Nominator's rationale: In the on-going project to deal with the various "groups by size" categories, we've finally reached a case where there are significant groups organized to play music written for a five member ensemble of specified instruments. With the exception of the string quintet, of which we have only one example (the Boccherini Quintet), these are all in subcats. Evrything else is, yes, a five member band, or at least a band which had five members at some point in its history. And as for the larger numbers, this isn't defining. Mangoe (talk) 22:02, 6 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: trivial category. This categorization isn't helpful. If we are going to categorize bands based on the number of members, why not "bands with two men and three women" or "bands with an odd number of members"? Bands containing five members have important in common with one another (with the possible exception of string quintets, which is a more specific category). Yes (band) is a good example: It is tagged as a "musical quintet", which is 99% correct (Yes had five members over most of its history, with brief exceptions) -- but tells us nothing interesting about the band. If you were to list the bands most similar to Yes, they would have various numbers of members. Deep Purple (five members) is much closer to Led Zeppelin (four) than it is to Yes (five). And many bands have changed their number of members without changing their sound. — Lawrence King(talk)23:16, 6 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The previous nomination was an omnium gatherum of something like thirty categories of musical groups by number; the primary reason given for keeping by almost everyone was that it was to much to deal with at once. The decision accepted that smaller nominations might succeed. Mangoe (talk) 11:04, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Keep – my reading of the recent cfd is that editors thought that each should be considered separately: that at some point the number in a band becomes irrelevant. IMO quartets should be kept and octets deleted. I note that Category:Musical quintets has 3 subcats which appear to be entirely valid, whereas Category:Musical sextets (and larger) have no subcats. So I would keep 5 or fewer (possibly as container categories) and delete the rest. Oculi (talk) 09:30, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The possibility of a container cat did occur to me, but it seems to me that it would be an attractive nuisance which would eventually fill up with bands again. Perhaps you could suggest a rename. Mangoe (talk) 11:04, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - it is considered defining enough to be mentioned in reliable sources that a band is a quintet, or a quartet, or a trio, etc - and also if a band changed from one format to the other. Our own articles will often mention in the opening statement the style and size of a band (do a Wikipedia search for "five piece band" for example). And while different styles of music are played across different sizes of band, the sound that a trio makes tends to be different to the sound a quintet makes due to the increased instrumentation. SilkTork✔Tea time11:46, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Containerise and purge of all articles that do not fit into the existing subcategories or any new ones that may be suggested. Except in classical music where the group is playing pieces written for a specific combination, the number of players is largely random. Peterkingiron (talk) 12:58, 8 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The two problems I'm seeing are that already mentioned (the variability in numbers) and that it is common for the various small-number groups to be backed up by session musicians, so that the number stated isn't the real number of musicians. And when you read the article on ensembles you will find that the power trio and the three most common variants on quartets are the only really standard configurations; after that the article more or less admits that there is little or no pattern. Mangoe (talk) 18:39, 9 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I agree people can have personal opinions on the importance of the number of people in a rock group; nevertheless, the number of people is mentioned in reliable sources, so it is seen as significant enough by enough people for a cat to be useful, even if only to create lists like these: [1], [2]. Though numbers higher than five are mentioned, it is not with any frequency, but numbers one, two, three, four, and five are common enough to be useful cats. Agreed that bands can fluctuate in their numbers, as they can fluctuate in the nationality of their members, so bands like Fleetwood Mac are always going to be a problem. But we don't decide to do away with nationality cats such as American blues rock musical groups and British blues rock musical groups because some groups straddle both cats. SilkTork✔Tea time17:32, 12 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Was going to nominate one of these myself. Glad it has been done as a group nomination. These are perfect examples of inappropriate user categories as both "divisive, provocative, or otherwise disruptive" and "which group users by advocacy of a position" AusLondonder (talk) 10:06, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: Clear violations of "Inappropriate types of user categories... Categories which group users by advocacy of a position" in WP:USERCAT. Now if we could only stop editors from inserting political opinions about US presidential politics into completely unlelated discussions... --Guy Macon (talk) 18:21, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
In regards to Category:Wikipedians who retain deleted categories on their userpages, the gist of that category existing is that some people re-added categories to their userpages that were deleted at CfD, thus creating redlinks. These redlinks were causing issues at Special:Wantedpages, so one user decided that re-creating the categories in question as hard redirects to that category was a better solution than leaving them as redlinks. Personally I disagree with this solution and would rather see these categories stay red (or an even better solution, we have a policy against users re-adding deleted categories to their userpages so there are no redlinks/redirected links to have to deal with at all) but we need a wider discussion as to what the permanent plan is regarding this. I worry that creating a bluelink like this somewhat legitimizes the process of re-adding deleted user categories that were removed by consensus. VegaDark (talk) 04:04, 8 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Call for WP:SNOW close - These categories do not have a snowball's chance in hell of avoiding deletion at this point, so there is no need to keep this CfD open. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:10, 8 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
Delete Per nom. There is also evidence that suggests that indef'd sockmaster Sonic N800 requested (and then primarily handled population of) this category. Difficult to track as they change IPs and ranges fairly frequently. -- ferret (talk) 16:37, 6 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Per nom. There is also evidence that suggests that indef'd sockmaster Sonic N800 requested (and then primarily handled population of) this category. Difficult to track as they change IPs and ranges fairly frequently. -- ferret (talk) 16:38, 6 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Merge; there weren't many elective positions during this time, so not many elections, and thus not many election articles. I've found a few more (articles in Category:Papal conclaves), but aside from the conclave of 1799-1800, none of them were in a year category (some, like 1721, didn't even have a year category); I've thus put all of them into Category:18th-century elections in Europe. Nyttend (talk) 21:25, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Merge but we do not need the Europe/America split. I am not sure that adding Papal conclaves adds much.Since these take place in secret, there is little to be said except that they happened. Peterkingiron (talk) 13:02, 8 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Peterkingiron, please check Special:Randomincategory/Papal conclaves and refresh a few times to get a few articles. Many of them have a good deal of information, as you can see in the first random one I picked, Papal conclave, 1492. Remember that the choice of a pope was once far more significant to the world in general than it is now (even if it weren't banned, can you imagine any political leaders bothering to cast a papal veto nowadays?), so while the vote itself is held in secret, the circumstances are highly public and have a lot that can be said. Nyttend (talk) 20:14, 8 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Merge per nom. There's a big chunk of the 19th century for which we should probably do this too — in an era when there were very few actual elections being held at all, it does nobody any favours to obsessively subcategorize the few articles that do exist as narrowly as we subcategorize contemporary ones. Bearcat (talk) 22:26, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
