The merge targets are all quite small. AFAICS, the biggest category after the merge will be Category:2013 establishments in the United Arab Emirates , which will grow from 14 to 18 articles ... and most of the merge targets will still have less than ten articles.
Abu Dhabi is a city with a current population of about 2 million. In the 19th and 20th centuries it was a de facto part of the British Empire, as one of the Trucial States. The Trucial States became independent in 1971 as the United Arab Emirates, whose 2013 population was 9.2 million. Wikipedia's coverage of events there is limited, so subdividing the chronology categories by city makes lots of small categories which impede navigation. We don't have by-year categories for any except the very largest cities, and establishment-by-year categories for cities have repeatedly been deleted (see e.g. 2012: London, 2019: Philadelphia & Pittsburgh).
In this case, every single "Category:YYYY in Abu Dhabi" or "Category:YYY0s in Abu Dhabi" is functioning solely as a container category for the corresponding establishment category, and will become empty if the establishment categories are merged. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 14:45, 30 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Laurel Lodged: For the record, we did not have both of those; one was a redirect to the other. Thanks for the reminder, as that decade was inconsistent with the rest of the hierarchy; I have now revised the close at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2017_August_26#Category:1908_establishments_in_Poland, and reversed the redirects. As you evidently feel strongly about ahistorical categories in Poland, please make a proposal somewhere with a list of historical territories and dates for which chronology categories might be useful, in order to seek consensus at an RFC. – FayenaticLondon10:00, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Not so, @Nyttend backup/Nyttend. First, these categories are named for the city, not the Emirate, so this is a Pittsburgh equivalent. Secondly, the number of articles in scope is way way smaller than for Pennsylvania. Just look at the size of these categories, and of the merge targets: the biggest category after the merge will be Category:2013 establishments in the United Arab Emirates, which will grow from 14 to 18 articles. That is too small a set to split up.
The point is that the nomination, and the support votes, rely on a false impression of the situation (not accusing you of bad faith, just of a misunderstanding). See the airport comment below for proof. Imagine that "Establishments in Quebec by year" were small, and someone nominated it for deletion with the above rationale. It would be a thoroughgoing bad idea to delete a provincial category tree merely because a few people believed that the City of Quebec was too small to warrant its own establishments-by-year category. It's fine if people conclude that a country's primary subdivisions are too small to warrant their own categories; I'd heartily support such a nomination if we had an "Establishments in Yaren District by year" category, for example, and were the nomination and the support votes saying "we don't need separate categories for each emirate", I wouldn't have come in at all. I just don't want to see this category tree abolished because of a misunderstanding. Nyttend backup (talk) 22:49, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Nyttend backup and Nyttend: I don't think that the comparison with Quebec quite works, because the naming issues are differently constructed in the two examples.
But more importantly, it is also irrelevant, because no matter which definition is used, the categories will be small. This nomination is indeed based on the proposition you say would support, viz that this country's primary subdivisions are too small to warrant their own categories, with "small" measured by "number of articles in scope" — a set where the largest combined size is a mere 18 pages is too small to merit subdivision. If and when en.wp's coverage of Abu Dhabi expands by a factor of 5 or 10, then a split would become viable ... but I see no reason to expect that happy day to occur nay time soon.
Votes to "delete because we don't do such categories for cities" are based on false premises, which the closing admin must ignore. Imagine that a bunch of people said "delete this category because it can only ever have one entry" and then a bunch of additional articles were added that clearly belonged. If a closing admin deletes such a category on those grounds, we go to DRV because the entire basis for those delete votes has been disproven, so they must be ignored. Same here: disproven votes must be given zero weight, so the only thing that matters for deletion is your opinion (in response to my statements) that these are still too small. If others come along and agree with that statement, no objections (I don't have an opinion on the question), but deletion based on false premises is inappropriate and will result in a DRV if they're counted. Nyttend backup (talk) 15:57, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Nyttend backup: that is one of the most risible and disingenuous exercises in wikilawyering I have seen in a long time. It's studied effort to avoid the central point of the nomination: NARROWCAT means scope is too small. You seek to treat a difference of interpretation of titles as a nullifying factor for everything else.
This sort of bad faith, timewasting and wordplay of deliberately-missing-the-point crap is what turns some XFDs into unconstructive sprawling word heaps. This is a consensus-forming discussions, not a children's catch-me-out game, and it is very sad to see an admin indulging in such blatant disruption. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 16:55, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
That's funny; I merely said that we mustn't count votes that don't understand the situation and noted that your new argument on "too small" grounds was entirely different, and yet you thought it appropriate to attack me. Block requested. Nyttend backup (talk) 18:06, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Nyttend: it's astonishing that even after several rounds of discussion, you sustain your flow of FUD even to point of claiming that I have new argument on "too small" grounds. Like so much else of the drama you are working so hard to manufacture, that is either an outright lie or evidence that you have a serious reading comprehension problem. As anyone can see, "too small" is the core basis of my nomination. The fist two and a half paragraphs of the nomination — 8 sentences — are all about that. It is bizarre that you have made such a drama out of a falsehood. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 19:14, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm neutral on the proposal; although the categories are fairly small, they still strike me as viable and marginally useful. Disambiguating these categories to "establishments in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi" has some attraction for me, although I would favour a discussion to rename the main article, after which city-related topics would belong in "Category:Abu Dhabi (city)", and the concisely-named nominated categories could stay put. – FayenaticLondon11:38, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Fayenatic london: it seems to be that they are well below the viability size:
@BrownHairedGirl: Given that that is your driving criterion, why not also merge to decade categories for the city (/emirate)? Decade categories would pass your SMALLCAT threshold, and we have closed various other chronology-category discussions that way. – FayenaticLondon07:10, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Fayenatic, I just used AWB to count the sizes and made the table to the right.
