Misnamed category: Imperium Romanum Sacrum

+12 votes
145 views
This category appears to suffer from an idiosyncratic reordering of name: WikiTree seems to be the only place apart from a gaming site called Total War Center that changes the customary Sacrum Romanum Imperium or Sacrum Imperium Romanum to Imperium Romanum Sacrum. Does it matter? Perhaps not if we also accept categories such as "America's United States" or "Great Britain and Northern Ireland's United Kingdom".
in Policy and Style by Helmut Jungschaffer G2G6 Pilot (602k points)

1 Answer

+4 votes
Helmut, thanks for spotting this.  

Categories are in single language streams.  The proper category name in the English language stream would be "Holy Roman Empire."  

If there is a wish to create a separate Latin Language stream, ascending up to the Latin word for Categories (!) , then one could have a category using the Latin language version for Holy Roman Empire.  Which apparently is not Imperium Romanum Sacrum!  (But I claim no expertise in that!).  

I believe the purpose of having separate language category streams, however, is to make categories accessible and useful to those whose primary language is a language other than English.  I don't believe we have a constituency whose primary every day language is Latin!

We have a constituency on WikiTree who have found it useful to create category streams in Swedish, in French, in Indonesian, and some other languages as well.  There might be an interest in creating a separate category stream in German for these categories.  A German language category stream has already been started, but there isn't much in it:  https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Regionen

Obviously some work was done to create this category, so the project that is focused on this should take the lead in re-naming several categories in English, and moving the material from one category page to the other, if they are to appear in the English language category stream.  Then Ales' instructions can be followed to have the affected profiles moved from the Latin language to English language versions.
by Jack Day G2G6 Pilot (461k points)
edited by Jack Day
No problem with Holy Roman Empire, Heiliges Römisches Reich, Sacro Imperio Romano, Svatá říše římská, Saint-Empire romain or what other languages come up, but if we have a category using the official name of an historic entity we should at least get that right.
Since the official name of the historic entity was in Latin, a category using that name -- whether right or wrong -- would ONLY appear in the Latin language category stream, which I don't recommend us creating!

Categories do not function the same as data entered in the data field.  

I notice that there is a parallel English language category Holy Roman Empire already, which is under-developed.  Under the misnamed Imperium Sacrum Romanum, there are also some categories which appear to be in the German language.
Following Jack's reasoning,, the category should probably be renamed to Heiliges Römisches Reich according to the way it is used.

It is only a sub of the German History category, it's not in regions, which is odd as well.

The way history categories are nested is weird as well, though that would be for another thread.

The German language category stream starts at the top with 

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category: Categorien.

It would be helpful if a German speaker could create a subcategory under that for the German language equivalent of "World History."  Would it be Weltgeschichte?

Notice that the English language category:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:World_History

already has a cross-link on it to the Dutch lenguage equivalent.  The German language equivalent could then be cross-linked in the same way.

Heiliges Römisches Reich would be an excellent title in the German language category stream, and it could be a subcategory under the German language category equivalent to World History.  The text on the category page should then all be in German.  The parallel category page with English text should be named  Holy Roman Empire.  The Category: Holy Roman Empire can be cross-linked to the German language Category: Heiliges Römisches Reich in the same way.

What becomes a problem is when Categories created in one language are added as subcategories of categories in another language.  And of course it's a bigger problem when the category is wrong as in Imperium Romanum Sacrum!

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