Category talk:Actors

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Contents 1 Category:Male Actors 2 Categorization of professions by nationality 2.1 Action item(s) 2.2 Application to film, television and theatrical professions 2.2.1 Actors by time period 2.2.2 Proceeding from here 2.3 Actors categories worked on following discussion 3 Comments regarding Actors category heirarchy - February 2006 4 Female actors

[edit] Category:Male Actors

• This category was listed for deletion on April 4, 2005. It was deleted as categories should generally be gender neutral. The following discussion took place and should not be modified.

[edit] Categorization of professions by nationality

The following discussion has been moved from Wikipedia talk:Categorization; see that page for how we got to this point.

[edit] Action item(s)

Possible general action items if the consensus statement is accepted:

• Is there cause to update Wikipedia:Categorization/Categories and subcategories section on "Reasons for duplication"? Is our "desire to browse articles at the topic article level" a distinct reason from those already mentioned? --LiniShu 02:21, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Comment - There have been a relatively small number of editors involved in the discussion to this point, although it is in a central location as far as categorization is concerned. I would recommend that, after leaving the discussion open a little longer, we then proceed with the effort of making the categorization of individuals in the film, television and theatrical professions consistent. I would not be surprised, though, if the general topic was revisited in other times/places. Hopefully, though, the current discussion may be good groundwork for any future discussions. Thanks, Samuel, for all of your due diligence on the issue of category size. --LiniShu 02:40, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

It sounds like a good plan to me--wait a bit, and if there are no further objections, use the actors category as an experiment to see how well a more-or-less fully populated category tree works. Then, if it seems like a good idea, we can meet back here and use it as an example of why the recommendation maybe should be changed. I'm kind of new around here; does that sound wikikosher?

I would argue for consistency in dealing with categories up to Actors. (I could see including a populated category of People, for a guide to all biographies in Wikipedia, but that would be outside the scope of doing one branch as a test case.) I would say that Actors should be fully populated, as well as Film actors, American actors and American film actors. That's a minimum of four categories for every actor--that does not seem like too many to me. Thus: Category:Actors; Category:NATIONALITY actors; Category:FIELD actors; Category NATIONALITY FIELD actors.

Is there another kind of category that every actor should have? If we want to fully populate the tree, adding another category would mean adding four more categories to every actor (e.g., DECADE actors, NATIONALITY DECADE actors, DECADE FIELD actors, DECADE NATIONALITY FIELD actors). But we don't have to be strict about this: If we wanted to do the decade thing, for instance, we could say we'll only do it for a few specific types, like American film actors and British film actors. Then only those selected types would get an extra category, and those only one (DECADE NATIONALITY FIELD actors).

Nareek 05:24, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Okay, but keep in mind that most actors aren't simply "American film actors"--they're also "Jewish American actors", "American film directors", "Entertainers who died in their fifties", and "People from New Jersey". I'm not saying this is the end of the world, but let's keep in mind we're not always talking about four categories. NickelShoe 05:47, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Very true, many will have more than four categories. But for purposes of this project, there should be a set of categories that should be given to every actor. Are those four it, or is there some other grouping that everyone should have?

Nareek 06:03, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Assume that every topic level category is broken into subcategories by nationality. According to this proposal, each article ends up in two categories. If it is also broken by another attribute, that puts the article in 4 categories. 3 attributes yields 8 categories, etc... with the result that N attributes yield 2^N categories. For this reason, restraint is necessary. Eventually, hopefully, the software will be modified to tag articles with these attributes in a better system, or allow database searches. Until that day arrives (and if it arrives) we cannot expect this system to handle multiple attributes. For this reason, I'd like to propose the following. That duplication of categorization does not go above the lowest possible topic category (for example Film actors), and that subcategorization of that lowest level should only be done with parallel subcategories, which means that they would all be subcategories of the topic category and no attributes would be combined. So for example, if the topic level category is Category:Film actors, then Category:Film actors by decade it should not be combined with Category:Film actors by nationality to create Category:American film actors of the 60's. The point of this proposal started with trying to make it possible to browse through topic level categories, not to create and populate every possible subcategory. Let's do this a small step at a time and see how it goes. For now, let's just re-populate Category:Film actors and Category:Film directors and take it from there... -- Samuel Wantman 08:23, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Since the task involved is going to the articles in a category and making sure they're all in one or more other categories, it's not really harder to do four at once than two. If you go to "Category: American film actors" you'd open each article and paste in the following:

"Category: Actors Category:Film actors Category:American actors"

All these articles would already be in Category:American film actors. You might have to then delete some categories if there's duplication.