The numbers are probably OK, but I don't like this approach of having different years for the wider area and decades for the narrower area. It requires every article to be categorised twice, e.g. in "Cat:1997 establishments in the UAE" and "Cat:1990s establishments in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi". That's fine in theory, but in practice I think it is too non-obvious to most editors, so we will end up with a lot of articles placed in one or the other. We don't have good tools for monitoring this; in some (tho not all) cases it is possible with skilled use of WP:AWB and/or WP:Petscan, but it's a bit tedious, and in practice the cleanup doesn't get done. My experience of implementing the mass merges of that style from @Marcocapelle's mass nominations is what led me to eventually oppose them, because I concluded that the v low probability of adequate maintenance outweighs the theoretical benefits.
My answer would be different if the category software was more sophisticated. Imagine for example if an editor could categorise a page in "Cat:1997 establishments in Abu Dhabi City" and the software translated that into:
"Cat:20th century establishments in Abu Dhabi City"
"Cat:1990s establishments in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi"
"Cat:1997 establishments in the UAE"
If we had that, then I'd enthusiastically say, yes of course, let's do this.
But we don't have that smart software. We are working with a dumb category system. So I'd much prefer to keep the by-years categories than to create this non-obvious hybrid of years and decades.
And we are also working with a diminishing ratio of active editors to articles. As @Iridescent recently noted here[3], the Articles/ActiveEditors ratio has grown from 430:1 in September 2007 to 1650:1 December 2018.
The situation is even worse wrt categories: participation in each CFD discussion is on average somewhere between 10% and 20% of what it was when I was first involved, back in 2006. We have a severe shortage even of admins with enough experience and inclination to close CFDs, leading to a persistent backlog of over 3 months (place {{XFD backlog}} on your userpage and watch its grim figures). We just don't have enough active, experienced category editors to effectively maintain an increasingly fine-grained and ever-more-complex category system, and there is some truth in the complaints that the category system is becoming a Rube Goldberg machine.
I should probably start a wider discussion about this problem, because it seems that individual discussions are not paying enough attention to the wider problem of excessive complexity and fine divisions. So we have a good faith suggestion here to add avoidable complexity, and we have other decisions not to delete even irrelevant intersections such as Mathematicians by city. We need to stop creating a monster. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs)
I agree about the smart-software ideal.
For the record, here (Years in London) is a recent example of years-in-city being multiple-merged to years-in-country and decades-in-city. I acknowledge the problem that this approach requires manual maintenance in future. Will user:Marcocapelle appoint an heir to succeed him in this work? If not, IMHO the natural way out of that is to accept small categories within chronology hierarchies.
Meanwhile, this is a more specific proposal, which (if Dubai is also merged to UAE) will abolish all the chronology categories for cities within one country, and therefore ought to reduce future maintenance. I would have accepted small categories by emirate, but I won't fight for them. – FayenaticLondon13:05, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Fayenatic, at your suggestion I was going to nominate Dubai as well. But since this discussion is more complex than I had foreseen, I decided to postpone that until this one closes. Otherwise I think we'd end up discussing the same issue in two places. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 13:29, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Partially support -- The usual answer to small categories is to upmerge. Until 2000s there is not enough content to merit keeping annual categories. There may be for 2000s and certainly is for 2010s. The merge targets for the 1991 establishments should thus be 1991 establishments in UAE, 1991 in Abu Dhabi, and 1990s establishments in Abu Dhabi. Headnotes can define the category as referring to the whole emirate. Peterkingiron (talk) 15:23, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Peterkingiron, per my reply above to @Fayenatic, I strongly oppose that sort of multi-target merge. It would be vastly better to keep the lot.
Replacing one category with three means a maintenance nightmare for the future. It is exceptionally unlikely that any editor creating a new article will know that 3 categories are needed, and it is improbable that any categorisation specialist will with be routinely scanning these categories with the appropriate tools to detect the missing categories
It's time to stop adding so much unnecessary and avoidable complication to the category system, and stop acting as if we had an infinite number of editors to maintain that avoidable complexity.
In this case, the largest single category created by my proposed upmerges will have a mere 18 pages. How on earth would it be helpful add extra complexity to avoid that? --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 23:19, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nominator's rationale: Only one article. No real reason to expect more. Though its a significant issue it doesnt really generate articles. Rathfelder (talk) 09:27, 30 March 2019 (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.
Nominator's rationale: merge/delete per WP:OVERLAPCAT, Karlskoga Municipality has 30.000 inhabitants, of which the city of Karlskoga has 27.000 inhabitants; and no villages are mentioned in the municipality article. Buildings, people and populated places of the municipality coincide with those of the city. In option A: keep the parent categories of both (by city and by municipality) for the merged category. Marcocapelle (talk) 09:15, 30 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Support B per BrownHairedGirl. While it's not comprehensive, we appear to have a good collection of categories for Swedish municipalities, and it would be a bit silly to get rid of one of them merely because most of the municipality is a city with its own category. Nyttend backup (talk) 22:53, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Support B but certainly merge somehow. However the 3 subcats should also be merged to the equivalent categories for Orebro County to avoid the loss of data. Peterkingiron (talk) 15:30, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Category:Religion in Kazakhstan by city
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Nominator's rationale:delete, redundant container category with only one subcategory. There is no need to merge, the subcategory is already in appropriate trees. Marcocapelle (talk) 09:14, 30 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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Category:AVCA Hall of Fame
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