The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
Upmerge (as suggested) -- It makes little difference to an architect is a man or a woman to their performance. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:44, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
Category:1951 Missouri Valley Conference baseball season[edit]
The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
Nominator's rationale: Category with just one entry. ...William, is the complaint department really on the roof? 23:20, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Pretty obvious delete. We're not going to create articles for each team's 1951 Missouri Valley Conference baseball season. – Muboshgu (talk) 17:17, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
DElete -- It is empty except for a template, which should perhaps be articlised. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:46, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
Nominator's rationale: There are two issues here. The first is that the use of "college" as the generic term for all postsecondary education is exclusive to the United States, whereas in most countries colleges and universities are two different things — but both colleges and universities are reflected here and the contents are not US-exclusive, so the category name has to be more generalized for an international readership. And the second is that "college" is a setting that a television series may have, not a genre of television series per se. Bearcat (talk) 17:02, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support Clearer description of the setting. Dimadick (talk) 10:10, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
Nominator's rationale: Following recent consensus on single-year WP:SMALLCATs, both of these have a single election article, and we don't have single-year cats for any other county in the UK other than "London". Century cats are fine for now, can be split into decade cats as and when they're needed. Le Deluge (talk) 11:25, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Merge -- Too little potential content to be worth having, but perhaps it needs a double merge, also to Category:1887 in England. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:49, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was: Although interesting things have been said and suggested in this discussion, most editors expressed clear opposition to a rename of this category, and the inevitable conclusion is therefore to keep it as is. I would like to address a few of the things that have been said. It may be true that "unknown" and "uncertain" and "debated" are not the same, but as one of the participating editors has said correctly, "unknown" is doing a good job of bundling all of these together, while any rename or split would not help to silence those with firm opinions rooted in their religious beliefs. Those will have to be dealt with either way, as has also been said in this discussion. I would make one suggestion that can be instrumental in this, namely to add a bit of explanation to the category page along the following lines: "This category is for works of unknown authorship, whether written anonymously or with a claimed author, including cases in which authorship is debated." or shorter "This category is for works of unknown authorship, whether anonymous or debated." Regarding the suggestion to connect this category with Category:Anonymous works. Apart from the fact that there is clear agreement in this discussion, that technically this would be incorrect, and there is no consensus for it, this proposal is also not viable. This discussion started with the mention of books that contain a claim of authorship, and are therefore not "anonymous works", but whose authorship is debated, and would therefore need to be in this category. The abovementioned suggestion is irreconcilable with the existence of such works. Debresser (talk) 01:27, 2 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: I don't doubt the value of this category in theory, which is why I'm saying "rename" rather than "delete". The classification "unknown authorship" is vague and is a magnet for abuse. It includes a lot of classical works from various traditions about whom there is varying degrees of agreement among scholars about who may or may not have written them, but let's just forcus on the Christian New Testament texts for examples. We have:
(1) texts such as 1 Timothy, which claims to be written by Paul the Apostle, a figure about whom we know quite a bit, but whose Pauline attribution is almost universally rejected by modern scholarship, and we don't know who was the actual author and when;[1]
(2) texts such as 2 Thessalonians, which claims to be written by Paul but whose Pauline attribution is rejected by some (or perhaps many) notable scholars, but those scholars don't know who actually wrote it and when;[2]
(3) texts such as The Epistle to the Hebrews, which contains no inline attribution, but which many ancient and modern Christians consider to have been written by Paul, but many ancient and modern Christians, as well as virtually all modern critical scholars, disagree; all sorts of named figures from early Christianity have been proposed as possible authors, but they are all just guesses, and at least one early Christian author apparently thought the answer would never be known to anyone but God;[3]
(4) texts like the Gospel of Mark, which contains no inline attribution, but which later Christians attributed to Mark the Evangelist (about whom we know very little), and which scholars now consider to have been written and published anonymously, and they have no idea who actually wrote it;[4]
and (5) texts like the Apocalypse of John, which claims to be written by "John", an obscure figure about whom we know nothing, but whom later Christians considered to be the same John who was one of the Twelve Apostles.[5]
So we've got a bunch of different categories of books of uncertain authorship, but with various types of attribution. And this is in the Christian New Testament, where Christians felt the need to add an attribution even where none made sense -- when we include secular works with similar problems, we have to add a sixth category of works similar to Hebrews, but where we have no record of any early attempt to attribute the work to any named individual.
