Commons:Categories for discussion/2013/03/Category:Healthcare in Armenia

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This discussion of one or several categories is now closed. Please do not make any edits to this archive.

Category:Healthcare in Armenia

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Merge or rename to Category:Health in Armenia, and "Healthcare in Country X" to "Health in Country X" for all other countries.

Full list here of all categories to be merged/renamed here:

I did a test nomination of Category:Healthcare in Afghanistan and it closed without any dispute. I am thus now nominating the rest of these duplicate categories, which aligns with similar discussions that happened last year and ended with the removal of the vast majority of "Healthcare in Country X" categories in english wikipedia.

The separation between health and healthcare at the country level is no longer used in en.wikipedia categories. I think the same logic applies to commons categories. In addition, if you peruse them, they are just as likely to have pictures of hospitals in the 'health' category as in the 'healthcare' category. For example:

There is already a rich tree of various healthcare subcats that can and should be used, but a high-level distinction at the country level between health and healthcare is not needed. In cases where there are too many images, the solution should be to create subcats, like 'Hospitals' or 'Clinics' or 'Doctors' or 'Patients' - but a high-level separation between Health and Healthcare just ends up confusing editors, as you can see from the haphazard placement of items to date. Health can be seen as an outcome of Healthcare, so they are two sides of the same coin, and when it comes to classifying images, it is *not* useful to try to distinguish between the two - for example, to have HIV statistics under 'Health' but to have HIV treatment centers under 'Health care' and then HIV public campaigns back under 'Health'.

Finally, maintaining these categories as is poses challenging classification problems: for example, in a given image, a patient may be receiving healthcare, or may be becoming more healthy. In addition, as was discussed the other CfDs, it is actually rather difficult find a sharp line between health and healthcare - for example, where does medical research and education, or blood banks, or HIV activism, or health legislation, or public health messaging, or death from cancer go? I could cite many other examples where it is ambiguous, and definition of Wikipedia:Health and Wikipedia:healthcare is not necessarily of much help, since healthcare is the activity, and health is the result (thus two sides of the same coin). If you look at the haphazard classification used to date, it is clear that there is no common consensus or understanding by commons editors on whether a given image is about 'healthcare' or about 'health' - so you end up having to search both categories, and the distinction doesn't help at all - it only confuses.

At the end of the day, in order to make it easy for users to find and classify the images they are looking for, we have two choices:

  1. accept the status quo, spend some time to come up with a long list of definitions as to what is healthcare and what is health, then go through all of these categories fixing things, and spend the next few years monitoring it to make sure images don't go awry, and force users to pay the penalty of themselves having to understand this subtle and inconsistently applied "difference" between the health and healthcare categories
  2. Or, merge the categories.

Thus for now, I am proposing a full merge of these categories to 'Health in X'. It is probably cleaner to delete 'Healthcare in X', but we could also keep a redirect. I welcome your thoughts and comments. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 11:12, 19 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: I found several more Healthcare in X cats, usually for national sub-divisions; I have added them to this CfD for consistency and completeness.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 11:14, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
When looking in those cats that are really populated (Germany, France, ...), there is indeed a serious mixup, but they deserve to remain split-up. Experience shows that merges for simplification are very often undone later as they become too crowded. A proper split seems not so difficult, documentation might seem more complicated, although to me, healthcare is the main cat in the sense that it concerns organising and doing things related to the health of people, and will be quickest populated in the short term. I think that with a minimum of documentation and making sure that all the root and by country categories are properly organised, the correct structures will propagate in an organic way to the deeper categories. --Foroa (talk) 12:36, 21 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Foroa. I can see your POV, but I have considered this issue deeply, including through the process of cleaning up this mess in the en.wikipedia, and I am convinced that there is no value to be gained by trying to define such a separation - for categorization purposes - between health and healthcare. You say "healthcare is the main cat in the sense that it concerns organising and doing things related to the health of people" - in this case, what then remains for "health"? For example, is exercise "health" or "healthcare"? In some cases, exercise is prescribed by a doctor, so is a form of care or treatment for an ailment; in other cases, it is used for maintenance of good health, thus not technically healthcare... Let me give you another example:
  1. A picture of someone with a disease - this is a condition of the human body, so we put under 'health'
  2. The same picture of the same person, but we've zoomed out and realize they're in a clinic being treated, so we put under 'healthcare'
  3. The same picture of the same person, but they're now relaxing in the hospital feeling better and sharing a smile with their family - it is thus an image of wellness, and thus we put under 'health'
  4. Now the same picture, but the doctor walked into the room to discuss the treatment options - now again we're back in 'healthcare'
Thus, 4 pictures of the same person taken 5 minutes apart could potentially be categorized in different places only based on a few changes in scenery. This doesn't make sense to me.
Another example is just to consider the huge breadth of types of content that are out there - such as graphs of health status, graphics on treatment status (would those be split between health and healthcare?), public health campaigns (is this health or healthcare? even the experts don't agree on that); blood banks, medical research institutes (which may do research into the basic functioning of human health, but may also do research into treatments), social security and insurance (is that healthcare since it's about how you pay for treatment, or is it health as it's about the overall health status of a population? both!), etc etc etc. At the end of the day, there is no simple rule you can apply, you would end up having to make a long list, and in many cases arbitrarily just decide "X = health, Y = healthcare" (arbitrary since health and healthcare are two sides of the same coin), and it is a pretty sure guarantee that the editors won't even follow those rules in any case, making it someone else's job for the rest of time to clean it up. Yes, there are clear-cut cases like a surgery, but for every clear cut case there are dozens of edge cases that could be argued either way. And that is the crux of the problem.
As to your point that the merge may create crowded categories, allow me to suggest that creation of sub-categories (eg. hospitals, doctors, etc) will easily de-clutter any top level category. If you can come up with a simple (or even a complex!) heuristic for sorting a given image as 'health' or 'healthcare' please share it, I have tried and I have asked many other editors, in vain - no one over several CFDs ever came up with one that came even close to covering the numerous edge cases, or that would provide an editor or a searcher with a simple way to say "when looking for image X, check category Y". Here are a few more images I found browsing one of the categories, and for each one I could make a cogent argument to place it in health, and in healthcare: "a vaccination campaign sign, a sign encouraging people to get tested for HIV, a meeting on health and healthcare policy, a lab worker with blood samples (is he doing research on health, or tests on a patient? should it matter?), life expectancy graph, treatment-adjusted life-expectancy graph). In any case, I welcome your (and other's) further thoughts on this matter. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 00:26, 22 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Need more time, will look in it later. --Foroa (talk) 16:39, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
 Oppose I did spend a couple of hours in those categories and did not found major inconsistencies, while it confirmed my feeling that in the long run, those categories should be kept apart. In most major topic trees, we have a split between concepts and implementation/execution, that tends to be contested in the beginning: art/artists, painting/painters/paintings, sculpturing/sculptors/sculptues, literature/writers/books ... I would worry more about the Medicine category that is much more inconsistent per country and could need a better definition. --Foroa (talk) 06:03, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks - but I've struggled with this though - how would you split things? In the cats I've looked at, there isn't any consistency, and I can't imagine what guidance one might give to editors to determine whether a given image is about healthcare or health.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 06:10, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think that the best way forward is to agree about a reference category tree in a particular country such as Germany. Making a conceptual list seems difficult as there are very often categories created. Concerning the guidance of a particular image, I think that neither Health of Healthcare should contain images in the long run, so images should go into deeper categories that are less conceptual and much more obvious. --Foroa (talk) 05:20, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

