English poets: male, female or what?

[Poetlister]

The topic of putting females in a category distinct from everyone else has been raised before. In the case of English poets, we now have three categories:

Category:English male poets (T-H-L): 1074 entries
Category:English women poets (T-H-L): 339 entries
Category:English poets (T-H-L): 885 entries

Presumably the first category includes boys whereas the second does not include girls. I am unclear what the third category is supposed to cover.

Incidentally, one poet has his own personal category: Category:Lord Byron (T-H-L). He is also in Category:Scottish poets, although he was born in England and his father's family was English.

[Wonderer]

Maybe transsexual English poets? There's got to be at least one.

I'd chalk this up to there not being enough gnomes to take care of this. Another symptom of Wikipedia's declining number of editors, which Wikipediocracy has of course documented very well.

By the way, the English male poets category doesn't have a talk page.

[Johnny Au]

Maybe transsexual English poets? There's got to be at least one.

I'd chalk this up to there not being enough gnomes to take care of this. Another symptom of Wikipedia's declining number of editors, which Wikipediocracy has of course documented very well.

By the way, the English male poets category doesn't have a talk page.

Not just declining number of editors, but a general lack of female editors in the first place as well

[Poetlister]

By the way, the English male poets category doesn't have a talk page.

No big loss; the others just have templates saying this category is in the scope of some project.

[Ming]

The whole issue of splitting out female categories has been banging around CFD for months if not a couple of years. Ming hasn't bothered to keep track of which the wind is blowing on this, so Ming can't say whether or not this is a split that just hasn't been caught up with yet.

[Poetlister]

I can see some merit in splitting categories of sportspeople, since in most sports men and women do not compete in the same events so they are essentially two different sports. There might be some merit in categories where women (or men) are so rare that each is remarkable, though there are arguments to the contrary. For the great majority of categories, neither argument applies of course.

[Jim]

Read this, but substitute "male" for "blue" and "poet" for moth.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5984&p=127211#p127330

The wikipedia category system is broken, has always been broken, and will always be broken.
The only solution to this is assigning attributes to items and having a usable, cached, query system to sort/extract data.

Until then, you have clueless obsessives shuffling mountains of worthless "category" info back and forth, and no useful result.
There are lots of downsides to categories: unwieldiness/unworkability/inaccuracy/ridiculous complexity/potential to exploit for defamation/high cost of admin.
No upsides, unless you count the "churn factor", which wikipedia, sadly, does

[SB_Johnny]

Read this, but substitute "male" for "blue" and "poet" for moth.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5984&p=127211#p127330

The wikipedia category system is broken, has always been broken, and will always be broken.
The only solution to this is assigning attributes to items and having a usable, cached, query system to sort/extract data.

Until then, you have clueless obsessives shuffling mountains of worthless "category" info back and forth, and no useful result.
There are lots of downsides to categories: unwieldiness/unworkability/inaccuracy/ridiculous complexity/potential to exploit for defamation/high cost of admin.
No upsides, unless you count the "churn factor", which wikipedia, sadly, does

Isn't wikidata supposed to solve this somehow?

[Jim]

Read this, but substitute "male" for "blue" and "poet" for moth.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5984&p=127211#p127330

The wikipedia category system is broken, has always been broken, and will always be broken.
The only solution to this is assigning attributes to items and having a usable, cached, query system to sort/extract data.

Until then, you have clueless obsessives shuffling mountains of worthless "category" info back and forth, and no useful result.
There are lots of downsides to categories: unwieldiness/unworkability/inaccuracy/ridiculous complexity/potential to exploit for defamation/high cost of admin.
No upsides, unless you count the "churn factor", which wikipedia, sadly, does

Isn't wikidata supposed to solve this somehow?

I believe that was one of its stated purposes. You'd still need to have a usable search interface, even assuming you can stuff all the right data in, and keep it up to date, and I have my doubts about that.
The big concern about wikidata, for many, has been that it provides a poorly monitored central point of access where you can alter data to vandalise many wikipedias at once. They may have addressed that - I haven't been watching wikidata recently.

[Poetlister]

I believe that was one of its stated purposes. You'd still need to have a usable search interface, even assuming you can stuff all the right data in, and keep it up to date, and I have my doubts about that.
The big concern about wikidata, for many, has been that it provides a poorly monitored central point of access where you can alter data to vandalise many wikipedias at once. They may have addressed that - I haven't been watching wikidata recently.

Surely the geniuses who brought you the Visual Editor can quickly develop a superb search interface ... can't they?

[Vigilant]

Read this, but substitute "male" for "blue" and "poet" for moth.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5984&p=127211#p127330

The wikipedia category system is broken, has always been broken, and will always be broken.
The only solution to this is assigning attributes to items and having a usable, cached, query system to sort/extract data.

Until then, you have clueless obsessives shuffling mountains of worthless "category" info back and forth, and no useful result.
There are lots of downsides to categories: unwieldiness/unworkability/inaccuracy/ridiculous complexity/potential to exploit for defamation/high cost of admin.
No upsides, unless you count the "churn factor", which wikipedia, sadly, does

Isn't wikidata supposed to solve this somehow?

I believe that was one of its stated purposes. You'd still need to have a usable search interface, even assuming you can stuff all the right data in, and keep it up to date, and I have my doubts about that.
The big concern about wikidata, for many, has been that it provides a poorly monitored central point of access where you can alter data to vandalise many wikipedias at once. They may have addressed that - I haven't been watching wikidata recently.

Shhhhhhhh!

[arthur]

Read this, but substitute "male" for "blue" and "poet" for moth.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5984&p=127211#p127330

The wikipedia category system is broken, has always been broken, and will always be broken.
The only solution to this is assigning attributes to items and having a usable, cached, query system to sort/extract data.

The obsessives would still edit-war over the attributes but nevertheless, a big step in the right direction.

[Poetlister]

Read this, but substitute "male" for "blue" and "poet" for moth.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5984&p=127211#p127330

The wikipedia category system is broken, has always been broken, and will always be broken.
The only solution to this is assigning attributes to items and having a usable, cached, query system to sort/extract data.

The obsessives would still edit-war over the attributes but nevertheless, a big step in the right direction.

Indeed, there are for example many notable people, novelists, politicians and even scientists, who have published a handful of poems. Some are in the English poets categories, some aren't. There is endless scope for argument on the margins.