Category talk:People

order by family name?

Should we order it by family name? [[Category:Actors and Actresses|Streep, Meryl]] instead of [[Category:Actors and Actresses]] in the Meryl Streep article? I prefer first name ordering, but that doesn't seem like something an encyclopedia would do. - Jeandré, 2004-05-31t20:00z

• Yes, by family name. More specifically, in the order discussed in Talk:List of people by name --Amillar 05:00, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Ideas for broader subcategories

How about splitting off Category:People by profession? Another that comes to mind is Category:Prizewinners, or something similar, to hold the various prizewinner and honor recipient categories. Bryan 09:02, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)

• I agree about Category:People by profession, altho we can quibble about the exact category. Since this suggestion has not been followed up, let's discuss the name issue, and do it, once there's agreement. --Jerzy(t) 20:36, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)

Category Title: Professions or its Alternatives

• My misgivings abt Category:People by profession are two:
  1. Profession (or whatever) can do double duty, and perhaps might as well, since no one but people have professions. If there were a Category:Professions, it could be a subcat of Category:People and of, say, Category:Fields of knowledge and/or Category:Useful arts (or an alternative). (Useful arts is a (perhaps poorly named) Dewey Decimal category; i admit to vagueness about its breadth, but i think it excludes Lit and Science and Biog.)
  2. "Profession" has a several meanings, including those used in labor law and probably liability law. (Is teaching a profession, if you can't be sued for malpractice of it?) So does "occupation" (boondoggle arts-and-crafts is part of occupational therapy; both housemaid's knee and tennis elbow are occupational diseases, tho neither housemaid nor amateur tennis are usually thought of as professions). IMO, "Occupations" or "Human activities" (or something else) could have "Professions" or "Livelihoods" as a subcategory, and also "Sports", "Music", "Arts", and maybe "Sexual behaviors".

--Jerzy(t) 20:36, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)

Category Title: Prizewinners or its Alternatives

Category:Laureates? Category:Honorees? These seem to me capable of embracing both prizes and prizeless formal honors.
--Jerzy(t) 20:36, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)

Types of people

• The articles pilgrim and raver are not about people but about types of people. Should these articles be removed from this category? anthony (see warning) 14:41, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Categorization of people - general discussion

see also: wikipedia:categorization of people and its discussion page - maybe I was too fast in creating that new article, and the discussion should have been out here first (as suggested by user:Beland on CfD page), sorry if having caused inconvenience... --Francis Schonken 13:30, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for lending a hand. Everyone should definitely follow the above link to learn more about and participate in the people-classification controversy. -- Beland 04:48, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Main page cat

Now that People is a main page category (replacing Personal life=life), would it all right if we were to add a link to that category? It could go under Did You Know, currently a red link. Or it could go in place of that red link. Ancheta Wis 09:30, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Categorisation

Avoiding loop between Category:People and Category:Humans

Category:Humans is in Category:People and vice-versa. Since in general we are to avoid cycles in the category system, and since Category:People is in Category:Fundamental, it looks like the thing to do is to take Category:People out of Category:Humans. I'm going to go ahead and make that change; if someone disputes it, feel free to revert and discuss. Jdavidb 19:54, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

You remembered to put colons at the start of your category links except in the heading - those links work the same way. Brian Jason Drake 03:39, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the fix. Sorry about that. I think I was cutting and pasting an edit summary from the same comment which I put on Category talk:Humans. Jdavidb (talk) 04:44, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Nature?

Category:Humans is under Category:Nature (if you go upwards through Category:Apes, you eventually get there). Shouldn't this go there too? Brian Jason Drake 03:39, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Fictional people

I would also suggest putting this into another category to reflect the fact that there are fictional people in here - Category:Fiction? Brian Jason Drake 03:39, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

"Humans" a subcategory of "People"?

Currently, there is a root-category "People" (with specific people), which contains, among others, the category "Humans" (with all very general terms). Shouldn't those two categories be the other way around, with Humans a root category, and People a subcat of it? Peter S. 22:20, 2 October 2005 (UTC)1

No - it sends an arrogant message about humans and presumedly violates NPOV. Brian Jason Drake 03:43, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't know about NPOV, but People is a root category because People, who are users of the encyclopedia, are more interested in People than in Humans. That is, categories are fundamentally a navigation device to help people find things, not the "one true way", since there is no one true way in a category system. For that matter, I don't know why "loops are to be avoided", we are not computers likely to be stuck in a "do loop", we are trying to help People find things, in this case, links to other People. dml 03:49, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