 Support Wow a year and a half later and this is still an open topic? I am here because of Mozambique, and it would be much better to just simplify as a "Health" category. Everyone has health, and not everyone healthcare, which is a subset of health. I am working on AIDS, which is not really healthcare, but instead is health. Ditto for ebola. Delphi234 (talk) 20:54, 19 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

 Support I understand the point that Foroa makes, but do not see the similarity between Health/Healthcare and the other category groups he refers to. There is, for example, a clear distinction between the act of painting, a person who is a painter, and a painting that has been produced by a painter whilst painting. Whilst most images will clearly belong to one of those categories, very few will belong to all three. That is not the case with Health/Healthcare where, as Obi-Wan Kenobi states, it is very difficult to envisage any clear guidance that would separate the categories. All the present distinction is doing is complicating matters for both those categorising images and those looking for images to use. We should be seeking to make matters simple and easy to use, not making them incomprehensible. Skinsmoke (talk) 12:08, 25 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

 Oppose After some reconsiderations, I'm now against deleting and upmerging the categories. While at first sight the proposal seemed to make some sense, it soon became clear that Category:Health care is also a child of Category:Public services, so at least the contents would have to be merged there, too. That however would be quite a regression rather than an improvement. If your aim is a clearer distinction between the parent and its child category then I'd rather propose renaming the child categories to Category:Public health care and Category:Public health care in .... --PanchoS (talk) 03:11, 13 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Comment Much of this relates to how the terms are used. Healthcare relates to healing actual people, as it's a public service (more or less); while medicine relates to anything that is not directly about providing healthcare to humans, and could just as well be about actual research, actual medicine (drugs), and so on. In some regions of the world (Eastern Europe, Post-Soviet countries and Russia), medicine actually means and stands for healthcare as a public service. -Mardus /talk 18:09, 12 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

No consensus to merge. I'm going to be bold and close this after more than five years of discussion and no new input in the last two years. The discussion has not resulted in any clear consensus to merge. The lack of responses in Commons:Categories for discussion/Archive/2012/05#Category:Healthcare in Afghanistan is not indicative of any consensus; category discussions generally have little or no participation. English Wikipedia once again has a en:Category:Healthcare by country, so following their example is no longer a valid argument for merging. The fact that subjects related to the more specific topic (healthcare in this case) are frequently miscategorised or overcategorised into parent categories (generic health categories) does not in itself indicate that merging is called for; it's seen in every branch of the category tree. Keeping the problem tags at the top of every healthcare related category at this point only discourages working on the categories to impose better structure, and as Foroa stated, with more concrete deeper categories, conceptual differences in higher categories tend to become less of an issue, as hardly any images should ever be directly categorised as related to health or healthcare. —LX (talk, contribs) 11:13, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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