Since it's pretty much the same amount of work to paste in one category as three, it seems like we ought to do this the way we want it to turn out. Am I wrong in thinking that the consensus here is in favor of a fully populated tree?

Nareek 13:27, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm attempting to kind of "redirect" the discussion on the specifics of the acting and directing professions to the section below :) Thanks, --LiniShu 13:35, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Application to film, television and theatrical professions

Regarding the scope of the original discussion (and the area for which we have editors willing to work on consistency of categorization at this time): If the consensus statement proposed above is accepted, we have already established in the discussion that the following "grandparent" categories should be populated with all of the articles in their descendant "by nationality" categories: Category:Film actors, Category:Film directors, Category:Television actors, Category:Television directors, Category:Stage actors, Category:Theatre directors Are there any other similair "fooers" categories to add to this list at this time? --LiniShu 03:01, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Other "ancestor" categories in question- We have Category:Actors, Category:Directors, and "Actors by nationality" categories such as Category:American actors. Should any of these be populated with individual articles? If no one has a strong opinion, we could go with the status quo for now; current general usage based on numbers of articles, is to not have "Actors" and "Directors" populated with individual articles, but we do have the "Actors by nationality" categories populated with individual articles. --LiniShu 03:13, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm taking the liberty of pulling out a couple of comments from the section above, relevant to what we do here and now with the film, television, and theatrical professions (--LiniShu 13:31, 26 January 2006 (UTC)):

From Nareek 05:24, 26 January 2006 (UTC) - Populate Category:Actors; Category:NATIONALITY actors; Category:FIELD actors; Category NATIONALITY FIELD actors with individual actor articles.

From Samuel Wantman 08:23, 26 January 2006 (UTC) - Let's do this a small step at a time and see how it goes. For now, let's just re-populate Category:Film actors and Category:Film directors and take it from there...

My preference - My "pet question" :P I really want to know what to do with Category:American actors - because that's the avenue by which I became involved in this discussion. I can go through the category making sure each actor is in the appropriate Category:FIELD actors and Category NATIONALITY FIELD actors, but do I then remove them from "American actors" or leave them in? And do I add back those I had removed before this discussion began? I'd like to make the usage consistent, one way or another. Status quo and lesser amount of edits required would probably be to populate rather than depopulate. --LiniShu 13:31, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Actors by time period

A wild and crazy idea - for those who prefer smaller subcategories for browsing - for American actors, even the most precise subcategories that we have now Category:American film actors, Category:American stage actors, and Category:American television actors are not small categories. "American film actors" at the time of this writing has 1331 entries; more will be added in the effort to consistently categorize "American actors", and the category will only keep growing with time. With the above discussions about the disadvantages of "over-subcategorizing", I'm not in a hurry to create these new subcategories, and I would not want anyone reading this to rush out and create them, but... what about the idea of actor subcategories by time period, as we have for musical groups? Some actors like George Burns, of course, would have quite a few decades of activity, but others would have only one or two. Advantages would be: a.) we'd have subcategories that at some point stop growing very much b.) we could see people grouped with their contemporaries c.) an actor's time period implies something about the cultural climate in which they worked. What do you all think? (If you are tired of more and more subcategorization, "please don't shoot me" for suggesting this :) - just an idea) Thanks, --LiniShu 03:33, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proceeding from here

At this time, among this group we have clear consensus on: do re-populate Category:Film actors and Category:Film directors, do not re-populate up the heirarchy tree above Category:Actors. There is less clear agreement on "Actors" itself, and the NATIONALITY actors categories. We also have the "cousin" categories of the Film categories - Stage and Television. I've been thinking this over the past couple days - I think that those who are interested in helping with the repopulation effort for the "MEDIUM(Film,Stage,Television) Actors" (or directors) categories should go ahead and begin, maybe focusing on the film category first (one has to choose somewhere to start), but at the same time, as we "touch" any articles to add in MEDIUM Actors category tags, why not make sure, at the same time, as Nareek suggested, that the NATIONALITY Actors and Actors category tags are there also? Of the group that has given consensus on populating categories farther up the heirarchy tree than the NATIONALITY MEDIUM Actors categories, no one showed significant opposition to populating NATIONALITY Actors or Actors, and our "populate to the level of notability" criterion could be applied either at the MEDIUM Actors or Actors level, and, interest has been expressed in having Category:Actors populated for browsing.

As we begin this work, it would be good to incorporate Samuel's new "Allincluded" template on the appropriate category pages.

I am planning to proceed as I have described above, if there is strong objection, or a different consensus is reached, my changes can always be undone.

