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Wikipedia:WikiProject Musicians/Categorization

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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.

Structure

Please use the following guidelines when organizing articles. To discuss these guidelines, please use the Talk:Talk page.

Orders

The subcategories of Category:Musicians have been divided into three "orders" based on amount of information encapsulated by the category. The three pieces of information are the genre, nationality, and instrument. Categories that encapsulate only one of these bits of information (e.g., Category:British musicians and Category:Punk rock musicians) are first order, two pieces of information are second order, and so on.

Order naming

All categories should be named using the following order:

  1. Nationality
  2. Genre
  3. Instrument

Pieces of information not included in lower-order categories (1 and 2) should simply be skipped. In the absense of the instrument, the term "musicians" should be used. Otherwise, the word for someone who plays that instrument should be used (e.g., "guitarists"), and should always be plural. Examples:


Pre-orders

In order to seperate categories of different orders we use pre-order categories. These are used to group similar higher order subcategories within their parent category. In general, Category:<N> <G> musicians is a sub category of Category:<N> musicians, but so is Category:<N> ists which is true for all genres "G" and all instruments "I". Therefore, to keep them seperate, we introduce two pre-second order sub-categories of <N> musicians which are: Category:<N> musicians by genre and Category:<N> musicians by instrument. Category:<N> <G> musicians will now be a sub category of the former, and Category:<N> ists will be a subcategory of the latter, and neither will be placed directly into Category:<N> musicians. Similarly, pre-third order categories might be of the form Category:<N> ists by genre as a subcategory of Category:<N> ists and Category:<G> ists by nationality is a subcat of Category:<G> ists.

Note that each first order category can have 2 pre-second order sub cats, but each second order category will only have 1 pre-third order sub cat because the second-order category itself is only missing one peice of information.

Example:

There are also three pre-first categories which are subcategories of Category:Musicians itself. These are simply Category:Musicians by nationality,Category:Musicians by genre, and Category:Musicians by instrument.

Placing pre-order categories

All pre-order categories should be placed into the parent category using piped links to specify the sorting order. The sorting word should start with a space so that the pre-order categories show up first in the sub-categories listing. Following the space should be simply the name of the page, for which you can use {{subst:PAGENAME}}.

Category:<N> <G> musicians by instrument should be placed in the parent category with: 

[[Category:<N> <G>| {{subst:PAGENAME}}]]

Placing order-categories

Every order category should be in one lower-pre-order category for each piece of information in the category. In other words, second-order categories should be sub categories of two different pre-second categories, and third-order cats should be sub-cats of three different pre-third categories. For consistency, parent categories should be listed in the following order:

  • For third order:
  1. NG by instrument
  2. NI by genre
  3. GI by nationality
  • For second order:
  1. N by genre or N by instrument
  2. G by nationality or G by instrument
  3. I by nationality or I by genre

When placing order-categories into pre-order categories, use piped links to specify the sorting on the category page. The piped text (i.e., the sorting key) should be the piece of information offered by the new sub-cat. For instance, if placing Category:<N> <G> musicians into Category:<N> musicians by genre, the sorting should be <G>, so the category link would look like this: 

[[Category:<N> musicians by genre|<G>]]

Always start the sorting word with a capital letter, mediawiki knows the difference and sorts captial letters and lower case letter seperately. When sorting by nationality, use the nationality, not the country. When sorting by instrument, use the instrument, not the term for someone who plays the instrument, e.g., Guitar not Guitarist.

Examples:

Category:American rock drummers: 

[[Category:American rock musicians by instrument|Drums]]
[[Category:American drummers by genre|Rock]]
[[Category:Rock drummers by nationality|American]]

Category:British guitarists: 

[[Category:British musicians by instrument|Guitar]]
[[Category:Guitarists by nationality|British]]

Note about singers

Singers should be considered musicians who use a specific instrument, that instrument being Vocals. The term for a person who "plays the vocals" so to speak is a singer. Therefore, in category names, use the term "singer" but when sorting by instrument, use "Vocals" as the instrument.


Progress

You can check on progress at

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