Commons:Categories for discussion/Archive/2007/10

‘Ancient Greek coins’ is ambiguous. This, and the term ‘pre-Roman coins’ are overlapping to such an extent that they might be construed as covering exactly the same groups of coins, depending on definition. I suggest renaming the category ‘Ancient Greek and pre-Roman coins’. This would prevent confusion (arising from the present ambiguous name) as to what belongs in the category and what doesn’t. ‘Ancient Greek coins’ is a term usually applied to pre-Roman coins of the Mediterranean region. The present name of the category is ethnocentric, which - if rigorously applied - will be rather unworkable. Many coin issuing ancient peoples of the Mediterranean region weren't Greeks. The Greeks even considered the Macedonians to be non-Greeks. Accordingly, "Ancient Greek coins" is often used interchangeably with "pre-Roman coins", and catalogues generally include Judaean, Carthaginian, Celt-Iberian coins etc. along with the Greek. To avoid any confusion about which coins are supposedly "Greek" and which aren't, I think the category should be labelled Ancient Greek and pre-Roman coins. Alfons Åberg 18:40, 7 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

 Oppose The proposal is far worse. The standard form is “Coins of Ancient Greece”, and this category would be moved to Category:Coins of Ancient Greece. If you want to classify coins according to any criterion, “period” for example, create suitable subcategories. --Juiced lemon 14:11, 17 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

 Oppose Oppose to both. The result would be a huge monster-category needing in a very short time to be split in two, "Ancient Greek", and something else. Which is what already is. So why bother?

Åberg, what you do is noticing that in Commons there is not a meaningful categorization for coins for non -Greek ancient cultures. This is because we who are at work on the period rather concentrated on Greeks and Romans first, and this shortcoming regards all artifacts of any kind. Therefore it would be most appropriate if it were you to fill the gap.

To do so, I suggest that you might rather create appropriate categories for all the people you mention: Carthaginians, Phoenicians and so on.

By the way, I never heard before that these coins were "Greek". They may have been "hellenistic", but I don't know how Carthaginians could be considered "Greek". So, if you think you need them, you could rather create categories for "Hellenistic Phoenician coins", which is the correct way to name them, versus "Phoenician coins" proper (inscribed in punic) and "Greek coins" proper.

As for juiced Lemon, again we have to repeat what we had to underlined here: Category talk:Ancient Greek jewelry. There was never such a thing as "Ancient Greece" covering the whole territory inhabited by the Greeks (no more than a Category "Ancient Lebanon" could cover the whole area inhabited by Phoenicians...). This is why the national categorization scheme cannot work here. "Ancient Greece" is better left to be used to mean the territory of today's Greece in Ancient times, whatever the population (e.g. Thracians, Eteocretenses & re.) inhabiting it was. However, most of the coins we are dealing with were in no way "from" Greece: they come from all over the Mediterranean sea. The "nation" category system is therefore unfit for a reality which was a people, a culture, even an empire (and the Romans made the Roman empire, the Greeks made the Byzantine empire, which they called "Roman empire"... hardly "Ancient Greece", then!), but not a nation, prior to 19th century. --User:G.dallorto 02:26, 4 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Kept, by consensus. --rimshot^talk 18:31, 27 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What is the difference to Category:Messier Catalog? Should they merged? --GeorgHH 12:56, 7 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Messier objects is the category for the 110 Messier objects. When the object has a special name in the English Wikipedia, an extra redirect category is also categorized there.

I don't know what is exactly Messier Catalog: maybe Catalog of Nebulae and Star Clusters ([1]), or this images source ([2])?

Category:Messier Catalog is progressively emptied as new categories are created for Messier objects. --Juiced lemon 09:37, 8 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Reasons for discussion request -- Incorrect capitalization of “ancient” (see Religion in ancient Rome and Re: ancient Rome).Juiced lemon 16:22, 12 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

 Support rename to Religion in ancient Rome, as my dictionary confirms this. There are some more, so I've made a list. Feel free to add more as you find them. --rimshot^talk 17:56, 14 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

and possibly

 Support as per naming conventions but "Navy of ancient Rome" might be more consistent than "Ancient Roman navy". --Foroa 18:11, 14 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Correct capitalization concerns also other compound categories with the expression “Ancient Rome”. I support the move requests above, except for the navy: "Navy of ancient Rome" is a better proposal. --Juiced lemon 17:06, 17 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I support Navy of ancient Rome as well, and have changed the tag above. --rimshot^talk 17:15, 17 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Move requested here. --rimshot^talk 11:48, 25 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