NickelShoe, you were part of this discussion at the beginning; I know that the repopulation of the higher level categories is a new direction from the way we were going before, hopefully, after the discussions above, and the checking of whether categories can be too large (from a technical standpoint), this conclusion is something that you can live with? Your opinion is valued; you do a lot of work improving the quality of Wikipedia, and you had already put in a lot of effort in organizing the Actors categories according to the generally held application of WP:MOS prior to this discussion.

Feedback from all is appreciated, as always. Thanks,Lini 13:28, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Lini, could you spell out exactly what you're doing in case others want to give you a hand? Nareek 22:19, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

A quick answer for now - See the history for any of the four articles in Category:Argentine film actors. I've added in Category:Actors and Category:Film actors for each of them. So, the articles in "Argentine Film actors" are done. I have not yet done anything with a note on the talk page yet, which I'd like to do when I get a chance. To avoid duplication of effort, it might also be helpful to have a subpage to one of these talk pages (this one, or Film actors?), where we break the task into chunks - individual nationalities, or individual letters of the alphabet within nationalities with lots of articles - to keep track of who is working on what, and what has been looked at already. In the meantime, we could just make notes here.

Hope this helps for now; I hope to do more after work today. --Lini 13:32, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Please see the "note box" that I have "hard-coded" on Category talk:Argentine film actors. I would suggest putting something like this on the relevant talk pages as a guideline for editors, regarding usage of the Actors category heirarchy. Please feel free to adjust the wording if it is awkward or inaccurate. Also, someone with more experience with templates (Samuel?) could maybe advise whether this is a candidate for a template. Thanks, Lini 01:45, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I've added a different (also hard-coded) note box to Category talk:Film actors which explains the consensus that we reached, and that the category is in the process of being repopulated with articles that had been "moved out" of Film actors into NATIONALITY Film actors --Lini 12:49, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

[I moved up the "Actors by Time Period" discussion--to facilitate this ongoing conversation.]

[edit] Actors categories worked on following discussion

Articles in Category:Argentine film actors repopulated into Category:Actors, Category:Argentine actors, and Category:Film actors --Lini 13:32, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I moved all the articles in Category:Venezuelan actors to Category:Actors. It doesn't take very long to do a bunch--just copy the category, repaste it and edit out the nationality. Add capital A. If you write one explanation that can explain all the edits, that saves time--you just type in the first few letters. Nareek 05:14, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Good work on the Venezuelan actors. So, what is this about writing one edit summary that fits multiple edits and then you just type in the first few letters on subsequent edits? Is this something like the AutoComplete in Excel? If so, I was not aware of that feature - "Kewl" :)--Lini 13:19, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah. At least the way it works on my computer, when you type in the Edit Summary box it offers you the choices of what you've written before with the same beginning characters. Nareek 13:27, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I moved the Category:Ukrainian actors into Category:Actors--there weren't a lot of them. Question: If the category listing has only the last name, does it show up that way in the category, or is the first name automatically supplied somehow? I've been adding in first names, and I'm not sure it's necessary. Nareek 02:38, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Articles in Category:Greek actors have been both sorted into the appropriate Greek actors by medium category (without moving from parent) and populated into Category:Actors and the appropriate Actors by medium category. --Lini 20:54, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comments regarding Actors category heirarchy - February 2006

(I've taking the liberty of rearranging the organization of recent comments on this page without changing content - for clarity's sake.) --Lini 20:45, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I have been subcategorising category:Television actors by nationality, but have only just seen this debate. If I have seen an article in for example "American actors" and "television actors", I have been replacing both by the single "American television actors". I don't really see the point of putting things up in Actors at all, but please comment or I'll carry on doing it my way Tim | meep in my general direction 19:57, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

The point is that some people will be interested in actors, some people will be interested in television actors, some people will be interested in American actors and some people will be interested in American television actors. Given that space is not really an issue in categorization, it makes more sense to put articles in each category that they belong to, rather than assuming that people will only be interested in the most specific category. Nareek 20:33, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

I would be incredibly annoyed and disaffected if parent categories were repopulated. I have spent hours placing articles into their correct subcats (film, TV directors and producers), and removing the parent cats. Parent cats obviously provide a useful navigational tool (Film directors --> British film directors, for example). The parent cat would become far too large that it would be unuseable. The JPS 12:58, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

The subcategories will still be on top of the category, no matter how large the category gets, so the navigational use will be unaffected. As for categories being so large as to be unusable, that's a subjective judgement. People interested in directors may well find a category broken up into dozens of national categories to be unusable. Why not organize them both ways and allow people to use the one they find most helpful? Nareek 13:14, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

