Louisiana categories not findable by geography higher category

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Louisiana categories not findable by geography higher category

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The categories are somewhat tangled as people created categories and put them in what they thought were proper places before there was much organization and real thought about historical place names. However, a group has been working hard on creating a Francophone portal and in connection with Project Quebecois, on a structure for Nouvelle France place names.

It also has the following subcategories: Acadie | Canada, Nouvelle-France | La Louisiane, Nouvelle-France | Île Royale .

There is a cross reference from Category: Nouvelle-France to Category: New France but no indication that there are more place names on the French side.

It would appear three things break the chain to higher region categories especially on the English side.

First, while there is a parent category Amérique du Nord on the French side, there is no parent category North America on the English side.

Second, there is no parallel English category for La Louisiane, Nouvelle-France and no reference from the category Category: New France to see category Category: Nouvelle-France for further subdivisions where La Louisiane, Nouvelle-France can be found.

Third, Category: Louisiana First Families does not have either Category: La Louisiane, Nouvelle-France or an English equivalent as a parent.

If Category: Louisiana First Families had Category: La Louisiane, Nouvelle-France as a parent, it could be found easily through the French side.

And if there were a new Category: Louisiana, New France which were a parent category for Category: Louisiana First Families, and a subcategory of Category: New France and if Category: New France were made a subcategory of Category: North America then the chain would be complete on both the French and English side.

If this would fix the situation, I can fix it for you. This would be in keeping with practice elsewhere in regional categories where there are multiple language paths down to the the lowest level where locations are in the native language of the time, which during the New France era would be French.

answered Jun 13, 2018 by Mary Jensen G2G6 Pilot (130k points)
selected Jun 14, 2018 by Danielle Liard

Danielle,

There are pros and cons to how to handle multiple language issues, and it is a topic of current discussion in the Categorization Project. Guy was a member of that project and served as the liaison to Categorization. It would be good if you could join that group and monitor it for discussions that would affect Quebecois.

If that's too much for you, I'd be willing to serve as the Quebecois liaison to Categorization for the time being.

At present bilingual or trilingual category names are not permitted, but that is under discussion currently. While it isn't officially permitted it is being done with native languages that don't use Roman characters.

I think the real limitation is that a category "name" is a very rigid piece of code that won't tolerate any variation in characters and won't accept a / character most other characters that would be a reasonable language divider other than perhaps (). So if the creator didn't know the proper term in both languages or the exact format including which language is primary, we would get a lot of accidental duplicate categories. Those are the kinds of issues currently being discussed as well as the practical issues of getting proper bilingual names on categories created by unilingual users.

We also don't have the capability for two categories to display together as one page or the kind of automatic redirect that occurs when profiles are merged. That idea has come up, but so far the best we have at present is a cross reference that can be clicked on to get from a category in one language to the equivalent category in another language.

The present model is that hopefully the name in the landing category (the one put on the profile) will be in terms that are the same in all languages. That often works for the lowest level location name but not always. It usually doesn't work for non location categories. Above the landing level, the current model is to have separate language streams in each language with cross references from one language to the other(s). Several countries pick a level in their locations below which it is not practical to be multilingual and say that all locations below that level will be in the native tongue. But as expected, there are then some problems with areas where the official language changed over time.

Guy's approach was that since French was the local official language and the native tongue in the area covered by Project Quebecois (and all of Nouvelle France for that matter), the landing levels should be in French. Those are normally the towns/cities. Above that level, it was worked out what the English and French terms were and somewhere there is a list of when to use Bas Canada and Lower Canada and similar terms, but I've lost track of it. (I'm behind in all the projects I'm part of these days). So that is what I based my suggestions on.

But I don't think Guy had finished sheparding the process through revising the upper part of the category structure into bilingual for all the periods from Nouvelle France through today. I'm pretty sure he did not get the English side all done or the links from English to French categories and vice versa.

Ales has been working on ways to automate more of that kind of work, but we only have one Ales so it isn't going as fast as we would like.

commented Jun 14, 2018 by Mary Jensen G2G6 Pilot (130k points)

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Louisiana categories not findable by geography higher category

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