User:DexDor/Terminology categories

This is an essay on Wikipedia categorization. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Shortcut User:DexDor/TermCat

This page in a nutshell: Articles should be categorized by characteristics of their topic, not by characteristics of their title.

Wikipedia articles should be categorized by characteristics of the article topic^[1] (i.e. the subject of the article), not by characteristics of the article title.^[2]

In Wikipedia a terminology category is a category whose title or position in the category structure indicates that it is for articles about terminology. Most terminology categories have a title ending in "terminology" (or "terms") and most^[3] are below Category:Terminology (and hence below Category:Language).

Many articles have been placed in terminology categories inappropriately - often because of an editor categorizing the article based on its title being a term rather than categorizing the article by its subject. Category:Language also includes categories for articles about words and abbreviations; these categories sometimes have the same problem as terminology categories.

The main problem caused by terminology categories is that articles are placed in them instead of in a more appropriate category. For example, in 2011 the 600+ articles in the "Aviation terminology" category (none of which were about terminology) included about 100 articles that weren't in any other aviation category - e.g. anyone looking in Category:Types of take-off and landing would not have found the article about Brodie landing system. It is also harder to spot duplicate articles if one is categorized correctly and the other is in a terminology category.^[4]

Another problem is that these categories may encourage some editors to create dic-def stub articles to go in these categories.

Some categories do contain some articles about language, but having a large number (sometimes hundreds) of inappropriate articles in the category makes it hard to find the articles about language.^[5]

The many thousands of articles inappropriately under Category:Language (in a terms/terminology/acronyms/slang/neologisms etc category) have included articles about:^[6]

• Organisations etc - e.g. Wine & Spirit Education Trust, Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization^[7] and Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference.
• People - e.g. Alfred George Greenhill^[8].
• Other named things - e.g. Bay of Bengal Cooperative Air Traffic Flow Management System, Yaesu FT-77 (S), Aviation Maintenance Technician Day^[9], Book of Common Prayer, Augsburg Confession of the Catholic Faith and Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Bill^[10].
• Other things - e.g. military operations other than war (Japan)^[11], baptism of Jesus, wastewater^[12], tutorial system, campus tour, cavity wall, sealed orders, cross and isotope.

Even categories have sometimes been placed under Category:Language inappropriately - presumably categorizing on characteristics of the name of the category. Examples include Category:Urban decay, Category:Open innovation intermediaries and Category:Brokered programming. This has caused articles such as Genrich Altshuller^[13] and Noida serial murders^[14] to be under the acronyms category. The slang category has included articles on World Water Monitoring Day and even Wikimedia Foundation.^[15]

In some cases the lead of an article is badly worded for an encyclopedia article (see WP:REFERS) and this may confuse the person who categorizes it. For example, the POMCUS article once began "POMCUS is a military acronym for ... The POMCUS system ..." and was duly categorized in Category:Military acronyms^[16] rather than in Category:Military logistics.^[17]

Sometimes an article is moved down from a higher level category into a language category (e.g. a terminology category) despite the article saying nothing about linguistics.^[18] Such edits are often (especially when HotCat is used) unexplained; it may be an editor trying to "clean up" the higher-level category who feels that the article should be moved down the category hierarchy, but the editor can't find (and doesn't create) a more appropriate category.^[19] In some cases the higher-level category has a {{catdiffuse}} tag which says that the category "should directly contain very few, if any, articles" (or even a {{container}} tag) where there is no reason for that category to have such a tag.^[20]

An editor may see, for example, Category:Hotels and assume that it's a set category (just for articles about specific hotels) rather than a topic category (for any article within the topic of hotels).^[21] Thus they decide to move articles such as Mini-bar from Category:Hotels to Category:Hotel terminology (presumably as the title of the article is a term rather than a name). However, the article is still in Category:Hotels (as the HT cat is under the H cat) so that "correction" hasn't worked and the article is now also (incorrectly) under Category:Linguistics.^[22]

Articles that are about language (and hence may be within the inclusion criteria of a language category) include:

• Articles that are about an individual term (e.g. Public enemy). If a term is notable enough for a Wikipedia article about it then there is usually already a Wiktionary article about it. See also: Wikipedia:WORDISSUBJECT. If an article really is about a term (word) then the article should link to the separate article(s) that covers the topic(s) referred to by the term - for example, Nigger / African Americans, Fuck / Sexual intercourse, BRD / Germany.
• Articles that are about a particular type of language element (e.g. Abbreviation).
• Articles that are about the terminology of a subject - e.g. Medical terminology and Scientific terminology.
• Articles about databases etc of terminology (e.g. Komputeko).

