes and neither one removes the need for the other? —Stormie 01:45, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. The year articles have no easy option for an unknown date within the year. Also there is a limit on how many people you want to hack into a list, whereas the Category has no such limit. We would also have Category:Unknown year of Birth to provide incentive for research. --Phil | Talk 09:14, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep for the reasons listed above, particularly by Sean Curtin & Phil. Also I really don't agree with the argument that category birth and category death clutter a biography page. It's only two categories - there can't be more. I think it's the randomness of categorisation that make pages look "cluttered". Why not a standard sequence of category birth, catetegories "claim to fame" and category death, that would be easy to read. I don't like the idea of deleting just because there is a perceived problem when the problem is fixable. Rossrs 11:09, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. I can't say I particularly care for either of these, but it seems to be the best way of grouping people by the time period in which they lived, certainly better than something like "19th century people". I still think it's somewhat trivial, but how I'd like to see trivial categories dealt with is for the most notable categories to appear first in order at the bottom of the article and the trivial ones last—this will lessen the effect of such classifications to submerge those most relevant to an article. Postdlf 02:24, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)


The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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