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@Declangi: I appreciate that you are trying to work only with WGSRPD. However to the user of Wikipedia who might want to look at the Flora of the nation-state Papua Niugini, this category is misleading. It only covers some of the nation-state. Your explanation does not convey that information to the reader. Thank you for clarifying that WGSRPD includes Bougainville &c. with Solomons. I will add that detail to the text. Brunswicknic (talk) 01:14, 24 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Brunswicknic: a long-standing concern of mine is that the English Wikipedia uses misleading titles for WGSRPD categories. Sometimes they are misleading because they differ from the WGSRPD (e.g. Category:Flora of North America instead of the WGSRPD's "Northern America") and sometimes they are misleading because the WGSRPD itself uses misleading names (e.g. "France" and "Ecuador" for what is actually only the mainland continental part of these countries). For some of these there have been past RfCs to try to get them changed (most before I really got involved with this topic), but what I see as a dogma has prevailed, namely that "Category:Flora of X" should correspond to a main page "X". I don't know whether it's worth trying again.
In this case, the WGSRPD code is actually clear: "NWG-PN", i.e. that part of PN (=Papua Niugini) that is within NWG (=New Guinea). But there's no obvious verbal title that I can think of. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:35, 24 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
How about renaming this category "Flora of Eastern New Guinea"? It would require less explanation and be symmetrical with Flora of Western New Guinea. Declangi (talk) 08:36, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That would be great, it reduces the confusion over PNG while focusing on the geographical. Brunswicknic (talk) 10:58, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that categories can't be (properly) redirected, unlike articles. So an editor that uses one of the many sources that use the WGSRPD will see "Papua New Guinea" in the distribution and not connect this to Eastern New Guinea, and unlike Eastern New Guinea, Category:Flora of Eastern New Guinea couldn't just be redirected, either from or to.
Actually, the articles I've quickly looked at suggest that a lot should really be in a higher category, particularly Category:Flora of New Guinea. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:35, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Peter, yes the redirection would be an issue. And that some editors might not map Papua New Guinea in a source to Eastern New Guinea here. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the articles under one or other subcategory actually belong in Flora of New Guinea. Declangi (talk) 05:08, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
PNG has a woefully under-researched botany (and biology in general). Every botanical expedition comes up with new taxa. But West Papua (Indonesian New Guinea) is even less researched. So plants that appear in descriptions of the flora of PNG that are almost certainly in West Papua do not appear in studies. This is similar to the situation of Cambodia and Laos. Widespread Southeast Asian taxa are missing from these areas' flora. In regards to the category names, I appreciate the complexity re categories. If re-direction is a problem, then not much point in renaming. However on the point of confusion in readers between "Category:Flora of Papua New Guinea" {as it is" and "Category:Flora of Eastern New Guinea" with a separate "Category:Flora of Papua New Guinea" (Flora of the nation-state), I see the same issue of explanation required for both. It seem that at present renaming the category is not practicable, such is life. Thank you both for your consideration around this issue. Brunswicknic (talk) 08:32, 27 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I've never managed to understand why categories can't be redirected, but it seems to be a deep feature of the WikiMedia software. You can have "soft category redirects", but these don't work in the same way and you can still put articles in them. Although bot(s) are said to move articles out of such redirect categories (see WP:CATRED), I can only say that in the past I left an article in one to see what happened, and in the end gave up and fixed it myself. It may be different now, of course.
If we were starting again, I would push hard for adding "(WGSRPD)" to the end of all flora distribution category names where the geographical designation in the WGSRPD doesn't match its normal meaning. Somewhere in the archives there is, I seem to remember, a specific attempt to do this, but both 'category editors' and 'disambiguation editors' have norms and guidelines about the use of such additions which seem to prevent ready acceptance of this proposal. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:14, 27 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
