User talk:Ardfern

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Category:Greater_Manchester_in_the_18th_century

Category:Greater_Manchester_in_the_18th_century has been listed at Commons:Categories for discussion so that the community can discuss ways in which it should be changed. We would appreciate it if you could go to voice your opinion about this at its entry. If you created this category, please note that the fact that it has been proposed for discussion does not necessarily mean that we do not value your kind contribution. It simply means that one person believes that there is some specific problem with it. If the category is up for deletion because it has been superseded, consider the notion that although the category may be deleted, your hard work (which we all greatly appreciate) lives on in the new category. In all cases, please do not take the category discussion personally. It is never intended as such. Thank you!

Rathfelder (talk) 14:44, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Category:Shops_in_West_Didsbury

Shops in West Didsbury has been listed at Commons:Categories for discussion so that the community can discuss ways in which it should be changed. We would appreciate it if you could go to voice your opinion about this at its entry. If you created this category, please note that the fact that it has been proposed for discussion does not necessarily mean that we do not value your kind contribution. It simply means that one person believes that there is some specific problem with it. If the category is up for deletion because it has been superseded, consider the notion that although the category may be deleted, your hard work (which we all greatly appreciate) lives on in the new category. In all cases, please do not take the category discussion personally. It is never intended as such. Thank you!

Rathfelder (talk) 15:28, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

Categorisation

Hi! I've noticed you've been categorising a lot of Cornwall recently and I wanted to ask whether a lot of the new categories you are making are really necessary. Apologies in advance for what is quite a chunky comment, but I wanted to make sure I show you from my perspective!

In some cases, you're creating several levels of shell categories:

• Category:Mobile phone shops in Cornwall (which only houses one category)
  • Category:Mobile phone shops in Cornwall by location (only one category)
    • Category:Mobile phone shops in Falmouth, Cornwall (only houses one file)

Why not just have the single file in the intial category?

• Category:Public services of Penzance
  • Category:Waste management in Penzance (only one category)
    • Category:Waste collection in Penzance (only one category)
      • Category:Litter bins in Penzance (only houses one file)

In this case, a litter bins category could have easily just been placed in a street furniture category and a waste management category (and, as a side note, I don't necessarily think a 'public services' category is a good fit, since neither waste management nor post need technically be a public service).

In other cases, you've put established categories into categories which don't naturally fit them:

• Category:Signs in Cornwall (and many other sign categories in Cornwall) have been placed in Category:Communication in Cornwall. Although signs 'communicate' information, I don't think a general user would think that it would be found in a communication category, nor that it is natural neighbours with telecommunications or the postal service.
• Category:Streets in St Ives, Cornwall is now not in Category:St Ives, Cornwall, but in Category:Geography of St Ives, Cornwall alongside physical geographic features. When looking for a picture of a street I don't know that I would be able to find this.

Here, I would say both 'Signs in X' and 'Streets in X' categories are perfectly fine to just go in Category:X - very few of the categories of Cornish towns have problems with having too many loose categories, and it makes these fairly well-used categories much more visible to users.

The categorisation system you're creating is so convoluted that it cannot possibly serve readers or editors (and I would argue that in some places, it breaches the simplicity principle at COM:CATPRI). I know that I've found it significantly harder to navigate around categories and find what I need since you've started categorising in this way.

Additionally, you often only place a single file in categories that you're creating. Although I recognise that categorisation is not everyone's favourite task, I do think it's rather poor editing form to add categories in a 'drive by' manner but then barely populate them. It would have been relatively easy to add further files to many of the categories you add, and since it cannot be guaranteed that anyone else will, it's important that you make sure the categories you're creating have enough members to warrant their existence. Thanks, Gazamp (talk) 22:41, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

All the categorisation I have been doing is in line with every other county. Some of them may not be well populated yet, but it is a work in progress. Ardfern (talk) 09:48, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

But this isn't necessarily the case - for signs categories for example, those for Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Cumbria and Oxford (to name a few) are placed in the main county category. Other counties have them in architecture or structure categories. I think this shows well enough that in many cases, there is no consensus on how categorisation should be best universalised and that some further consideration (and discussion with other users) might sometimes be helpful.

In regards the barely populated categories, I think the onus is on the creator to populate them to show that a new category is needed (especially since it really is a low bar; all I'm asking is that you consider finding and adding more than one file to new categories). No one else is guaranteed to do this work, meaning that unless you're going to help populate categories too, the empty shells you're creating could feasibly stay like that, making it more difficult for users to find what they want.

Many of your categorisations are useful, but there are some that are disruptive - I really would urge you to think of the other users who are also here trying to help out. Thanks, Gazamp (talk) 14:43, 16 July 2024 (UTC)