Category talk:Biography (genre)

Comments

This category is for articles about the genre of biography, but is regularly applied by many editors to any "biographical" article about an individual person. Articles about people need to be removed from this category. I have done some myself, but it is far too big a job for one person alone. Bearcat 00:58, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Is the purpose of this category: It is for articles about books which are themselves biographies? —EncMstr 16:23, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

No, that's Category:Biographies (books). This category is supposed to serve as a parent for things like that, Category:Biographical films, etc. It should only rarely be applied directly to articles on its own, and if and when it is, those should be very general topics like biography, autobiography or family history. People belong in the appropriate subcategories of the Category:People tree. Bearcat 16:31, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm guilty myself; how do you propose dealing with this problem? My own confusion had to do with there being a Biography Project, I think. Sparafucil 09:12, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

I've cleaned the category out with AWB, so at the moment there's nothing in here that shouldn't be. From here on out, though, there should probably be at least a few people who commit to monitoring the category once in a while to refile any new additions. Bearcat 09:40, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Since this has been resolved, perhaps the Attention template should be removed. -LelandRB (Chat · contribs) 04:23, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

It hasn't been "resolved", as such, as it's a situation that requires permanent ongoing monitoring. People still add new biographical articles to this category from time to time. Bearcat (talk) 17:10, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Can someone explain where I can find the articles in the category of a human? Thanks. Kaeso Dio (talk) 21:25, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

What do you mean? Bearcat 17:36, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

• There are too many underpopulated categories. Many categories only have a few in them. Not the more than forty that is the minimum recomentation. —Mattisse (Talk) 02:01, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

And what exactly does that have to do with this discussion at all? Bearcat (talk) 02:20, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Hello: I don't know where you get your interpretation of the definition of the biography category. It says in the template above: " collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people." It does not say a collaborative effort to create, develop, and organize articles about "genre". Even the word "Biography" speaks for itself, as stated below - "an account of someone’s life written by someone else." For example my recent article "Martha Foley" is derived from biographies. The article itself is a biography assimilated from other biographies. Biographies are about people, not genre.

Also there are only eight articles in this category. As ;Mattisse implied above - this is an underpopulated category. There is a certain minimum number - such as 40 or 60, I don't recall. The number of articles creates the need for a category, not the other way around. Also, I don't know how the following statement got placed on WP:CAT : "Categorize articles by characteristics of the topic, not characteristics of the article. A biographical article about a specific person, for example, does not belong in Category:Biography. How did the Biography category specifically get picked for an example on this page? In addition, I am only seeing one editor field comments and questions on this talk page, are there other editors involved with this categorization plan?

One more thing - Would anyone be interested in a name change for this category to Category: Biography (genre)? Anyway, now would be a good time for such a change since there are only eight articles and only about 15 sub categories. Thanks for your time. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 05:43, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Articlespace categories are applied on the basis of characteristics of the topic, not characteristics of the article; we only categorize by characteristics of the article in maintenance-space (e.g. "stubs", "category needed", "unreferenced", etc.)

Normally, the relationship between a topic and its categories needs to be expressible as "TOPIC is (a/an) CATEGORY", not "This article is a CATEGORY". Barack Obama is a Category:Presidents of the United States; Margaret Atwood is a Category:Canadian novelists. Neither of them is a Category:Biography — our articles about them are biographies, but we don't categorize on the basis of what the articles are; we categorize on the basis of what the people are. That's why filing an individual person in here is inappropriate — not because we're using any sort of non-standard definition of the word "biography", but precisely because the fact that we normally categorize by characteristics of the topic, not characteristics of the article, means that filing Martha Foley in this category would be an assertion that Martha Foley — not our article about her, but the actual physical flesh-and-blood woman herself — is a biography.

There's no compelling reason for this category to stand alone as an isolated exception to the way categories are normally applied — particularly given that a single catchall category which would contain every single biographical article on Wikipedia wouldn't even be a navigationally useful thing for us to have in the first place.

And no, there's no minimum size requirement for categories — and certainly not 40 or 60. I have a personal rule about not creating categories until I can immediately place at least three, four or five articles in it, but there are plenty of circumstances where even a one-article category is perfectly acceptable. And the presence of a WikiProject template on the category talk page doesn't have any bearing on what should or shouldn't be contained in the category, either.

That said, I wouldn't be opposed to your renaming proposal, since this category is still frequently misapplied. But the issue here isn't that anybody's imposing a "non-standard" definition of the word biography — it's that categories in articlespace are applied on the basis of what the article's subject is, not what the article itself is, and that Wikipedia has absolutely no need for an "all biographical articles" category anyway. Bearcat (talk) 22:28, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. I have to agree that using this category for every biographical article on Wikipedia would make navigation impossible. I didn't see characteristics of the topic vs. characteristics of article is the real point here - it makes sense. I think renaming this category would not make a difference. The only thing that works is what you are doing already - monitoring this category and re-categorizing the articles that show up here. OK thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia and taking the time to reply. ----Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 01:04, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Biography

biography · n. (pl. biographies) an account of someone’s life written by someone else. – DERIVATIVES biographer n. biographic adj. biographical adj. biographically adv. – ORIGIN C17: from Fr. biographie or mod. L. biographia, from med. Gk, from bios ‘life’ + -graphia ‘writing’.

I have no problems with your interpretations above. But the confusion will continue because most people are taught the dictionary version of Biography I list above. And will list such articles as biographies.

May I suggest a category of Biography-Human with a search sub-catergory B-H-last name, first name, birth year with the birth year even if it is estimated? I am a novice with Wikipedia, but might this solve the problem? And it would be easy for computers to search. Or maybe something similar?

John R. Carpenter Jrcrin001 (talk) 23:51, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Articles are meant to be categorized by characteristics of the topic, not by characteristics of the article. That is, adding George W. Bush to Category:Biography is not asserting that the article is a biography — it's asserting that the person is a biography. Articles are already categorized in the most appropriate and relevant subcategories of Category:People, so we neither need nor want another one for "all biographical articles". Bearcat (talk) 23:21, 22 June 2009 (UTC)