Category talk:Actors and actresses by nationality

It seems like this would be better accomplished by having two tags, [[Category: British nationality]] or [[Category: United States nationality]] and [[Category:Actors and Actresses]] on a page rather than the single tag [[Category talk:Actors and actresses by nationality]] - Nunh-huh 22:05, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

If actors of all nationalities are put together under a single category surely that will soon become an unmanageably long list? 213.202.139.72 22:16, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes, but if you want a list of British actors, you can make one (List of British actors and actresses). If you want the tags to provide useful information, so that one can query the database and find all (British) (female) (actors and actresses), it makes more sense to have separate tags. Presumably it will become possible eventually to view such a query on the fly. - Nunh-huh 22:22, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

I was going by what seems to be a tentative categorisation convention. According to these guidelines: [1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization):

Categories should be kept as hierarchical as possible. That is, the number of top-level categories should be kept at a minimum.

Most importantly, an article should only link to the most specific category it is in. Thus, Paul McCartney should link not to People, nor to British people, nor to Musicians, but to British musicians, or rather The Beatles. The reason for this is that The Beatles should be hierarchicalized as follows (arrows denote parentage; linked items are articles; the rest are categories):

213.202.139.72 22:35, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

Articles will fit into more than one category. The idea is to minimize the number: if all musicians are "people", there's no need to have both "musician" and "people". But there are "British" "Actors and actresses", and there are "film actors and actresses" and "stage actors and actresses" and "child actors and actresses" and "retired actors and actresses" and "dead actors and actresses" and "leading men" and "leading ladies" (which supposedly wouldn't stand sexist muster) and "character actors" and all sorts of other interesting ways to divide actors and actresses. The example is chosen because it's convenient: if there had been a female Australian Beatle the example cited would be a little less clear. Paul McCartney would even now require a category for whatever he was that ALL the other Beatles weren't: an "OBE" or "member of Wings" for example-- Nunh-huh 22:50, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

Understand the reason i choose that excerpt is that's where i get my understanding of hierarchicalisation from. I understand what you mean about things fitting into more than one category. But if we follow your example every article would be tagged with every possible category into which it might go. Are you saying that an actor should be separately tagged as: actor, dead, American and every other group into which they might go. These are not invisible tags and i dont believe their primary purpose is for use in some future database. They clutter the top of the page so some kind of choices have to be made to keep them to a minimum. The size of category pages themselves also has to be kept down.

In the case of say Noam Chomsky, he needs two tags: "linguist" and "political writer". There is no way to avoid this because the two categories overlap but neither contains the other. My understanding is when one category entirely contains the other then it is ok to make the smaller category a subdivision. For example if there are an awful lot of political writers then that category has to be subdivided and it wouldnt be unreasonable to create "US/American political writers". nationality seems to be a major way people are categorising. If you look at Category:People by nationality there is an awful lot of subdivision by nationality going on. For a particularly advanced example see Category:Japanese people.

213.202.139.72 23:22, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't disagree. I think it's inevitable that every biography will be tagged with separate categories for profession and nationality. I don't think adding categories for every possible permutation is a constructive use of people's time if the same result can be garnered by obtaining an intersection of two sets they'd already be labeled with. Your mileage may differ...<G>. - Nunh-huh 00:05, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

By language instead?

I don't understand the reason for listing actors by nationality; by language makes sense to me tho. -- Jeandré, 2004-06-12t12:55z

True or false??

True or false: although the word "actress" is considered sexist by some people, others don't. 66.245.125.53 00:24, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)