Talk:Arnold Kent

Why not to put him in the Americans of Italian descent category

I have been attacked viciously on my talk page for the decision to removed Kent from category:American people of Italian descent. This comes down to a failure to understand how Wikipedia categories work. In Wikipedia we do not have category:People and have it contain every article on a person, then Category:American people and have it contain every article on an American person, etc. Instead we have Category:American piano players, and since it is a sub-cat of Category:American musicians, no piano player is directly in the musician category. So since category:Italian immigrants to the United States which Kent is in is a sub-cat of Category:American people of Italian descent, no one in this sub-cat belongs in the parent category. There are exceptions to this rule, such that someone in say Category:American women poets also needs to be in Category:American poets or a not-sex specific subcat of Category:American poets, however the so called ERGS rules do not mean that ERGS categories are undividable. By some understandings Category:American people of Italian descent is an ERGS category. So Kent needs to be in a sub-cat of category:American people that is not specific to his being Italian. However there is no reason that he needs to be in both a sub-cat and a parent category when both apply to his ethnic status. Italian descent does not imply that the person is "ethnically Italian", at least not exclusively, so the child of recent Nigerian immigrants born in Italy whose family then moves to the US fits in it, at least if they are Italian enough to fit in Category:Italian emigrants to the Uunited States. On the other hand, there are some cases where such a child would not quite meet being "italian descent", but in that case they would also not be an Italian immigrant to the US (or any other country they moved to), but instead fit in Category:Nigerian emigrants to the United States and Category:Nigerian expatriates in Italy. The two most clear cases of such is if one or both parents were soldiers or diplomats for Nigeria, or if their parents were refugees from Nigeria who were then resettled to the US. If said child was born to parents studying at a university in Italy who then relocated permanently to the Us, or to parents who were serving short term as missionaries in Nigeria, and then moved to the US, such categorization might also apply.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:59, 9 January 2018 (UTC)