Category talk:Fictional

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The discussion started on my user page, I copy it here for easier reference. Pjacobi 16:10, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Categorization

'Fictional' already contains 'Fictional universes', which contains 'Harry Potter', which contains 'Harry Potter locations'. (Alternately, 'Fictional' contains 'Fictional locations' which contains 'Harry Potter locations'.) Thus, 'Hogwarts' was already in Fictional. If we included every cateegory in the tree under which an article eventually appears, we'd have huge and unwieldy category sections---not to mention unusably dense category pages. Please only include the most specific categories into which an article fits. grendel|khan 15:33, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

I agree with you, theoretically. But I've checked the situation and it didn't work out in this way. The categories created by the authors of the Fictional articles tend to have non-fictional items included. Like real books, films, actors etc. I'd prefer to have all strictly fictional items and characters in a separate namespace, but it was already decided against this solution. So a category giving the same distinction is the next best solution. When category support improves by enabling boolean category queries, it will become possible to return only non-fictional results from queries by specifying "AND NOT Category:Fictional". Pjacobi 15:42, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Yes, you can do that already with Category:Fiction. (One performs a traversal of the graph under the root category.) You're creating a huge, flat, useless category. If this were done for Category:World War II, we'd have over fifteen hundred articles in it, and the category would cease to be human-readable. This has been discussed over at Wikipedia:Categorization#General_naming_conventions. It pollutes the namespace. Please stop. grendel|khan 15:50, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)
Is this a personal advise or annnouncement of upcoming sanctions? Anyway, I'll stop for now, but I don't agree. Any advanced, complicated scheme cannot hold pace with rate of Fictional articles added. And yes, Category:Fictional is flat, potentially huge, but not useless. It's single use. Pjacobi 15:57, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
And Category:Fiction is already broken: it includes many things existing in Real Life, not Fictional. For example: Crime writer, Category:Christmas fiction, Thriller. -- Pjacobi 16:00, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Pjacobi, I don't believe Grendelkhan was threatening you (if he was, I hope he'll apologize). I do sense some frustration in his words, I grant you. I'm afraid he's right, though -- Category:Fictional violates our category conventions in two ways, that I can see. It is far too broad for the articles being placed in it, and it is an adjective -- as I recall, categories are supposed to be nouns (Fiction, Biology, etc.). Now, I find categories ridiculous and inconsistent, but I think a change as sweeping as the one you're proposing would need a great deal of discussion and consensus before it's applied sitewide. And that's only personal advice, I promise you! :-) I'm glad you're willing to "stop for now", and I hope you will discuss your proposal at Wikipedia talk:Categorization and announce that discussion on the Village pump -- that way everyone gets to consider your idea, which may well have merit. But if it has merit, we need to be agreed that it does, else someone will inevitably end up following you around reverting edits, which will frustrate everyone. Sorry for poking my nose in, but I thought you might like a 3rd opinion. If not, please excuse my intrusion. Jwrosenzweig 16:02, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I have to agree here. A single large category containing every article on a subject is simply unworkable. If you think there's a problem with an existing category, it should be brought up on that category's talk page so a consensus can be formed. —Kate | Talk 16:08, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

This category will be way too large if we start assigning individual article to it. It should have only subcategories in it. Hopefully by the time we can do boolean operations on categories we can also include all articles in subcategories - so we can do the above operations by removing from our 'list' everything in Fictional or its subcategories. DJ Clayworth 16:19, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Ah, okay; I see where you don't like this. Perhaps 'Fiction' should include all things involving fiction in any way---including those examples you made, which are involved with fiction but are not fictional. Then 'Fictional' could be a subcategory of 'Fiction' into which anything fictional---places, people, items, everything you're putting into 'Fictional'---could be put, but in a hierarchy. Here's an ASCII diagram of a piece of that hierarch. (a -> b) means "a is included in b".

Delenn
   |
   |
   V
C:Babylon 5 characters---------->C:Babylon 5
   |                                   |
   |                                   |
   V                                   V
C:Fictional characters           C:Fictional universes
   |                                   |
   |                                   |
   V                                   |
C:Fictional<---------------------------/
   |
   |
   V
C:Fiction

That way, we'd have both a hierarchical structure and the 'Fictional' category (and its functionality of filtering out all fictional anything in the whole 'pedia) you were looking for---because that's a useful function, I agree; I just didn't like the way in which you were implementing it. (And if, as Jwrosenzweig pointed out, I came on a bit brash, I do apologize.) What do you think? grendel|khan 16:23, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