I'm not sure if the current title is appropriate for any of these categories by themselves, or if the category should be split up completely and all articles currently in it be checked, and I'm not entirely certain what we should name these categories, but I thought I would bring this up for discussion.
From these examples I doubt if there is a strong need to rename or split, the descriptive name of the category seems to cover all these examples quite well. Question to nominator: what kind of abuse would the category, as is, attract? Marcocapelle (talk) 03:16, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Marcocapelle: Try adding any of the above-listed articles to the category and see a bunch of conservative evangelical Christian editors revert you saying "The letter itself says its author is Paul and claim that the category is "supposed to be" for works with no traditional attribution (even though that is not how most readers would interpret "unknown authorship). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:44, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That seems like a good idea, although I am not sure why the change of "works" to "books". With a lot of these works, the word "book" may be technically accurate, but I doubt most of our readers know why. Keeping with the New Testament theme, the letters can all be called "books" despite several of them scarcely being one page in modern printed editions, because the word "book" when used in reference to the ancient world means a single independent scroll regardless of length. But "work" avoids forcing our readers to already know that. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 05:38, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Works and books are both fine to me. Marcocapelle (talk) 14:24, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Books of uncertain authorship covers this well. What the heck is a "placeholder name" and what does it have to do with books? Dimadick (talk) 10:13, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Dimadick: Did you even read my rationale? Are you to "discuss" like the title of this page says, or just "vote" between one option and another? I put "placeholder name" because I am not certain what a better title for this category would be, and I came here to discuss what would a better alternative would be. Your above post appears to indicate that you would prefer "Category:Books of uncertain authorship", which is clearly different from the current title. I agree that "uncertain" is probably better (certainly much broader) than "unknown". Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:44, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I wouldn't be against a "uncertain" category, but only as a split from the current category, not as a rename. Unknown is definitely different from uncertain. Marcocapelle (talk) 23:22, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to Category:Anonymous works. Aren't they basically the same thing? Anonymous work says they are works with an "anonymous, undisclosed, or unknown creator or author". I can't see that we need both. Maybe they both should be merged together and renamed to something using "uncertain". Good Ol’factory(talk) 02:15, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Technically not. "unknown authorship" implies that we don't know who wrote them, which could mean we have next to nothing to go on apart from some traditional attribution (Hebrews), or we have a name and virtually nothing else (Apocalypse), or we have a name in the document itself but it's probably a forgery (2 Timothy). Only the first is "anonymous"; the third is "peudonymous", and the second is what this guy calls "homonymous".
Put simply, "anonymous" has to do with what's in the text itself, whereas "unknown authorship" has to do with what modern scholars know (or at least it should have). There are plenty of works that are internally anonymous but scholars are pretty certain they know who wrote them; none in the Christian New Testament, though, and it veers a little off my reason for being concerned about abuse of this category, because no one would think to add, say, the Tosa Nikki to the category.
That said, I thought CFD was the place to have a discussion about exactly how this should be broken down even if I don't already have a concrete proposal laid out, but I may have been wrong -- was I?