OK, another example. I recently created a nationality subcategory. I wouldn't have noticed them if they had been buried in the large category. I'm not sure how end-users are going to "use" the parent cat anyway. Seems a lot of effort for not much point. The JPS 21:14, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

One would "use" the parent category if one were interested in actors in general, rather than actors from a specific nationality--just as one would use any other category if you were interested in members of that category. If we're going to organize the categories to make it easy to organize them, that would seem to leave the user out entirely. Nareek 02:30, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, Nareek, but I fail to see this happening. So the end user wants to read an article about 'an' actor, so picks a random one from the cat? This might be true of the smaller, specialist categories, but not from the parent. Human time can be much better spent on improving the articles themselves, rather than on pointless remedial tasks like this. There are many articles about actors in an appalling state, and improving them would be much more beneficial to the end user. Ensuring references to the IMDB or eqivalent are inlcuded, for example, would greatly help.
Another user has commented, on his talk page, that overcategorisation is a worry. This means that some articles will have a larger category section than text. The JPS 18:09, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Added Turkish actors to Category:Actors. Nareek 02:30, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I have to agree with The JPS. I'm also worried about over-categorisation; the comment that a short article on a minor article can have more categories than text was mine, I think. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 18:48, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

There are many reasons why someone would find a Category:Actors useful--the same reasons someone might want to own a book called "Actors of the World." Say they're writing a piece about great actors of the world. Or maybe they want to know if any actors names start with the letter "X". Users put things to all sorts of uses, most of which you won't imagine beforehand. The point is we've got an category called Category:Actors, and it ought to contain what the label describes--unless we want to empty it of everything but subcategories, which seems like the only other intellectually plausible thing to do. Having actors in the category means adding two words to every actor's article, which doesn't seem like a terrible burden to put on an article.

I appreciate your concern for my time, but I assure you that I spend most of my Wikiing hours working on content other than categorization issues. I got drawn into the discussion because the way that musicians, actually, were being categorized seemed so illogical--Category:American musicians is a listing of all the American musicians who are not subcategorized into a particular state, which seems like a perfectly useless category. Checking into Wikipedia talk:Categorization, I discovered that other people found the current system equally illogical, which I found reassuring. Having participated in a discussion that reached a consensus (among the people participating, I know) that fully populated categories were more sensible, I felt like I ought to do my part in the ensuing call to action--see above. So every once in a while I add some nationality of actors into the main Category:Actors.

It may not be the ideal use of my time, but I would suggest that it's more useful than spending time taking people out of categories that they obviously belong to, thereby making those categories less useful. Wikipedia is not a closet--it doesn't become more organized as you stuff things into fewer boxes. Ideally, things ought to be everywhere where people might look for them. If that means that the category box is the longest part of some stubs, I fail to see why that's a problem. Nareek 22:27, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

But that's just how categories work; many categories have no articles as members, only sub-categories. And I don't think that we ought to be second-guessing the research needs of readers, nor doing their work for them. In fact I doubt, to be honest, that many people look at categories at all (no-one I've ever spoken to about Wikipedia has admitted doing so). Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης)

But it's not how Category:Actors works (or Category:American musicians, either)--both of them have articles in them, but just a small subset of the articles that their names imply.

It seems to me that to delete articles from categories where they logically belong is second-guessing the research needs of the users. My feeling is that categories ought to contain what they say they contain; if they're useful they'll be used. You can always ignore categories that aren't personally useful to you; you can't use a category that exists but has been depopulated because somebody else didn't think it would be useful.

I have to say, if you don't think anyone uses categories, why do you care about them? Personally, I'm doing this because I find the subject intellectually interesting. Nareek 22:51, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Most top-level parent cats that have members have them because inexperienced editors made mistakes (which is why they have relatively few). I care about them, though, because they're useful for editors; that udefulness declines the fuller they are.

If this discussion is meant to change Wikipedia usage of categories, though, I think that it should be taking place somewhere rather more public. Would anyone object if I (or someone else) copied this to somewhere relevant (Wikipedia talk:Category, or somewhere)? --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:58, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Categorization is where this conversation started--it would be great to have your viewpoint(s) there. Nareek 23:13, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I've restored all of the text that had been on this page prior to this section. I believe it must have been cleared accidentally yesterday, because there was no archive page created and no explanatory note of it being removed. --Lini 02:44, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

To clarify - as Nareek stated above, the discussion started at Wikipedia talk:Categorization#Professions subcategorized by Nationality, and remained open from 21 January 2006 through 29 January 2006 before any action was taken. A proposed consensus statement was also published on 26 January with two days wait for objections.

