Wikipedia:WikiProject Musicians/Categorization
Category:Musicians and all it's many sub-categories are a mess and there does not appear to be any real organized effort at fixing it, untill now. This sub-project of the [[Template:MUSART|Musical Artists]] WikiProject is aimed at organizing the categorization of articles about musicians. For the time being, please use this page to discuss issues you want resolved in the new system as well as proposals for how to hande these issues.
Recognized Issues
- There's a lot of overlap and no consensus for how to handle it. For instance, an American guitarist would likely be in Category:American musicians and Category:Guitarists. Obviously Category:American guitarists is appropriate as well. What if they're from New York State? Should they also go in Category:New York musicians and how about Category:New York guitarists? Then you can introduce genre into the mix, not to mention religion and ethnicity. There needs to be a good set of guidelines for how to categorize all these different overlapping categories.
Proposals
I recommend the following as guidelines: Major top level organizational sub-categories of Category:Musicians:
- Category:Musicians by nationality
- Sub categories are of the form Category:Belgian musicians.
- Within each "nation's" category, if appropriate, regional sub-categories of the form Category:Alabama musicians
- Articles not in a regional sub category can go in the national-level category.
- Articles in regional sub-categories should not go in the national category.
- No additional breakdown, i.e., none of Category:American guitarists or Category:American musicians by hair colour
- Category:Musicians by genre
- Sub categories of the form Category:Rock musicians.
- Genre cats can be broken down into sub-genres as neccessary, e.g, Category:Rock musicians might have subcats Category:Alternative rock musicians and Category:Punk rock musicians etc.
- Sub genre categories might over lap, e.g., Category:Folk punk musicians could be a sub cat of both Category:Folk musicians and Category:Punk rock musicians.
- All genre categories should ahere as strictly as possible to Wikipedia:WikiProject Music genres
- Category:Musicians by instrument
- Sub cats of the form Category:Guitarists
- Instrument categories can be broken down to better organize the intrument, such as Category:Electric guitarists and Category:Acoustic guitarists could both be subcats of Category:Guitarists
- Sub cats of the form Category:Guitarists
- Category:Musicians by religion
- Sub cats are simply in the form Category:Muslim musicians etc.
- Category:Musicians by band
- Sub cats are like Category:Cream artists".
- Each band's musician category should also be a sub-cat of the appropriate Musician by genre sub-cat. For instance, Category:Mighty Mighty Bosstones musicians would be a subcategory of Musicians by band and of Ska musicians
- Sub cats are like Category:Cream artists".
Instead of keeping articles in upper level categories when moving them into sub-cats, use a list page with a title that matches the upper level category name, which can list all the articles in alphabetical order, including the ones in sub-cats.