 Done --rimshot^talk 13:20, 2 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Animals of Hamburg and it sub categories (it ends in Category:Orthoptera of Hamburg ) contains only images of one species which was photographed in Hamburg. It's not a typical animal of Hamburg. This categories should be deleted. --GeorgHH 18:57, 13 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, who knows where those animals are now and it's not like Leptophyes punctatisimma is somehow especially a Hamburg-er animal. Samulili 19:38, 13 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The idea/point of having categories "animals of xyz" is not to list species special to that area only, but to - over time create useful overviews of all species found in a certain area. Of course, in the beginning there will be only be a few species in each category, but it only adds one category marker to each image and in the end (I'm talking 5-10 years) we would end up with fair indexes of zoological variety in many areas. What's so bad about having categories "Animals of Germany" or "Animals of Hessen" (or Hamburg for that matter) to document the fauna of such an area (at some point in the future!)? I know for a fact that local biologists would love to have access to such information (which is why I started it in the first place). At some point such categories might even show geographically related variance in coloring or other characters of certain species. It's a small effort to add to image uploads, I cannot imagine that the one category marker extra in each image is a "problem" or "in the way" so why destroy extra information that comes with the images instead of putting it to possible future good use. We DO ask users to provide "Location" information with the images - to me it seems daft to NOT want that same information in a structured manner so that it can be better retrieved and organized ??? What is your "problem" other than the momentarily still scarce content? Pudding4brains 20:25, 13 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What you describe would be even more problematic. You could place the gallery Rattus norvegicus in about gazillion categories. For biologists looking for variation we don't really need categories if all images in Category:Leptophyes punctatisimma have location in their description. It's also about using the right tools for the right job. Samulili 07:57, 14 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I do not think the category:animals of xyz are of any use at all, the nature of the 'sampling' process (ie what gets photographed) has all sorts of weird biases that destroy any statistical validity of animal distribution. But on a practical level some people assume such categories should include every picture of a species that can be found in a particular region regardless of where it was actually photographed, others assume it should only contain images photographed in a particular region, regardless of whether they are normally found there (eg a photo taken in a zoo). --Tony Wills 20:44, 14 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I don't quite follow the logic of both replies - seems to me it's "looking for reasons" more than anything else. The way I have explained the intention of the categories, it seems clear to me that they are intended to categorize only images/animals that were actually photographed in the area (in the wild). If this is not clear to the average user it could easily be remedied with a simple one -liner at the top of the category page (template of course).

In my view the only valid concern would be Tony's "bias of photography choice", which in the end is not our problem but the problem of the scientist using the data. Nevertheless biologist seem to be very content with such collections of data/photograhps anyway - maybe not as a "main" source, but certainly as "extra info". Please have a look at waarneming.nl which has the exact same problem of non-scientific bias, but is still very popular with scientist and provides them with a lot of info that they can put to good use. Of course our categories would not be of interest only to scientists, but also to any other person (school kids?) interested in finding pictures of animals that can be found in a certain area.

@Samulili: To me the category system seems to be the perfect tool for the purpose as I really could not tink of any possible way to get an overview of say all animals photographed in Germany or Bavaria by using any other search methods Commons currently offers: Or do you suggest generating 10.000+ seperate searches with all names of Bavarias town and villages (assuming these would be entered in the info fields in a structured manner)??

On the other hand I've totally given up on the idea that Commons could actually become a place where it would be possible to find anything on the basis of such meta data as "location" (or anything else) in a structured manner. All efforts to provide anything that could be interpreted as structured information seem to be eradicated by the information police who want Commons to be just storage without any aid (extra info) to the people who might at some point want to actually use the images in various ways. So, do as you please, see if I care ... Pudding4brains 14:29, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the current category names concerning Nobel laureates are a bit cumbersome. Category names that reflect usage on enWP and by the Nobel comittee itself make more sense. Accordingly, I propose the following renames. --rimshot^talk 09:44, 16 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

 Support --Juiced lemon 16:59, 17 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Move requested --rimshot^talk 11:13, 24 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

 Done --rimshot^talk 13:20, 2 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Typo. Correct exists category:Aleksander Sochaczewski. --Mikkalai 19:01, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have tagged it for deletion. It will be deleted soon. --rimshot^talk 11:02, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

 Done --rimshot^talk 14:57, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Reasons for discussion request -- The naming is ambigious as there is a Perth, Tasmania and a Perth Western Australia. The content currently in the category is all for Perth WA so the category should be renamed to that. This would also make the category consistant with all other Wikimedia projects which distinguish between the two locations. Gnangarra 15:04, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Given the size of Perth, Tasmania (2000 people), I think we can safely assume that people looking for Perth, Australia mean the capital of WA. --rimshot^talk 12:31, 8 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not moved. 哦，是吗？(висчвын) 17:46, 17 May 2008 (GMT)