During the initial discussion, the following editors expressed the opinion that having articles appear in a category such as Category:Film actors, rather than just in the Film actor by nationality categories, would be more useful to them: User:Samuel Wantman, User:Bkonrad, User:Will Beback, and User:Cacophony. The following editors expressed opinions early in the discussion against large categories (such as Film actors would be) - User:NickelShoe and User:CalJW. I facilitated drawing the discussion to a conclusion that would give some editors what they were asking for; would not take away anything that other editors wished to preserve, and was not out of line with recent updates to Wikipedia:Categorization. My personal preference is actually on the side of only populating the smaller descendant categories, but I think what is most vital is to have an agreed upon standard which can be documented on talk pages and applied when creating new articles or checking the categorization of existing articles. I believe that the conclusion arrived at and the method used were in line with the spirt of Wikipedia, as is the encouragement of continued discussion as others become acquainted with the consensus reached in January. Thanks, Lini 03:20, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

(Simultaneous comment)

This has been a controversial topic ever since categorization began about two years ago. The original reason for small subcategories was that there was no easy way to navigate categories with a few hundred members. Many categories, such as Category:Film directors got depopulated into subcategories by nationality. This made it very difficult to browse through film directors. When category table of contents (TOC) arrived, it became easy to navigate categories with several thousand members. It became possible to repopulate categories such as film directors to make them more useful for browsing. The key question, I think, is at what level will people want to browse through the articles about any given topic? After discussion at Wikipedia talk:Categorization there was a clear consensus that categories should be populated at least up to the topic article level. There is no article about Polish film directors and there is an article about Film director, so it makes sense to be able to browse through all film directors.

With Actors, the decisions are not as clear cut, and there should be discussion here about what makes the most sense. From the discussions at Wikipedia talk:Categorization it would follow that acting categories be populated up to Category:Actors. If not that high, it should at least be up to the level of the subcategories of Category:Actors by medium, as these all could have reasonable articles about what it means to be an actor in each medium. There seem to be people who have commented above that think that it would be useful to browse through all actors. So the question to be answered is why not? One argument put forth has been that it leads to "overcategorization". I don't see this as being a problem. If all actors were also categorized as entertainers, that would probably be excessive. Another problem is that it is harder to see which articles have not been put into the subcategories.

I think it is useful to consider other real-world examples of categories. If you do a web-search on actors you get all of them. You don't get a message saying that you have to add the actors nationality of medium to get the listings. Likewise for the index of books. An encyclopedia of plants doesn't require that you know the genus of the plant. Indexing and tables of contents is about giving people a way to browse and find things when they have incomplete information. We should keep this in mind as we categorize. -- Samuel Wantman 03:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

On further examination, it would appear to make sense to fully populate the 'Actors by medium' categories at the same time as populating his one. Or poputate those BEFORE doing this one. It seems odd to skip a level in the hierarchy. -- Samuel Wantman 08:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, regarding populating Actors by medium categories at the same time as Actors, and have been doing so - actually have been consistently populating both 'up' and 'down', as needed, for whatever is missing from: Actors, Actors by Nationality, Actors by Medium, Actors by Medium by Nationality. --Lini 04:39, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Female actors

I plan to create a sub-category Category:Female actors. Entries listed in the female actoes category will also be listed in Category:Actors, hence it will be duplicate categorization. We already have the female categories for the following occupations, but don't have one yet for actors (see Category:Women by occupation) : Architects, Artists, Aviators, Composers, Sportspeople (sportswomen), Film directors, Models, Musicians, Poets (poetesses), Rulers, Scientists, Singers, Lawyers, and Writers. Jay 10:57, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

My impression is that, despite the exceptions you've found, the WP convention is to avoid making gender-based categories. Nareek 13:15, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

I did go through Wikipedia:Categorization/Gender, race and sexuality and the discussions at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Gender,_race_and_sexuality/Archive_1. Among the many arguments there I found these impressive :

• In favour: "... If the person's field of endeavor separates the sexes, then it makes sense for us to recognize that."
• Against: "... since about half of all actors are female, it's not very useful to split out a cat:actresses."

Unlike what the project page says, what I found from the discussions is that there is no problem with categorizing based on gender. However for the specific case of actors, categorization is a problem because of the 50:50 ratio of male to female. But as I mentioned earlier, the female category is not expected to be a subset but a sub-category that will involve duplication with the main category. Jay 05:26, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

There's a whole lot of actor categories, all of which would have to be duplicated for consistency's sake. Given that it's usually not too difficult to distinguish between male and female names by looking at them, I'm not sure why this would be worthwhile. Nareek 15:52, 3 May 2006 (UTC)