Can we merge categories? [closed]

Question

I started a G2G discussion today about whether there was any interest in a Jamestown Project.  Along the way, I've learned there are, at least, the categories of:  Virginia Colony (with 4 subcategories), Virginia Company, Virginia, Thirteen Colonies, "Jamestown, Virginia," and Ancient Planters (earliest folks at Jamestown).

The defination and use section for Categories seem to contemplate that they would be used to pool profiles with a common element in one place; but some of the above contain historical statements and other information.  But, they all overlap to one degree or another.  (Virginia merits a stand alone as a state, of course)  Is there some way to organize these cats?

Answer 1

Foster,

Technically, leaders can effectively merge category pages - but they never should.

It is a technical issue - when any merge is done the 'old' page continues to exist and contains a hard redirect (i.e. #REDIRECT[[pagename]] ) to point traffic to the new page, but articles categorized under the old pagename will not appear in the article list of the newpage but there is no way to see there is a problem from the profile. (Reference)

Answer 2

It would seem to me you shouldn't merge categories.

The personal profile remains constant, with further detail perhaps being added following research. It is the sourced detail that "meets" the categories. Therefore you should add additional categories to which this profile "fits".

Comments

Ron, perhaps I didn't phrase my question correctly.  I'm not proposing to change personal profiles.  Ancient Planters is a category and it only hold links to personal profiles.  I get that.  But listed in my question are several categories which all deal, to one degree or another, with Jamestown.  It just seems to me that adds confusion.  Furthermore, digging some more, it seems what Jamestown needs is a Free Space Profile.  Maybe that should be created and all the categories linked together there?

---

That is my very point, Foster, profiles don't change, rather categories can be added to that profile. Ron

---

But Ron, what I understand Foster to be pointing out is that there are multiple different categories more or less "categorizing" the same thing.

I think that one solution might be to work collaboratively to determine which is the best category name to use and change all those profiles to link to THOSE categories.

---

There's Virginia Colonists as well as Virginia Colony.  It's a subcategory of English Immigrants to America, though on the face of it not all the colonists were immigrants and not all the immigrants were English.

Which only shows that these things aren't that useful without careful definitions.  It's not even easy to define immigrant, as a lot of people went back and forth.

Ancient Planters has a clear cut-off date, though it may not be restricted to Jamestown, as there were other early settlements.

But some of the others are much more open-ended in timescale and go way beyond the period that the name Jamestown calls to mind.

Isn't there a project for category definitions?

---

Jullaine:  Your get it.  There should be one primary place to go to for Jamestown with links to the others.   How do we do that?

---

RJ, yes there is such a project. It's called the Categorization project which deals with categories generally.  There's also the southern colonies project which should be involved.

---

Interesting discussion -- it would seem to me that one approach I haven't seen discussed yet is to see which of the current categories are broadest and which are narrower, and then make the narrower ones sub-categories under the broad one.  That way nothing needs to be merged or changed, and they all look part of an organized whole!   In the process it might be appropriate to add specificity to the definitions used for each category, while recognizing that some duplication would always happen!

Answer 3

I wonder if you can just change the name of any duplicate categories to increase the description of the links? Jamestowne and Viigina Colonists may be similar, but Jamestowne would not include Roanoke Colonists. Virginia Colonists should. So perhaps Jamestowne Colonists is a sub-set of Virginia Colonists.