Category talk:Castles in Pays de la Loire

Duplicate or wrong commonscat?

@Emeraude: After your revert about the commons category, I investigated a bit more. I made the edit because of a discrepancy between the local commons category and the one on Wikidata. It turns out that we also have Category:Châteaux in Pays de la Loire, which has the same commons link as here. Unless I'm missing something, these look like they are about the same topic and should be merged? Or if this category is about the fortified type, and the other is about the palaces, then my edit was correct? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 16:36, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: It's probably come about because some editors assume that the French word "château" always translates into English as "castle". It doesn't. It could be a castle, or a mansion, or a palace, or a vineyard, or a water tower ("château d'eau") or just about any large building, and we then get the nonsense of "fortified castles" (what castle isn't fortified??). In English usage, "château" is used for the mansions (e.g. the Châteaux of the Loire). Unfortunately, the French do not have a word for castle as English does. The solution, I'm afraid, is to go through thousands of articles and distinguish which are castles and which are châteaux and make appropriate edits there. Some fellow editors have made an effort at this over the years (see, for example, List of castles in France), but anomalies still crop up. Emeraude (talk) 10:07, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

@Emeraude: OK, but on Commons there is commons:Category:Castles in Pays de la Loire, of which commons:Category:Fortified castles in Pays de la Loire is a subcategory. Which Commons categories do you think correctly correspond to the categories here? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 10:56, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: Quite frankly, commons:Category:Fortified castles in Pays de la Loire should not exist. Castles are fortified, so what is a "fortified castle" meant to be? Emeraude (talk) 11:33, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

@Emeraude: commons:Category:Châteaux in Pays de la Loire does not exist, so as far as I can tell, "Castles" = "Châteaux" and "Fortified castles" = "Castle". Could you perhaps have a look at the content to see if that's correct? Perhaps we could then move the Commons categories to new titles - although there could be a lot of them if this is the way the whole category tree is ordered. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 13:02, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: To tell the truth, Commons is a bit of a mystery to me. I would suggest the easiest (and probably correct) solution is simply to delete commons:Category:Fortified castles in Pays de la Loire as a category and place the items currently listed there within commons:Category:Castles in Pays de la Loire. Emeraude (talk) 13:21, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

@VIGNERON and Jean-Frédéric: do you have any insights into this topic that could help resolve this? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:31, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: I must say that I never really understand the exact meaning of castle in English compare to the meaning of château in French (which is indeed quite large but not as large as Emeraude says, château d'eau an vineyard are obviously not a château, so most of the time château = castle, not sure it). I'm not sure either about the deletion of Category:Fortified castles in Pays de la Loire on Commons, it's probably a good idea but if we do it we should do it for all the similar categories and have a discussion on Commons about it. Cheers, VIGNERON * ^discut. 08:57, 22 December 2019 (UTC)