Category talk:German male rowers

Sub cats

This isn't clear cut so I shall discuss first.

Category:German male rowers has Category:East German male rowers and Category:West German male rowers as sub categories. I'd suggest that that's not the best way of showing the historic situation. I'd rather have "German male rowers", "East German male rowers", and "West German male rowers" all sit at the same level, being a sub category of Category:German rowers. The same should apply to the women. The rationale is that after the amalgamation of the German rowing associations at the end of 1990, somebody who was active both before and after should belong to two categories, rather than just the sub category (i.e. either "East" or "West"). If they just belong to the sub category, then the fact is lost in the category system that they were still active after the reunification.

The equivalent would be "Germany", "East Germany", and "West Germany". They are (or were) three countries. Two of them are located in the category "Former countries in Europe", and that in itself is in the category "Countries of Europe", where Germany is also placed. If the "Former countries in Europe" would not exist, the three countries would all sit at the same level, and the two former countries are not in a sub category of "Germany". The same should apply to the rowers; we are talking about three separate countries in this case.

Any thoughts? Inviting the category creator and rowing interests to comment: BrownHairedGirl, MisterSynergy, David Biddulph. Schwede66 07:03, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Complicated.

• First of all, there is no former country "West Germany". In the reunification process, "East Germany" was abolished (so this is indeed a former country) and it entered the country which was formerly referred to as "West Germany". The foundation date of today's Germany is 1949-05-23.
• In German Wikipedia, there is consequently no categorization of "West German rowers" (they are all "German rowers"), while "East German rowers" are categorized in de:Kategorie:Ruderer (DDR). Same with all other types of sport. The "East German categories" for sportspersons are often, but not always sub-categories of the "German categories" for sportspersons, and it is widely accepted to permit categorization on both levels at the same time even if there is a direct subcat relation. Would that be possible here as well? Mind that one still could keep "West German rowers" as it is now and apply the same scheme, although this "West Germany" approach does not make sense politically and legally (it is of course relevant from the sports point of view).

—MisterSynergy (talk) 08:00, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

I had good reason to start a discussion first, it seems. Thanks for your considered response. Schwede66 08:43, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Not about rowing or male rowers

• Whatever the answer to this question, this is not the place to decide it. The issue here is the relationship between "Germany", "East Germany", and "West Germany", which applies at the least to all sports, and probably more broadly to all topics relating to Germany.

In creating this category, I followed what I understood to be the convention for predecessor states: that they are categorised both as a) former states, and b) as subcats of the current state. If that convention is to be changed, then the change should be discussed and applied broadly, not just to male rowers.

The history here wrt sport, as I understand it, is best illustrated by the Olympics:

a) Germany was not invited to the 1948 Olympics.

b) At the 1952 Olympics, West Germany participated under the label "Germany" (see Germany at the 1952 Summer Olympics)

c) At the 1956, 1960 & 1964 Olympics, East Germany & West Germany competed together as the United Team of Germany

d) from 1968 to 1988, there were two separate teams: East Germany & West Germany

e) Since reunification in 1990, German athletes have competed as "Germany"

It seems to me that subcategorisation is the best way to represent this complex sporting history.

As to the broader history, there are several ways of looking at it.

@MisterSynergy takes the constitutional formalist position that there is no former country "West Germany". That is correct in one formal sense, since the mechanism used in 1990 was that East Germany was treated as "Eastern Lander" which joined a pre-existing state called "FRG".

However, the practical reality is that for many purposes, the rest of the world dealt for 40 years with two Germanies: East Germany (DDR) & West Germany (FRG), which united in 1990 under the label "Germany". And in a sporting context, @MisterSynergy's assertion that there is no former country "West Germany" is simply and demonstrably false: see West Germany at the Olympics.

It may be that the constitutional formalist view is the one to take; but there is no axiomatic reason to assume that it should be applied to en.wp's categorisation system, which per WP:CAT is about helping our readers to navigate between related topics. It seems to me to be utterly perverse to seek to seek to apply it to sport.

Personally, I think that it would be highly disruptive to navigation to remove East Germany and/or West Germany from the Germany categories ... but whatever decision is made, it should not be made on this page. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:01, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

To clarify:

• I agree that we should distinguish between the formalist legal position (todays "Germany" is the same legal entity that was commonly referred to as "West Germany" during the cold war era, so "West Germany" is not a former country as it continues to exist under a different label), and the practical implications for sports on the other hand. I am sorry if that wasn't clear from my previous comment.
• There were indeed "German teams" mixed of East and West German athletes until the 1960s (for rowing: until including 1965), so "German team" and "West German team" are indeed not synonymous and it is wise to differentiate between them. Fun fact: there even was an "East German team" at the 1990 World Rowing Championships, which were held a month after East Germany had already been merged into (unified with) "West Germany" to form today's Germany.
• Part of this problem is the fact that national teams do not necessarily correspond 1:1 to countries, although that is widely thought to be the case. The typical scenario is indeed that international federations permit only one team per country (or national federation), thus it is the "national team". However, international federations have their own opinions about what a country is, so they sometimes permit multiple teams per country (e.g. German teams at the 1990 WRCH), or permit different countries to enter only one joint team (German teams until the mid-1960s).
• It is also correct that this question cannot be decided here, since there is systematical similarity in all (?) other types of sports and it would be valuable to preserve such a setting. My personal suggestion would be to allow double categorization (e.g. in "German male rowers" and "East-German male rowers") at the same time, in spite of the fact that the latter is a subcategory of the former, and although we are taught not to do this. Anyway, I consider Wikipedia's categorization technique as "old technology" that is systematically not able to deal with such issues (and others), which is why I do not invest any time in categorization any more. It had its merits in the past, but we have superior solutions meanwhile. So: do whatever you find useful, I won’t complain … :-)

—MisterSynergy (talk) 14:54, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Good discussion. I agree that it's a much broader issue than rowing (note that it's certainly not just about male rowers; I said the same applied to the women). Let me give you some context. On a personal level, I was in my mid-20s when the reunification happened (I called it the annexation at the time). Having grown up in post-war West Germany, to me there were two German states and I found the whole situation quite bizarre at the time. On a Wikipedia level, I've been working on the European Rowing Championships articles for the last wee while; I've thus far done them back as far as 1961 from the abolition in 1973. I dislike just plonking results stats on a page, but I prefer giving some context as to how each individual championship fitted into the bigger picture at its time. I've thus been reading contemporary East German newspapers. That, of course, gives you a biased view, and I'd love to read the West German papers to get a more balanced overview, but the West German papers aren't online and searchable in the same comprehensive way that three East German papers are indexed by the Berlin State Library.

In response to BHG's points, yes, there were combined (or unified, as it was called for the Olympics) German teams for a wee while. That was because sporting bodies (like the IOC or FISA) insisted on a combined team, and they did so because of intense lobbying by the West German government. It had nothing to do with reality, though, and the relationship between eastern and western sporting bodies deteriorated over time, just as the cold war intensified on a political level. For example, in 1961 West Germany forbade its athletes (not just rowing) to have any competitions with their eastern counterparts. When it came to forming those combined sporting teams, they often couldn't agree how to form them, or where to hold the competitions that would decide who would represent the combined team in each sporting category. More often than not, FISA made the relevant decisions as the rowing associations had too much political interference. At many international competitions, the only thing that the athletes had to do with one another was when there were communal meal facilities; all nations would sit down for a meal together, including East and West Germany. That doesn't sound like a "combined team" to me.

I conclude that we should reflect the reality of two countries forming a combined team by reflecting this at the category level. I further suggest that we should show this at the individual athlete level with the infobox. It's quite ok to have Olympic representation between 1956 and 1964 shown as representing the United Team of Germany as there's an article that can give the context (that article doesn't do the situation justice just yet, but that can be fixed). But when it comes to individual sports, I think it's plain wrong and misleading to show an individual during that time as representing Germany; they either represented East Germany, or they represented West Germany. Case in point is the current version of the 1962 World Rowing Championships; all the rowers shown as representing "Germany" were in fact West Germans. Yes, "Germany" was the label at the time, as decreed by FISA. But the West Germans had won all the boat classes in which finals were reached at the championships (I've already fixed, in the prose, the previously wrong statement that no East Germans were represented; they provided the single sculler), and they represented West Germany. Just as in the years thereafter, as the East Germans discovered that sport is a good tool to show their superiority, East Germany became more and more dominant, and they represented their country, rather than the combined team.

Where to from here? Maybe we should see whether we can reach agreement about the rowers, and then team up to draft something for CfD and see where that takes us. Schwede66 18:55, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

@Schwede66 and MisterSynergy: Thanks for your thoughtful responses. (Schwede66, I sympathise with you calling 1990 an "annexation"; I used to wind up my German friends by calling it the anschluss, which led to many a fine evening of heated debate ). But it's sad to think of those athletes competing on the same nominal team, sharing a common language, but not socialising. Humans are a deeply weird species of animal.

I don't see any CfD issue here, so I'm not sure what you have in mind. Maybe an RFC?

However, I would suggest a simple principle as the starting point: for any value of "foo", all German fooers should be in Category:German fooers or its subcats. That should apply whether the "fooers" are astronauts, sexologists, plumbers, women politicians, chiropodists, male actors, actresses or male rowers.

In this case of Category:German male rowers, that means that Category:East German male rowers and Category:West German male rowers should both be subcats of it.

However, we're still left with the question of how to categorise each individual.

Some of it is easy enough. Those who competed for specifically East German teams and/or made their rowing careers in East Germany should be in Category:East German male rowers; and same for the West Germans.

The question then is surely whether to adopt MisterSynergy's suggestion. i.e. to make the East German & West German categories non-diffusing, so that an article in Category:East German male rowers would also be in Category:German male rowers.

What do you think of that framing? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:49, 9 February 2018 (UTC)