Category talk:Storms

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[edit] Deletion of Category:Storm

I'm trying to start a discussion here about the deletion of Category:Storm. Back in September 2005 I moved several articles from Category:Storms to Category:Storm. I think the basis for this was that I was trying to separate the general "about types of storms and related stuff" articles from the historical "what happened in a particular storm" articles.

Now, going back to this several months later, I find that Category:Storm has been deleted. Looking at the deletion log here didn't tell me much, so I had to rummage around the archives to find the debate here. The reason given was: "Category:Storms is used instead.".

I then wanted to check the history of Category:Storm to see if I had put something on the category page explaining how it was supposed to be used, but unfortunately I can't do that because it has been deleted. It looks like people added stuff mostly to Category:Storms without realising that Category:Storm may have been more appropraite, and this led to the CfD listing when the clear separation began to blur once again.

So, after all that, I want to try and sort out is:

  • Why was Category:Storm deleted - the deletion debate explanation doesn't really satisfy me, as there seems to have been no consideration of why the separate category existed in the first place. It seems that the assumption was that these were duplicate categories. Would I be right to say that this assumption was wrong?
  • What to do now? Recreating Category:Storm is one possibility, but can anyone think of a better name for a category for the articles about the topic of storms, rather than the category for the history of storms? Maybe keep "storms" as the top-level category, and move all the "historical" articles to a suitable subcategory?

Any comments would be much appreciated. Thanks. Carcharoth 11:53, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

The deleted category page contained only its parent categories until the deletion nominator tagged it for CfD and added This category is unused. Use Category:Storms instead. I'd assume the CfD voters thought it was a duplicate. Looking at the situation now, it seems that Category:Storms is mostly populated with articles about the topic of storms rather than individual historical storms while the subcategories of Category:Storms include mostly historical events. The parent category for historical events seems to be Category:Weather events, so I'd suggest refactoring so that the events (by event type) are subcategorized directly under Category:Weather events (skipping any intermediate storm or storms category), with Category:Storms used for the general topic (types of storms rather than specific storms). -- Rick Block (talk) 14:00, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
OK, I'll do that. Thanks for explaining that. Carcharoth 15:13, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, Rick, you beat me to the explanation. --Kbdank71 17:35, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I probably moved some articles around to merge the two categories before nominating it for deletion, but I doubt it was that much. Perhaps a distinction should be made between storm meteorology and individual storms, but calling categories "Storm" and "Storms" and expecting the reader to know which is which isn't going to work. Also, I agree with the above statement that the distinction should be made further down in the category tree - this has also been done for Category:Weather events and Category:Natural disasters; it is probably discussed in Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones. Category:Tropical cyclones does a pretty good job at doing this, I think (I'm biased of course). — jdorje (talk) 01:08, 24 May 2006 (UTC)