Category talk:Poets

Hierarchization and Poets by Nationality

If we are going to do Poets by nationality, does that mean that we should gradually be removing poets from the general page? To be honets, I don't like that - given how elusive a concept "nationality" is, I don't really like this as a means of categorizing. Was T.S. Eliot a British poet, and American poet, or both? How about Homer? Was he a "Greek poet"? I'd prefer to do it by language. john k 02:54, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Umm, yes. I saw that someone had started with British poets and Chinese poets, so I ploughed ahead with the Spanish-speakers. But I was reluctant to exclude any poet from the general list by reason of inclusion on a country list -- you'll see I put both categories in those articles. However, now that you've mentioned it, I like the idea of Category:English-language poets, Category:French-language poets, etc, and I'd certainly be willing to put my share of the work in to do the change (not that hard, it's still early days).

So, let's group them by language. Should we include Category:Poet as well as the language-specific category (as on, eg Andrew Marvell)? There are compelling arguments for having access for both language lists and a general list. –Hajor 03:41, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The official policy seems to be that we should only use the more specific category, but I'm not sure I approve of that. I could go either way. john k 03:56, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Another thought just occurred to me: if we feel the need to indicate country of origin, we can piggy-back that in by including -- as is the case with Andrew Marvell -- the Category:XXXian writer. So he's listed as both "British writer" and an "English-language poet", which covers both country-of-origin and working language. And, for the difficult ones (Eliot), we'd just omit the "writer" entry. (As long as the people working on "writers" don't object to covering poets too, of course.)

Re including both Category:Poet and Category:XXXish-language poet, perhaps it's not necessary. Perhaps we should abide by the "most specific" rule. The "all poets" list is going to be 80% English-speaking anyway. I'm still in two minds about it. –Hajor 04:14, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Actually, on further thought, I'd prefer a situation where we have one category for all "poets", and completely separate categories for all writers in a given language. So Yeats would be in Category:Poets and Category:English language writers. Otherwise, the number of subcategories quickly becomes ridiculous. john k 04:58, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

This gets back to a more general thought on categories, which is that I think categories should be natural, and fairly broad. Really specific categories become silly, as well as making it more difficult to find things. It's not as though the poets list is so long as to be unmanageable. john k 04:59, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

If we do end up having subcategories under category:Poets, I'd recommend keeping them in the parent category as well or it becomes very hard to find anybody. The problem is that this category system isn't perfect; there should be a way of finding all articles which appear in both Category:Poets and Category:British people so that we don't end up needing categories like Category:British poets. I would seriously consider bringing this point to the attention of the programmers or moderators or whoever before continuing with any categorization.--[[User:HamYoyo|HamYoyo (Talk)]] 08:14, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)

Thoughtful contributions all round. There will be better ways of indicating a poet's nationality that double-listing as Category:XXXian poets -- either Category:XXXish people, Category:XXish literature, or even Category:XXXland -- so I'll go back and delete my ill-considered categorization of the Spanish-speakers. Links to our existing lists of national/language poets on Category:Poets by nationality would be worthwhile, however. –Hajor 15:23, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)