User talk:68.37.166.168

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[edit] Welcome!

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Xiner (talk, email) 21:08, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Katie Melua

Hello, Katie Melua isn't English; she has joint British/Georgian citizenship. I have put her in Category:British agnostics and I will create Category:Georgian agnostics and put her in that as well. Thank you. Hera1187 17:29, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Category:American liberals

Hi -- I appreciate the work you're doing to classify people. However, with all due respect, the term "liberal" is subject to a wide variety of meanings and interpretations, over time and culture, and you've applied it to people -- like Ani Difranco and Howard Zinn -- for whom it is really inappropriate. Moreover, the Democratic Party is not at all uniformly "liberal" under any understanding of the word, and socialists would generally not appreciate being called "liberal". You might consider holding off on populating this category until some more discussion and consensus happens on how to categorize people? Wikipedia talk:Categorization of people. I haven't looked at Category:American conservatives and the other categories, but imagine the same may be true for some of them. People who can be verified in their article to have claimed a specific political identity may be safe, but this is not something that should just be applied without close knowledge of the individual person's politics. I'm reverting the ones I know are wrong, but there are plenty that I suspect are wrong and just don't know enough about the person to say. --lquilter 05:11, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi, going along with the above statement, I don't believe Audre Lorde would have categorized herself as liberal. I suspect that many people that have read her work would agree. Dkreisst 09:37, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for all your comments. While I can understand where you're coming from, one has to consider in the U.S. the term "liberal" means a very different thing than in other countries. Is is generally used interchangably with "left-wing". This is confusing, yes, but that's politics for you. Also, I wasn't the one who added Zinn. At any rate, I'd like to propose a title change to the American conservative/liberal categories. How about the titles "American Left-Wingers" and "American Right-Wingers", this would end most confusion, as the titles are much broader, but also much more specific. I'm not a member so I can't propose this change myself, but if anyone would be willing to for me, that would be great. Thanks.

You should make these proposals at the discussions that I linked to above. With all due respect, your definition of the term "liberal" (interchangeable with "left-wing") is your definition. It's not an uncommon definition, but it's not at all universal in the US. There is no consensus, whatsoever, on what the term "liberal" means in the US; it's used in many different ways by many different communities. So using it to gather up "left-wing" is inherently a POV that adopts the definition of those communities who define liberal that way. Moreover, the fact that people are adding people to the category, that you might not, but that are liberals according to their own definitions should suggest to you that people use the term to mean different things. ... I hope this clarifies some of the problems that people see with this term. Best, lquilter 19:12, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Also, thanks for the offer to remove the category tag from articles you added it to, but please don't depopulate the category while the CFD is still going on -- per WP:CFD ("Unless the change is non-controversial (such as vandalism or a duplicate), please do not remove the category from pages before the community has made a decision."). It's easier for folks to see for themselves how the category is being used if it's kept in the same state as it was when the CFD nomination was made. Plus, if the CFD passes, the administrators will take care of it, and they have bots to do the hard work. <g> So you can save your energy for other tasks. --lquilter 20:30, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
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