On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 9:33 AM, sashi <learn...@creoliste.fr> wrote: > Given that the category French Jews contains more members than the category > French Roman Catholics, and that there are living people included in both > categories...
I would again recommend caution in looking at numbers, because Category:French Roman Catholics itself has many subcategories, which likely contain a few thousand entries in total. > I seriously wonder what it is that motivates folks to > anonymously tag others in this way (i.e. whether they want to be tagged or > not). Probably the same thing that motivates them to create categories for fictional characters with plant abilities or rail transport in Karnataka. I can't say whether such categorization is healthy, but it's certainly pervasive on Wikipedia, and is probably not usually malicious. (Not everyone edits anonymously, by the way!) > I looked into one of the many BLP entries with an unscourced Category:French > Jews tag, and found a review of a book they wrote. In that book, the person > stated that while they had a Jewish mother, they did not consider themselves > Jewish. This is a limitation of categorization systems. In an article's text, you can just say "X's mother was Jewish, but he did not consider himself Jewish," but either a category has to lump a lot of things together or you have to have a category to reflect every distinction you want to make: Category:American Cultural Reform Jews? (You can factor out the "American" part if you have category intersections, but the level-of-detail problem still remains.) Of course, you can just decline to categorize by religion (or ethnicity, or nationality, or sexuality), or decline to mention it at at all in an article unless it's unusually relevant, but I imagine you're going to encounter pushback to the effect of "what part of 'the sum of all human knowledge' don't you understand?" A lot of Wikipedians (and I might count myself among them) see the challenging nature of some topics as an invitation to address them thoroughly, not to refrain from addressing them. > On en.wp people being > labeled as Jewish/Catholic, etc. tend to be industrialists, politicians, > journalists, bankers etc. I'm not seeing the same thing in my cursory look at the categories. If anything, artists, scientists, and academics seem to be the ones who are overrepresented in Category:French Jews. In any event, to the extent that this appears to show stereotyping, it is merely making transparent the systemic biases in who has an article on Wikipedia in the first place. Though I clearly don't agree with everything you say, I do appreciate your raising this issue. By the way, your messages don't seem to be getting through until a few days after you sent them. I'm not sure whether that's an issue on your end, or my end, or if they're just getting caught in the moderation queue. Emufarmers _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