One way to fix a language category containing inappropriate articles is to carefully assess every article in the category and where the article is not about language remove the category tag or change it to a more appropriate category. Such categories also often contain articles that can be deleted (e.g. using PROD or AfD), turned into a redirect (to another WP article or to Wiktionary) or should not contain category tags (e.g. disambiguation pages). When removing the category tag it may be appropriate to add a {{Wiktionary|word}} tag.

If this process results in every article being removed from the category then the category can (usually) easily be deleted by using a {{db-catempty}} tag. The "Aviation terminology" category and several smaller terminology categories were deleted using this method in 2011-2012.^[23]

However such cleaning (or pruning) may encounter resistance from other editors for the following reasons:

• An editor may think it is wrong to empty a category without going through CfD (e.g. "Please do not remove any more. You will pretty nearly empty the category if you carry on..."^[24]). This may be based on an (mis-)interpretation of "do not remove the category from pages before the community has made a decision" (and references to "out of process deletions") at WP:CFD. It's not entirely clear whether that statement is intended to apply only to the removal of category tags where the articles meet the inclusion criteria of the category, but the category may fail WP:OC etc.
• An editor may think the existence of the category and its current contents mean that articles should be in it (e.g. "Terminology categories are used for terms associated with any particular topic. Reverting your edits ..." - i.e. not understanding the use-mention distinction).
• An editor may object to moving an article up from a de facto miscellaneous category as that places an article about an obscure subject (and often a poor-quality article) in a more "prominent" category.

Some terminology categories have many hundreds of articles in them^[25] so careful recategorization and dealing with any objections may take significant effort.

If it is clear that a language category contains very few, if any, articles about language (after checking a good sample of the articles in the category including any whose title looks like it may be the title of an article about language) then it may be possible to delete the category with the articles in situ by proposing a delete/upmerge at CFD.^[26] This may be a lot less effort than editing each article manually and then requesting deletion of the empty category. However this type of deletion may still face resistance at CFD.^[27]

If a language category (e.g. "Foo terminology") contains a few (e.g. less than 5) articles that are about language, but the category has a history of being used for many articles that are not about language that may justify considering the category a "generally bad idea" (a term used in WP:CFD). It may then be appropriate to delete the category (by CFD) and upmerge its contents to both its parents (e.g. "Foo" and "Terminology").

Any deletion should be "without prejudice to re-creation if articles suitable for the category are found".

When taking a category to CFD, consider, especially if the category has been recreated after a previous deletion, asking for the category to be salted to prevent it being created again without assistance from an administrator.^[28]

"Category:Terminology" and "Category:Terms" have long been a source of confusion - e.g. Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Category:Military terms.

"Category:Loanwords" and its subcats were deleted in 2012-2013 - e.g. see 2012 CFD, 2013 DRV and 2013 CFD.

Category:Abbreviations (and its subcats) - even highly experienced editors have placed articles in these categories inappropriately (again usually without an edit summary so their reasoning is unclear).^[29]

Example of categorising by title rather than by topic: [12]

Most recent at top of table.

Colours used in Result column: Green = CFD succeeded in removing articles from terms/terminology category, Red = CFD proposed removing articles from terms/terminology category but did not succeed, Grey = Other.

Category:Construction terminology (2019) - merge

Marketing terminology (2019) - delete

Catholic terminology (2018) - purge+merge

Electronics terminology (2018) - delete

Flag design terms (2018) - merge

Electronics terminology (2018) - delete

Globalization terminology (2017) - merge

Canon law legal terminology (2018) - merge

Labor terminology (2016) - delete

Computer storage terminology (2016) - delete

Judaism terminology (2016) - keep

In addition there are categories that have been deleted as empty - e.g. Category:Administrative terminology and Category:Druze terms.

• Wikipedia:Articles about words (essay)