Wikipedia talk:Categorization

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"O'" rule for first names

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NAMESORT is unspecific in regards to this so I figured I should ask: does the exception for excluding apostrophes in names that start with "O'" only apply to family names, or should someone with such a name as their given name (e.g. O'Donel Levy) follow the rule as well? QuietHere (talk | contributions) 02:56, 21 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think it applies to any name like that, given or family. Basically, the apostrophe shouldn't be taken into account when sorting the names alphabetically. O'Donel should come after Obadiah and before Offred. Mclay1 (talk) 04:30, 17 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Bug in the documentation or the implementation?

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In the topic of sortkeys, it currently says 

Furthermore, other general articles that are highly relevant to the category should be sorted with an asterisk as key so that they also appear at the top of a category but beneath the main article/s. Example: [[Category:Example|*]] Those articles are typically called "History of example", "Types of example", "List of example" or similar.

but if you use asterisk as the sortkey, at the start of the list of articles in the category you get the list article (for the sake of an example) appearing after a bullet (which is fine) but with an extraneous asterisk on the line above (huh?). If you just use a space as the sortkey, you get a bullet followed the list article but without the extraneous asterisk on the line above. So this is either an error in the documentation or a bug in the code, but I think one or other needs to be updated. Kerry (talk) 03:57, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Kerry Raymond: It's neither an error nor a bug. Category pages have up to three headings: Subcategories; Pages in category; and Media in category. Under each of these headings, there will be one or more subheadings, each being a single character - the first character of the sortkey for the pages listed below that subheading. So pages with the letter "A" at the start of the sortkey are placed below the "A" subheading; pages with the letter "B" at the start of the sortkey are placed below the "B" subheading; and so on. The only exceptions are pages where the sortkey begins with a digit: these are grouped together under an "0–9" subheading. It follows that pages with an asterisk at the start of the sortkey are placed below the "*" subheading; and less obviously, pages with a space at the start of the sortkey are placed below the " " subheading. It's not easy to see, but it's there, as may be checked by using your browser's "View Page Source" feature - it will be the element <h3> </h3>. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:48, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Human posing as machine imitating human

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I've been trying to fortify the article Mechanical Turk, now undergoing a featured article review. Its fate is unlikely to hang on its categorization, but this nevertheless interests me.

I think its current set of categories calls for the addition of Category:19th-century hoaxes, Category:19th century in chess, and perhaps also Category:19th-century robots (and removal of Category:History of chess as superfluous).

Wikipedia lacks categories for human-powered devices (I suppose the closest would be Category:Hand tools, irrelevant here), chess hustlers, itinerant entertainers, exhibits, or "curiosities". We do however have Category:1770 beginnings, Category:1770 introductions, Category:1770 works, Category:1854 endings, Category:1854 fires, Category:Fires in Philadelphia, the title of each of which sounds as if it would be at least moderately appropriate -- but for each, a quick look at the list of what is currently so categorized suggests that the Turk would be anomalous.

And yes, I'm a little tempted to add the Turk to Category:People from Bratislava, Category:People from Hietzing, and Category:Deaths from fire in the United States -- but Wikipedia is and must remain a solemn enterprise, so no I shan't.

Comments and suggestions welcome. -- Hoary (talk) 22:16, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Allow navboxes in article categories

