Wikipedia talk:Categorization

See also: Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories

Mis-corrected blank sort key: how much of a problem is this?

I'm not that much of a CAT-gnome, and I recently ran into a problem with a blank sort key that had been properly used in an article, until a well-meaning editor incorrectly "fixed" it by removing the blank, who I guess figured that a blank param is meaningless, so why not get rid of it. I undid their change, but I can understand why an editor might do that. I wonder how frequent a problem this is, because I've got an easy fix. The solution would be simply to create a template, maybe to be called {{Cat sort top}}, that resolves to a space. Nobody is going to remove a template call embedded in a Category item who doesn't understand precisely what it's doing there, so that will stop it from happening. But is it a problem that's frequent enough or annoying enough to bother with? Even if infrequent, it could be the kind of thing that would slip by without anyone noticing for quite a while. Mathglot (talk) 03:55, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

A template would work as a prevention mechanism. Unfortunately, nobody is going to use it because it's so long to type. I think it's better to use incorrect removals of space as sort keys to inform new editors about the guidelines at WP:SORTKEY. —⁠andrybak (talk) 14:41, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Sort order not merging all diacritics

Wikipedia:Categorization#Sort keys says "In English Wikipedia, sort order merges (ignores) case and diacritics." I dearly wish this was true, but it appears it is untrue for macrons (a diacritic), and always has been. Am I missing something or is the statement inaccurate? Nurg (talk) 04:53, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

Nurg, so you have an example? —⁠andrybak (talk) 09:37, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for asking. I can't find an example now and it appears that the statement is true after all. I am not sure when I did last see an example. Perhaps sorting of diacritics was fixed years ago and I was confusing English Wikipedia with Commons, where diacritics are not merged. Nurg (talk) 10:48, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Category:Archaeological organizations

Hello all, I'm going to be subdividing Category:Archaeological organizations down by country, i.e. Category:Archaeological organizations based in (country), similar to how Category:History organizations by country functions (as some have a wider scope than the nation they're based in).

There is currently only one subcat serving this purpose, the relatively new Category:British archaeological organisations, which does not seem to conform to category naming standards. Can this be safely moved to Category:Archaeological organizations based in the United Kingdom? – TCMemoire 14:22, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

@TCMemoire, you can nominate the category for speedy renaming according to criteria WP:C2C. —⁠andrybak (talk) 09:41, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Categorizing Colleges that are Closing this Summer

Our friends over at WikiProject Higher Education are having a conversation about when to add disestablishment categories to colleges that are closing this summer. Your input (pro/con/other) is always welcome right here. - RevelationDirect (talk) 01:53, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Solution is simple: per WP:CRYSTALBALL and WP:WIP – don't rush and add the corresponding category after the disestablishment has happened. —⁠andrybak (talk) 06:07, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Listing most common categories of articles in category

To help with stub sorting, I'd like to go through a large stub category (let's say Category:Araneomorphae stubs for example - none of the pages in its subcategories) and see what the most common categories on those pages are, to check if there's any more subcategories that could be made. Is there any way to do this? I don't see it in Petscan. Suntooooth, it/he (talk/contribs) 01:47, 2 July 2024 (UTC)