Forum:SH:Category "shell"

This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments or questions on this topic should be made in a new Senate Hall page rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record. —spookywillowwtalk 16:56, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
Forums > Senate Hall archive > SH:Category "shell"

Draft link

icon Main article: User:Spookywilloww/C

Categories... easily the most messy aspect of Wookieepedia. Also probably impossible to fix. However, leaving that mostly to Cade—this "shell" of a policy is designed to essentially be a holding capsule for any future rules the community passes regarding categories. This way, we avoid it sitting as a massive block on the LG as it is, and what's there would be removed when moved over to a "category policy" if it passes and linked to with {{Main}}.

What this draft has:

  1. [Existing] Policy text from LG.
  2. [Existing] Rules in-place currently from the files policy, signature policy, user page and profile policy, and index page categorization.
  3. [New] A slightly simplified explanation on "How to insert a category"; echoed from the "How to insert a reference" and similar sections in existing policy. And a succinct category intro.
  4. [New] Disallowing "auto-generated" categories to be manually added. Which, while this is by every view the norm, there's still tons of it occurring. Recently, bot's been tagging these with {{InvalidCategory}} to formalize this. Anyway, it's not really explained to people why we don't or how that works, so new editors may not really understand or be able to learn why we don't do this. "Auto-generated" categories is a wide spectrum ranging from stub categories, Top categories, and others.
  5. [New] Recommendation to not unilaterally make large changes to the top-most level of the newly revamped maintenance category without at least seeking input.

What it doesn't have:

  1. Pretty much has no IU or OOU rules for how to treat categories. Cade has some I know he intends to bring forward, but those, should they pass, would be sorted under the two placeholder headers seen. The only purpose of this initial draft is to create a holding shell for everything else that may or may not pass after... like Cade's clauses, but also stuff like continuity splitting and whatnot.

What we can vote or discuss on in the future, but is not in this draft:

  • Actors who have portrayed CHARACTERNAME categories (link) because they never officially made it out of CT. Also, we could end up with "Anakin Skywalker's actors" and "Actors who portrayed Obi-Wan Kenobi" for another. Might be nice to just set the naming in stone, for this and for "Social media screenshots by NAME" rather than "NAME's social media screenshots" (either, but consistency I beg).
  • Whether to continuity split categories.
  • Ecks' proposal: to limit heavily excessive "unidentified" subcategorization to higher-level attributes, which had decent support in SH, but no "category policy" shell to put it into.
  • More various clauses
  • All of which, if we ever want to consider... needs some place to host it all.—spookywillowwtalk 02:23, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

Discussion

  • TLDR shell with minimal if no effectual change, but needed if we ever want to try to discuss or bring up category topics like continuity splits that have been popping up for years. But if we hosted them now, we'd just be cramming them into the already bloated LG. Its time to separate all the category stuff out and throw it into its own policy. Whatever stuff gets added to this after, is a problem for future, hence this not including barely anything that isn't already standard.—spookywillowwtalk 02:23, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
  • Seems fair to go ahead and prepare for policy changes on categorisation, aye Fan26 (Talk) 05:09, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
  • Lovely stuff. Seeing that the wiki system automatically warns that "only the page will be moved and any pages in the old category will not be recategorized into the new one" if you try to move a category page, perhaps this is worth raising in the General rules too. It would go well after a slightly tweaked version of the point currently at the end of "Maintenance categories" in the draft, that "It is advised to seek input on the Senate Hall or in the Discord before renaming or otherwise altering a highly used maintenance category to ensure no unintentional adverse effects occur." I feel like the same should be said of any highly used category. I'd also add in the user page bullet point that admins can remove categories too, per the top of the WP:USER rules. OOM 224 08:07, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
  • Neat! Imperators II(Talk) 15:16, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
  • Makes sense to me! - Brandon Rhea(talk)(he/him/his) 15:45, 11 April 2025 (UTC)