People is a root category because users of the encyclopedia are more interested in it than something else? By that logic, every category is a root category! People is a main page category. A root category is one that cannot be placed under other categories according to a particular categorisation scheme. According to the categorisation scheme that currently falls under "Fundamental", people should be under "Nature" and "Fiction", in my opinion. Brian Jason Drake 04:19, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't get that, Brian. A root category should be as-general-as-possible, something that cannot be included in any other category. In this case, I doubt that the category "People", which contains John Cumming, Adam Watson etc. directly, should be a top category. It's not very general. Additionally, "People" fits very well inside "Humans", which is a more general category, and therefore should be more close to root, imho. Can you give a different argument? Peter S. 15:35, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

I think that "Humans" should be a subcategory of "People". This leaves open the possibility that there are other human-like species that we can call "people".

Your idea is to put "People" under "Humans". This does seem to make sense based on current observations, but I reject it, because of what I said above, and because I don't want to create a circular reference. Also, this could be seen as implying that only some humans are worthy of being called "people", although this is probably not a significant issue.

Perhaps part of the problem is that nobody seems to have defined "people". Brian Jason Drake 07:13, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

When I was searching before, I somehow missed the person article. Based on a glance at that article, maybe Category:Humans and Category:People should be left at the same level (neither one should be inside the other), at least until we can see a consensus, and I can't see one yet. Brian Jason Drake 07:16, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Well is there actually a human-like species that we can call "people" but is not actually human? Can you give me an example? Or is there a significant chance that we will discover such a species in the next few years? I'm sorry, i don't follow you here, people refers to human people by definition, doesn't it? So it's a subset of humans, no? I see no reason why "people" shouldn't be placed inside "humans" so far, sorry. Peter S. 14:41, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia must acknowledge the beliefs of those who don't follow the scientific method (NPOV). Some people believe there are intelligent aliens, and presumedly these would qualify as "people". Brian Jason Drake 06:05, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Philosophical People

I commented out the containing Category:Philosophy for this Cat, as I cannot understand the rationale. Please add a comment here to justify its inclusion in the Philosophy Category. True, People can be Philosophers, but not all People are Philosophers. Hence it is not a categorical statement. Ancheta Wis 14:19, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Note about lists

Since we are removing the various ways we are indexing Biographies from the browse UI's, I note that we should have:

• Lists of people
• People by nationality
• People by occupation
• People by religion
• Births by year
• Deaths by year

here in the cats. -- Fplay 19:56, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

individuals?

Should an individual ever be listed in this category? Shouldn't a given person always be listed in some more specific category? -- Mikeblas 16:08, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Moving many subcats to be subcats of Category:Customary categories of people

54 subcategories is way too many. As a means of further dividing these, I think many of the more specific subcats should be moved to be subcats of Category:Customary categories of people. That category's description says "This category is for terms used to classify people by traits other than major categories, such as ethnicity, occupation, religion, social groups etc." I think the following cats would fit in there.

• Category:Autodidacts
• Category:Biblical people
• Category:Centenarians
• Category:Children
• Category:Defectors
• Category:Disappeared people
• Category:Innovators
• Category:Leap day births
• Category:Mysterious people
• Category:Political people
• Category:Prize winners
• Category:Revolutionaries
• Category:Shriners
• Category:Teetotalers
• Category:World record holders

If this gets no comments in a week, I request that the next person to read it make it so, following WP:BRD. JesseW, the juggling janitor 23:09, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Merged back according to Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2006 May 18

--William Allen Simpson 02:26, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Religion sub-categories

The religion catagories are messed up. If I want to find Roman Catholics, Calvinists, Muslims, or Bahai I have to look in the People by religion subcat. But if you want Buddhists, Atheists, Taoists, or Satanists you need to go to People known in connection with religion or philosophy. Saints and exorcists can be found under Religious people. Then there's Religious leaders which are found under People by occupations (this one's probably ok, but Religious workers needs to go there too).

I think that all the subcats of people by their religion need to be merged under People by religion. But do we want to change its name to People by belief to include atheists and agnostics? Or possibly People by religion or philosophy so as to include most of the entries from People known in connection with religion or philosophy? Categories that cut across religions like saints and exorcists could be sorted to the beginning or they could be given their own category by keeping Religious people?