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Wikipedia:Categorization#Templates says: "Templates are not articles, and thus do not belong in content categories". I suggest an exception for navigation templates (navboxes) which correspond closely to a category. Navboxes are reader-facing and often give better or alternative navigation for a category, e.g. by ordering the items differently, piping out unnecessary title parts, adding information, and including informative section links, redirects and redlinks. Many navboxes are already in such article categories because editors found it practical. Consider for example Category:2025 ATP Tour versus {{2025 ATP Tour}}. The category is alphabetical and rather large and messy for many purposes. The navbox is very ordered. It organizes tournaments by tournament category with the largest on top. Each category is ordered chronologically. Most parts of the titles are piped out so you get a compact navbox full of information, including tournaments which don't have articles yet. Official sponsored names like 2025 BMW Open which can change from year to year are replaced with the city like Munich. I actually find this navbox so helpful that I would even support transcluding it on the category page but that may be going too far in general. I suggest navboxes in closely associated content categories are sorted under * at the start to help navigation and not under τ at the end as suggested for templates in general at WP:SORTKEY which also says: "Furthermore, other general articles that are highly relevant to the category should be sorted with an asterisk as key so that they also appear at the top of a category but beneath the main article/s." The discussed navboxes are highly relevant to the category. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:28, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You can transclude a navbox at the bottom of the category description. That provides the benefit of the navbox and a link to it without it needing to be categorised in the category. I haven't seen it done very often, but I'm not aware of a guideline against it. Mclay1 (talk) 04:36, 17 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Diffusing deaths into executions

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For a while I was away frem the subject Political repression in the Soviet Union, including Great Purge and stuff. To my unpleassant surprize, the huge Category:Victims of Soviet repressions was annihilated, en masse with other repression categories with a highlhy dubious rationale "They are unavoidably subjective and sometimes intentionally misleading or in the service of propaganda/apologetics" and "NPOV nightmare" I understand this in the faraway 2010 when people had limited clues what is NPOV and how to deal with it. But as a result, a person executed, say, during the Great Purge, now is calmly lain into the really cool neutral category:1937 deaths. Therefore for starters I would like to diffuse this and other years into category:Executions in 1937 by country--> category:People executed in the Soviet Union in 1937. But first I would like to ask, maybe someone has a smarter opinion? --Altenmann >talk 08:49, 17 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

PS. Heck, the even ain't no any Category:Deaths in Soviet Union; certainly, Category:Deaths in Lesotho are way more frequent and important to know of :--) --Altenmann >talk
PPS. Ive found soomething to compare/start with: Category:People executed by the Soviet Union. --Altenmann >talk 09:12, 17 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Altenmann, we do have Category:Deaths in the Soviet Union. It's one thing to factually state how people died; it's POV to call it repression. Mclay1 (talk) 00:50, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Colleague, thank you for fixing my ignorance with the definite article: I missed that it is the Soviet Union. However your answer is deficient in two respects;
  • The concept that POV is bad is related to POV of wikipedians see WP:NPOV, WP:FALSEBALANCE. If something is called "repression" in numerous reliable sources, then it is repression. But its beside the point.
  • Second, You have to learn to read posts to the end, not only first sentence, so you did not answer my actual question I asked.
Anybody else? --Altenmann >talk 05:08, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ordering of numbers

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From memory, numbers used to order "alphabetically" in categories, meaning we'd get 1, 10, 11, 2, 3, etc. This no longer appears to be the case and numbers are sorting numerically. We currently have this guideline:

To get the correct sort order, zero padding may be required, thus the actual sort key in this case is John 09 – this ensures that Pope John IX sorts before Pope John X. If we ever get to the hundredth Pope John, we would need to use three digits: "John 009".

Is this now redundant? Mclay1 (talk) 00:46, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That guidance is for Roman numerals. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:11, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Jonesey95 That's not the point. The zero padding no longer appears to be necessary. If you make the sort key in that example "John 9", it will now sort before "John 10". Mclay1 (talk) 01:15, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Is this your untested hypothesis, or have you adjusted the sortkeys on Pope John IX and Pope John X to check whether your hypothesis is true? If it is, the guidance can probably be removed unless there is some other situation in which it applies. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:58, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I tested it with test pages in the test category, Category:X1. Mclay1 (talk) 03:45, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think that it's about nine years since proper numeric sorting (1, 2, 9, 10, 11 instead of 1, 10, 11, 2, 9) was provided. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:18, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Good memory! Here's a VPT thread from September 2016. The bit of help text highlighted above is explicitly mentioned in that thread. We get around to fixing things eventually. [Edited to add: An editor from the WMF fixed the page in 2016, but someone apparently added back in text about padding. I haven't looked through the history to find out who, when, or why.] – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:24, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]