Thank you, Grendelkhan, both for your willingness to apologize (I find it refreshing around here) and for your constructive suggestion. I like this idea, and it appears to me that it addresses Pjacobi's concerns. Jwrosenzweig 16:30, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for all your comments on this issue. Unfortunately I've formulated my arguments just next door at Category:Fiction, if you want to have a look. Basically I'm saying that a flat Category:Fictional is more fool proof and faster to apply. The size in itself doesn't seem to be a problem. But in the end, I'd happy with any solution, that will allow to exclude Fictional articles from search results. -- Pjacobi 16:38, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
No problem. If he agrees on this, I'll go ahead and start making the changes. One thing we've gotta make sure about: while J. Michael Straczynski is involved with Babylon 5 (for instance)---he pretty much is B5---he's not part of the B5 universe. So he shouldn't be in Category:Babylon 5, just in writers and producers and whatnot. Aside from that, it seems like a good plan. grendel|khan 16:42, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)
I think J. Michael Straczynski should be in Category:Babylon 5 and Category:Babylon 5 should not be in the Fictional hierarchy. If such a fine distinction is needed, a separate Category:Babylon 5 Universe (or a "native" name for this) is called for. Just as Ringworld has Category:Known Space.
But it is not strictly necessary. "Category:Fictional AND Category:Babylon 5" has the same expressive power.
Pjacobi 16:58, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The problem is that when one traverses 'Fictional' to get the 'WikiReader Fictional Reference to Fictional Everything', one would like to get everything fictional, including, say, Babylon 5. William Shatner and Gene Roddenberry (two examples off the top of my head) aren't in any Star Trek categories---I don't think the issue I raised really is an issue. JMS simply shouldn't be in the B5 category (though he should, naturally, be prominently mentioned in the article.) Forget I brought it up. So, I'm going to start making the changes to Category:Fictional and articles therein. Into the breach, friends! grendel|khan 17:09, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

[edit] Unresolved Issues

One unresolved issue remains: The articles for the books and series themselves, e.g, Babylon 5 and Stargate, are in the categories Category:Babylon 5 and Category:Stargate, respectively. Thus, any non-fiction dump will miss those. The solution of creating categories for 'Babylon 5 universe' and 'Stargate universe' seems like the best idea as of now, and moving everything fictional under there. Still smells a mite kludgy. Any other options? grendel|khan 17:28, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

Another detail: Lists. Lists of fictional characters aren't fictional character and so I have dropped Category:Lists of fictional characters from Category:Fictional characters and added "See also" in both directions. Pjacobi 09:36, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Category:Tolkien stub contains at least one real-life item (Tolkien letters) -- Pjacobi 11:07, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Is there an agreement to exclude religion from this category? It would lead to major trouble if someone groups Category:Deities here. More troublesome is mythology. Should Dragon end up here? -- Pjacobi 11:07, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I assume all single articles which end up here will need cleanup work. I've categorized Revolver Ocelot. here as it is fictional but I don't know where to put it (except on VfD) -- Pjacobi 11:07, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Mentat

  1. There is a non-fictional entry on the same page, which may be of rather obscure importance, otherwise I'd moved "Mentat" to "Mentat (Dune)"
  2. Where to classify, we don't have Fictional orders

Pjacobi 21:20, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

List_of_fictional_battles also lists battles mentioned in the bible. -- Pjacobi 21:23, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Category:Yu-Gi-Oh! contains quite a large number of articles about individual playing cards. As unencyclopedic playing cards may be, they aren't Fictional, I assume. The monsters portrayed are fictionals, but not the cards. And the articles in part talk about their use in game. -- Pjacobi 07:50, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Are D&D (etc.) character classes Fictional? Example: Psionicist. -- Pjacobi 13:50, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Have you ever met any psionicists? Do you know anyone whose life is directly controlled by a character sheet? ^_^ --[[User:Eequor|η♀υωρ]] 21:13, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Problems with this category

I think the Category:Foundation universe books (and other similar categories, like Star Trek movies, Star Wars movies, D&D campaign settings etc.) should be part of the Foundation universe category. It's not that uncommon in Wikipedia categories that a subcategory fits very well into a category, but subcategory of that subcategory, while it fits very well in the subcategory, does not fit into the superior category, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Furthermore, I don't think the Category:Fictional is that necessary anyway. There are also numerous articles that describe both the fictional universe and the book in one article (like the Category:Campaign settings. Ausir 10:34, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] It just doesn't work

As I already explained in the initial discussion, this whole hierarchical approach to the Fictional classifucation is fragile and is broken daily. In categories some levels below Category:Fictional, the editors tend to not see the point in keeping books etc and fictional things apart.

I won't taken any action until I get more support, but I am re-assured that an aspect based categorization (adding a simple, flat "Fictional" category to each and every article about fictional X) would be superior.

Pjacobi 23:51, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Until the point where category-filtered searching becomes a reality, it's hard to really address this because we don't know exactly how it will work. It is completely appropriate to put Category:Middle-earth in Category:Fictional universes, and it's equally appropriate to put The Lord of the Rings in Category:Middle-earth books (or, for that matter, J. R. R. Tolkien in the parent Middle-earth category), but it does not really fit into fictional universes, and it's not by any means fictional.
The way the category system works right now, it is in fact rather difficult to figure out what the entire tree looks like. It is not immediately apparent to someone looking at the Middle-earth category that it even falls under Category:Fictional.
And even if it were, I'm not sure that such a limited categorization scheme would be particularly helpful. (For one thing, there would be no sub-categories of fictional universes. But where would Category:Middle-earth go if not Category:Fictional universes? It's the natural place to put it, even though none of the sub-categories or articles are themselves about actual fictional universes.)
If all we want is a way to declare that an article refers to something fictional, perhaps it would be better to do that with some sort of special tag that does not yet exist. I don't think the existing category structure is particularly conducive to that goal.
[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 00:15, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Make "is a fictional" a wikilink in all those articles! "What links here" will give the list of fictional X. But it's only different syntax for the same idea. --Pjacobi 21:57, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)
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