Is this a project that needs to be done all at once, or could we proceed one category at a time? If I don't get any comments in a week I'll start the process myself. --JeffW 20:32, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps the best way to start the discussion is to figure out what categories need to be renamed and merged, mention the changes on the talk pages for the major categories, and then nominate them all at WP:CFD. Then, if there is consensus, much of the process can be automated. -- Samuel Wantman 21:44, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Already done. See Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2006 March 1. It isn't getting a very good reception. --JeffW 22:16, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm removing the cleancat template from this category, because the problem you discuss is not a problem with this category, but with the religion subcategories. -- Samuel Wantman 20:46, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Common names

We have disambiguation pages for human names. We have pages that list birth/death years. We also have categories for people by birth/death year. What would you think of categorizing people by common given name? The category will be called simply "Name". Example- the category for people named Jimmy: [[Category:Jimmy]]
--User:Carie 18:24, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Categorisation Top 10

Why did you make this category part of the Top 10 category but with an inicial space:

[[Category:Top 10| People]]

It doesn't look so good to me, mainly because it isn't sorted in the P block but instead, in a no initial block. jοτομικρόν | Talk 13:02, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Fictional people

Wondering what we can do to try to clean this category up. I was going through this earlier and noticed that there were categories of fictional people in here. For instance, Category:Fictional kings is under Category:kings and so therefore has fictional characters from LOTR in a super-category of Category:People? Shouldn't it be real people in this category only? plange 04:35, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

• I agree. I think only real people should be in this category and its subcategories. Reyk _YO! 00:46, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Descendants of Famous People?

... Descendants of Mayflower Passengers, with subcategories: Descendant of William Bradford, etc etc.? Thoughts? -- Sholom 14:58, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

notable traits of people...

currently there is a discussion going on here at the CFDeletion and it's taken an interesting turn, regarding the fact that there are categories for people that risk being used inappropriately so the thought is to remove them... that's a weak summation, but i'm asking if anyone else can post their thoughts. -Zappernapper 11:21, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Ill defined..."American writers by state"

(Cross posting from: Category talk:American writers by state)

Who goes in each of these categories? People who write about a state? People who were born in that state? What about a person who happened to live in California for 2 years in the early 80s?

A clearly spelled out definition of who goes in these categories is definitely needed. Someone recently added Orson Scott Card to Category:North Carolina writers... card just happens to live thier currently, but it plays a very minor part in his life.

Anyway, some clarification would be appreciated. ---J.S ^(T/C) 20:03, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

It seems no one has posted here for quite a while. I would think the obvious as in state eg New York. Phgao 11:43, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Ethnicity, etc.

What is the distinction between Category:People by ethnic or national descent, Category:People by ethnic or national origin, and Category:People by race or ethnicity? --Paul A (talk) 02:42, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

According to the categories, "ethnic or national origin" is: "This includes people who (or whose ancestors) immigrated to the country in the category name from a different country. In other words, these people or their ancestors were immigrants." Descent is "This category includes articles on people who (or whose ancestors) emigrated from the country in the category name to another country. In other words, these people or their ancestors were emigrants. For the opposite, see Category:People by ethnic or national origin". "Race or ethnicity" groups both of those and some other categories too. --Lquilter (talk) 05:03, 7 December 2007 (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 and that biography really doesn't mean human biographies. But confusion will continue because most people are taught the dictionary version of Biography that I list above. And will continue to list such articles as biographies. And the bots will continue to remove the category biography from such articles.

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) 00:06, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

people, apes and humans loop

@Mclay1:I replaced humans and ape by human nature for prevent the loops. Furthermore, you can't say that people is a subcat of homo sapiens (humans category concerns the homo sapiens field) cause homo sapiens concerns prehistory. Homo sapiens is less broad than people. Same for apes. It's a very serious subject, we have to find a solution.Zipodu (talk) 15:52, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

@Zipodu: Category:Humans is the main category for our species, including subcategories about our biology, culture, history, etc. Category:People is a container for all the articles on individual people. People are humans, therefore Category:People should be a subcategory of Category:Humans. Humans are apes, which is why Category:Humans is ultimately a subcategory of Category:Apes, and Category:People (individual humans) is a subcategory of Category:Individual apes. Category:Human nature is a subtopic of Category:Humans – it doesn't make sense the other way around. What loops are there? MClay1 (talk) 08:48, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

There is a loop with Category:Humans through Category:Biology through Category:Education, which is in Category:Human activities. They're so far removed though that it's not really an issue. All the steps are logical and removing useful parent categories just for the sake of preventing a loop would be unhelpful to navigation and counterproductive. MClay1 (talk) 09:10, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

"List of everyone" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect List of everyone has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 October 7 § List of everyone until a consensus is reached. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 10:03, 7 October 2023 (UTC)