Do we actually have a reasonable number of Wikipedia articles about anonymous works of which scholars are nevertheless pretty sure of authorship? If we do, it might suggest that Category:Works of unknown authorship should become a child category of Category:Anonymous works and articles should be in either one of these two categories. If we don't have them, a merge is obviously appropriate. Marcocapelle (talk) 14:24, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I think that that is essentially what I was getting at. I know that there is technically a difference between anonymous works and works of unknown authorship, but I think they are close enough that it's the type of thing that would be categorized together, especially if one of the categories is going to be quite small in comparison. The articles can of course flesh out the details in each case. @Hijiri 88: you were correct. CFD can be used to discuss issues like this even if you don't have a firm proposal of what you want to see happen. Entirely appropriate what you have done and I wasn't questioning it. Good Ol’factory(talk) 01:52, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose -- but the category needs purging: some of the content is pseudonymous and should be in that category. Personally I do not accept that any of the Pauline epistles was not written by Paul or at least his amanuensis. Hebrews is certainly anonymous, as are various Old English texts, Hindu texts, etc.; indeed it is a common feature of ancient works that they are anonymous. I would prefer to see this being manually emptied into a series of subcats of anonymous works, such as Category:Anonymous works in Old English and Category:Anonymous works in Sanskrit. I am not sure that it is useful to categorise Biblical books in this way, as people would normally search for them as Biblical. I also saw so-called Pseudo-Aristotle and a few modern people who have chosen to conceal their identity (mostly using psudonyms). Peterkingiron (talk) 18:05, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Peterkingiron: what exactly are you opposing? The nomination does not begin with a straightforward proposal. Are you opposing any rename or change to the category structure here? Or are you opposing something specific that has been mentioned? Good Ol’factory(talk) 01:54, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It seems like he's opposing the breaking down of the category to be more specific about what scholars say about certain works. The most striking thing in the above post is the extreme view (a view shared by no scholars who aren't fundamentalists) that Paul wrote all the letters in his name, and it would make sense that a user who holds this view would want to keep a vague "unknown authorship" category so that the canonical books in the bible don't get divided into separate authorship categories like "generally accepted", "disputed" and "generally rejected". I would also bet good money that when User:Peterkingiron says "Pauline epistles" he means "in the New Testament". Peter, do you consider 3 Corinthians and the Epistle to Seneca the Younger to be authentic Paul? If not, then on what criterion are you basing the belief that the pastoral epistles are authentic but these extracanonical Pauline epistles are not? It would be a lot easier if you would use clearer terminology. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 04:53, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose the latter questions aren't really relevant for the possible merge, split or rename of this category. Marcocapelle (talk) 08:57, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I certainly did not want it moved to "placeholder" or merged into a general anonymous works, but a split might be appropriate. My view is that we should take the authorship of canonical works at face value, even if 19th century higher critics threw doubt on the question. It may be that certain other apocryphal works on the fringes of scripture should be categorised as pseudopigraphical works, since they purport to be by someone who is clearly not the author, e.g. Enoch. My recollection is that 3 Corinthians is the letter of Clement to the Corinthians, in which case he would be the author. However detailed issues as to what articles do or do not belong in the category is not really a CFD issue. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:55, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
Nominator's rationale: There's a well-established presumption against 20th century people cats (eg 20th-century activists, and the activist category is already more precisely categorised by nationality (Category:Activists by nationality) - I'm not sure something as vague as "Latin-American" really contributes much, the one entry is a Latino from the United States. Le Deluge (talk) 00:03, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom and WP:SMALLCAT. While there are some individual special cases where subcategorizing people by century is actually warranted, it's not a routine thing that we automatically apply to every category tree that exists to contain people — it's a tree that's become extremely overbuilt compared to the relatively small number of cases where it's actually justified. Bearcat (talk) 17:22, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. It's the first time that I hear about a well-established presumption against 20th and 21st century people cats but it does make a lot of sense. Shouldn't it be included in the WP:OCAT guideline? Marcocapelle (talk) 14:44, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think I'd agree that there's a blanket consensus that they're never used for people — there are some examples where they've been nominated for deletion and kept, but those are relatively few and far between compared to the number of times they've been tried. I would definitely agree that there is a consensus against this being a standard feature of all occupational category trees for people, though. Bearcat (talk) 16:57, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete (or better still find an appropriate merge target). The one article concerns an American labor activist of Latino birth. Peterkingiron (talk) 18:09, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
