Need help with political categories

Question

As part of the presidential project we are trying to come up with consistent categorization for the presidents which includes their other polictial offices.  So as to nog blow up G2G with this topic I created a working page for feedback.

http://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Space:WikiTree_Genealogy_Guide_to_Political_Categories&public=1

The goal is to agree on a set of consistent naming conventions for categories of US elected politicians.

== Federal Branch ==
For '''non-state''' specific executive and judicial positions proposed as follows:

[[:Category:US Presidents]]  [[:Category:US Secretary of State]] [[:Category:US Supreme Court Justice]]

#Question, should this be singular or plural?
#Question, Sub categorization?  US Government -> US Cabinet or US Supreme Court or US Executive branch?

For ''state elected'' congressional positions proposed listing by state  [[:Category|Senator of Tennessee]] [[:Category:Senator of Virginia]]

#Question add US to the category name?
#Sub categorization?  US Elected - US Congress - State Name Elected?

== State and City held Political offices==
[[:Category:Governor of New York]] [[:Category:Governor of Virginia]]

 

 

Comments

Hi Ed,

How come you didn't want to do this and the military categorization discussion on http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project_talk:Categorization ?

I think we want to discuss these issues on G2G when there are specific questions, using the tag "categorization", and on the Talk page when there are general issues or users prefer that medium. Then we want to put conclusions on Help/Style pages like http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category_Names

Let me make sure Lianne sees this.

Chris

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Ok excellent.  I'm putting all of these positions into 2 major categories [[Politicans]] under professions and [[US Political History]]

Another category is state focused as in New Your State Politics which I would put the state elected officials under.

I'll get rid of that page I was working on as a place holder.  Thanks Chris!

Answer 1

I don't really know much about how the US government is structured, but:

1) Categories like these should always be plural. That's how we've been doing it, and how Wikipedia does it, so I'd say that's standard. So [[Category:Senators of Virginia]] (or maybe [[Category:Virginia Senators]]?) and [[Category:US Secretaries of State]].

2) As for subcategorisation, probably [[Category:US Senators]] and [[Category:US Governors]] would be useful. Beyond that, like I said, I'm not really familiar with the system, so I'd leave that up to someone else.

~Lianne

Comments

To expand on this, I just took a peek around [[Category:Politicians]], and I have a couple of observations. We should add a US Ambassadors category, since lots of subcategories of that have been created and are currently crowding Politicians. Same with US Senators and US Governors, as I said before. I can help create those and move things around.

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I think [[Category:Virginia Senators]] would be the way to go, rather than [[Category:Senators of Virginia]].

We have other category names that put the state first, like Virginia Inventors instead of Inventors from Virginia, or Virginia High Schools instead of High Schools in Virginia.

Oh, I suppose we should prepare for a distinction between state senators and US senators. So, maybe it should be [[Category:Virginia US Senators]].

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It honestly looks like we have too many links going on in the Politician category and some general reorganizing. For instance there is a US Congressional Representatives category so there is no need for "US Representative of STATE" being on the politicians page they should all be under the Congressional Representative category. Same logic should be applied to the senators. I think the really big question as Chris pointed out is how do we handle the state stuff. Do we have a Category for "STATE politicians" under the "Politicians" category where the goverenors and any other STATE politicians would be put for further organization as needed? Similarly you could have a "US Federal Politicians" category or something like that to contain all the federal office holders.

Personally I am coming to hesitate making too many detailed folders as it seems like we end up with lots of duplicate categories. Almost feel like we should create general categories for "general" users to work with and then have people from the Categorization group come through and do more detailed categorization as needed. Just a thought.

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Seems like consensus is all senators and congressmen go into a single category each?  What do you think about Ambassadors?  By country or all together?  Happy to do either.   The presidents offer a good grouping to get this right.

I like fewer categories that are easy to remember and type.

Looking at wikipedia seems like a good idea.  We probably don't need to reinvent the wheel.