User talk:Dbackeberg

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Hi. Welcome to Wikipedia.

I see you have just created a category and are adding people to it, even though you are aware of the Category:Wellesley College alumni. I understand your preference for using the name that Wellesley uses for the category name. But the proper way to handle this is to see if you can gain consensus of other editors on the existing category in order to change the name, or to set up a redirect so people will find the current category. Duplicating the category under your prefered name is disruptive to Wikipedia as it causes confusion to those reading article pages. Please start working with the other editors on the existing category.

You can find out more about contributing to wikipedia at the welcome page Thanks --Siobhan Hansa 16:09, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I appreciate your comment. While alumni is the current word used, it's not the College's word for its graduates, nor the proper latin (and therefore English) noun. see the entry for Alumn.

I propose creating a parallel category, adding all articles to both categories then phasing out the Wellesley College alumni category and changing it into a redirect to Wellesley College alumnae category.

Dbackeberg 16:29, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Dbackeberg, I believe if you can get consensus for the change, there are bots (automated scripts) that will change the category over on all the articles. But I'm not sure where you ask to get this done. An Admin may know more, you can get help by putting {{helpme}} on your talk page - with a description of what you're trying to do below. Admins watch for this tag and should respond. I haven't worked much on categories - I only saw what you were doing because you started adding the duplicate category to a couple of articles I watch - so I'm not sure of exactly where to post questions or look for how-tos.

Even without a bot helping out, it seems like your basic process is reasonable. Having messages on both category talk pages sounds good (and frequently necessary to ensure people don't automatically change it back without realizing it was done for good reason). I don't think it's necessary to have the category duplicated on each alumna's article page for any length of time. If the name's changing, it should just change. It was the duplicate category that alarmed me in the first place, a name change probably wouldn't have registered. --Siobhan Hansa 16:44, 17 October 2006 (UTC)