Wikipedia:Pruning categories
 | This is an essay on Wikipedia:Categories for discussion. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
When discussing categories, editors sometimes use the term "prune" (or "purge", but this is ambiguous with purging caches). This means partially clearing out the category, or in other words, removing some of its members and leaving the rest.
Reason
[edit]A category can be pruned boldly when an editor thinks that some of its members do not belong in it. But if this has been disputed, or is expected to be controversial, then it should be discussed first, either on the category's talk page or at CfD. Pruning can also be proposed as an alternative to deletion. For example, if a category is nominated for deletion as failing WP:CATDEF, another editor might argue that it is only non-defining for some of its articles, and therefore should be pruned rather than deleted.
Implementation
[edit]If a CfD ends with consensus to prune a category, the closer can either prune it themself or add it to the manual CfD working page for another editor to carry out. This is easier when the discussion/closure make it straightforward to determine which members should be removed, without assuming familiarity with the subject matter.