Category talk:2019 television seasons

Speedy deletion request

@BrownHairedGirl: @AussieLegend: I suggest that we leave this category as it is for the time being. Yes, sure, it has been empty for the last 7 days and is amenable for speedy deletion. But 8 days ago it still contained something, and it was already deleted three times and restored/recreated three times. I do not mind deleting it every week, but we are now in mid-December 2018, and in January some content will surely come into this category. Let us just keep it, and if it is still empty say in March I will be happy to delete it again.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:49, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, @Ymblanter.

Editors keep on populating these categories, so they end up in Special:WantedCategories. That's why I create/re-create them.

In this case, I see that @AussieLegend has requested speedy deletion of this one three times (see page history), and in each case it seems to be because AussieLegend has just emptied the category. See e.g. AussieLegend emptying the cat here[1], then 3 minutes later CSD-tagging the category[2]

I understand why AussieLegend does this, and technically he is right: nothing has yet aired in 2019. But in practice, applying that principle a few months before the start of a new year just creates a pointless cycle of edits/reverts and restorations/deletions. In some cases, one such removal of an page from a category can trigger the deletion and re-creation of a slew of parent categories.

So to avoid a pointless cycle of maintenance work, it is best not to be too purist about this. Just turn a blind eye to categorisation which is a few months premature, because in the vast majority of cases it will turn out to be correct anyway. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:13, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

@Ymblanter and BrownHairedGirl: - These categories are a never-ending problem. If they're blue, people argue that it's OK to add articles despite the inclusion criteria. That was partly the reason it was discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Television/Archive 19#Category:2015 television seasons. If they're red, it's just a matter of removing the articles. The big problem is that BrownHairedGirl keeps creating the categories every time somebody adds an article, despite the inclusion criteria and the fact that we had a discussion about this on her talk page, which is now archived at User talk:BrownHairedGirl/Archive/Archive 040#Category:2018 television seasons. If BrownHairedGirl didn't keep creating the cats, we wouldn't need to keep getting them deleted. Just because a category appears in Special:WantedCategories doesn't mean it's necessary to create it, especially when the inclusion criteria clearly shows that the articles shouldn't be in the category in the first place. Removing the articles from the category when they are prematurely added is a much better solution than creating a category since the articles are obviously going to be removed from it anyway. --AussieLegend (✉) 15:31, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Sure, but, for example, we have a non-empty category Category:2016 television seasons. Do not we expect that in 2019 Category:2019 television seasons will also become non-empty, in full accordance with the policies?--Ymblanter (talk) 15:36, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

@AussieLegend: that discussion on my talk ended with my observation that two similar projects have adopted conflicting approaches to exactly the same issue.

As I also noted there, this issue also applies to other topics such as video games.

And please do consider by point above: why not just turn a blind eye to categorisation which is a few months premature, because in the vast majority of cases it will turn out to be correct anyway?

The deleting a 2019 category when it's only 3 weeks away seems to me to be nothing more than a make-work. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:43, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

(ec) If this category is deleted and then mistakenly added to an article, it will be listed at Special:WantedCategories as a category that needs to be created. If it stays empty like this, it will be listed at Wikipedia:Database reports/Empty categories as a category that needs to be tagged and deleted. I'm guessing that it is a similar situation to other 2019-oriented categories and we have to come up with a solution for the next 23 days until the new year comes. It would help to all be on the same page. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 15:49, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Exactly. And I guess the two of us delete most of these categories. I do not particularly care what this solution would be (whether the category stays empty, or gets deleted and then recreated in January), but it is a waste of time to repeatedly delete it, recreate, and then nominate for deletion again.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:56, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

I have re-populated it. Three weeks premature, but saves all the make-work ... because none of this lot will now show up in cleanup lists. Please can we all get back to things which actually need fixing? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:10, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

The category shouldn't be repopulated when the articles clearly fail to meet the inclusion criteria. That's a really poor and unprofessional solution, as is recreating a deleted category so you could add a completely unsourced article to it just so you could populate this category. That's the sort of thing I'd expect from somebody with just a handful of edits to their name, not an experienced admin. Survivor VIP (Israel), which was used to populate the cat, it probably shouldn't even exist - not a single reference, just a lot of unsourced stuff, exactly the sort of article that I was referring to. That approach is mind-boggling at best. --AussieLegend (✉) 16:19, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

(ec)Because pretty much everyone watches TV, the TV project sees a lot of WP:CRYSTAL editing that has undergone a lot of scrutiny, with MOS:TV having been overhauled in all areas to try to reduce the number of errors. Editors who might edit Wikipedia only once or who edit Wikipedia only for their much-loved TV program's article(s) make numerous errors, including categorisation errors. There are programs that have been off-air for several years but fans will edit the pages to announce an upcoming season that is nothing more than a pipe-dream. If we ignore the errors, including premature categorisation, the system turns into a mess. Take for example, Category:2015 television seasons which had 45 articles in it well before 2015 started. Other categories have had articles added to them in April and earlier, before the current season had even finished and in some instances the program was cancelled before the new season so there shouldn't even have been an article for the new season. It's something that the TV project is on top of all the time. We prefer to be proactive rather than reactive, which is why the consensus at the linked discussion was that the cat should be removed. This was inline with MOS:TV, which I cited in the discussion. Yes, the TV and film projects have different approaches but that is to be expected.

deleting a 2019 category when it's only 3 weeks away seems to me to be nothing more than a make-work. - As does creating categories that shouldn't exist. Like I said, it's better just to remove the article from the cat until it should be in it rather than create the empty category and encourage people to add articles where they should not be added. From experience, an inappropriately populated category can be a nightmare to sort out. As an example, one of the categories that I regularly check, sometimes 3 or 4 times a day, is Category:Pages using infobox television with unknown parameters. It's not unusual to see 5-8 articles added to that daily. Yes, I could ignore it, but more often than not the changes that put an article into that category has caused other errors, like destroying the formatting of the infobox so it can't be read or stopping data being displayed because somebody changed the name of a field. If I ignored it there would be hundreds of articles in the category that needed fixing. Many of the articles that I have had to remove from a "201x television seasons" category have had to be fixed, which is why I jump on them as soon as I see them, unfortunately often just after the category has been created. --AussieLegend (✉) 16:16, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Of for goodness sake, Aussie. It's only 3 weeks away. Just go for a stable solution which ends the make-work cycle. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:57, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

There's a bigger picture here that you're ignoring. If somebody adds a season article to Category:2020 television seasons on 1 January 2019, will you just blindly create the category instead of removing the article from the category, or are you happy with WP:CRYSTAL edits? The consensus at the discussion I linked to on your talk page, and here, was to delete the category. Will you ignore that consensus? --AussieLegend (✉) 05:41, 9 December 2018 (UTC)