How many profiles to a category?

Question

I have a question - there seems to be a misunderstanding as to the amount of profiles that 1 category can handle (5000 was the limit that was understood in the past). This however seems to me to be totally unrealistic. For example - if COVID-19 would have been a category (as are other diseases) there would be much more than 5000 profiles with that category on (death victims). The Holocaust alone would encompass at least 6 million ... the list goes on.

Is there any short, clearcut answer to this question?

Edit: See my question here: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1096444/projects-which-templates-categories-google-groups-profile

Comments

I have never heard the number 5000 as limit to a category. The watchlist of a WT member however is said to be meant to hold about 5000 profiles maximum.

Answer 1

As far as I know, there really is no limit. For practical reasons, we subcategorize when categories get too large.

Comments

What are those practical reasons exactly? Edit: Using for example the COVID-19 (or Small Pox for that matter) what would the reasons be?

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Perhaps they would divide them into continents or countries.

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This does not answer my question on 'why' - the practical reasons ...

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Why? To make it easier to find like profiles.

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In other words 'divide' the Holocaust (example) into subcatogories to 'easier' find like profiles?

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Practical reasons would be "there are so many profiles attached that it's difficult to find the names. "

Any projects would need to make decisions on categories they maintain within their structures.

Answer 2

It's a pragmatic judgment based on ease of use and navigation.

Honestly anything more than 400 profiles in a category starts to get a bit unwieldy. Take this category I use frequently (and which isn't even that large):
https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Category:Harbour_Grace%2C_Newfoundland_Colony

If you are using the skip-next navigation, it's a pain to get to surnames beginning the the letter 'w', to navigate to find a specific person, or check if a family is represented.

You can use the table of contents navigation, and that helps. But once you get above about 1-2k profiles, it's going to get really cumbersome again for frequent use.

At that point, it will probably make sense to start splitting it up by country, or other, division.

Comments

A bit too technical for my understanding. But thanks for the answer. Aren't there any new ways of dealing with this? How do they do it on WikiPedia?

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Anything over 200 divides it into pages. After that, a Category TOC template can be placed in order to "jump to a letter." 

We don't have a preference for how a category gets subdivided. The usual ways are by location or time period.

And COVID-19 isn't getting a category.

A similar outbreak to show you is the 1918 Flu Pandemic, which was divided by location.

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If it's too technical to understand, actually go to the category I linked, and try to find out if someone surnamed "Willis" lived in Harbour Grace. Imagine doing this ten or twenty times.

"Too many" is defined by "how much of a pain is it to use."

Answer 3

There is no cut and dry answer unfortunately. Help:Category Names states that:

"Ideally, bottom-level categories should be much smaller, with no more than a few thousand people in them. This isn't always possible, e.g. with towns and cities, but we should aim to create narrow categories when we can."

There was a comment previously about Wikipedia, but it should be noted that this is actually much more restrictive than Wikipedia in most cases. Wikipedia currently has:

• 700+ Categories with more than 20,000 pages
• 750+ Categories with 10,001–20,000 pages
• 1,400+ Categories with 5,001–10,000 pages
• 3,330+ Categories with 2,001–5,000 pages

While I don't have any exact numbers for WikiTree, I do know of a few large categories (based on the last dump) such as:

• Category:Unsourced Profiles - 1,020,064 profiles
• Category:Notables - 30,476 profiles

But as you can imagine, this is not typical. I am confident that our average numbers are much lower than this, and there are very few categories that reach over 5,000 profiles.

Comments

Thanks Steve. I appreciate this answer. Could you also take a look at the other question I just posted (https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1096444/projects-which-templates-categories-google-groups-profile), please?

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Here are exact numbers of profiles in a category updated daily.

https://www.softdata.si/wt/cat/UsageProfiles.htm

It begins with 90000 categories without profiles, 50000 categories with one profile and so on to 1 category with 1020064 profiles.

So ve have 26 categories with over 10000 profiles.
 

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Splitting a category into smaller, more manageable subcategories doesn't mean that you've removed them from a category. So, putting someone at the level of a town doesn't mean they are removed from the scope of a project.

(Aside: I know that statement is inviting a rant about whether Wikitree categories are categories, I'm sorry.)

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Yes, always my fear as well. Asking questions and then in doing so inviting rants. 

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Thanks Aleš!

Answer 4

I regularly use a category that documents people associated with a town in Maine, and it now has more than 4,000 profiles. I don't find it cumbersome at all -- it's a lot less cumbersome than it would be to use WikiTree search every time to find a profile for someone I know or suspect is there.