This is a list of user category discussions, including deletion reviews, from March 2007 through March 2010. Some individual sections have been updated with more recent discussions, but any listings of discussions after March 2010 should not be viewed as comprehensive.
This list is intended to be a resource for editors identifying past consensus and precedents regarding inclusion and deletion of user categories. Editors are cautioned to not draw conclusions based solely on the balance of "keep" and "delete" outcomes. The classification system used herein is an organizational device only, and is not a substitute for actually viewing the linked discussions.
This list excludes, with some exceptions, nominations that result in an outcome of "rename" (including "speedy rename"), "merge", or "speedy delete" under criterion G7 or criteiron C1. Such discussions tend to involve changes that are uncontroversial or that concern user category naming conventions, and therefore are not overly relevant to an evaluation of consensus regarding inclusion or deletion of certain types of categories.
Major discussions, defined as discussions that apply to an entire category tree and significantly affect consensus for certain types of user categories, are bolded and italicised. Discussions with outcomes that have been reversed, either through a subsequent discussion or via a deletion review, are crossed out.
This may not be complete; it intentionally omits those that involved such a category but did not involve the categorization scheme (e.g. speedy deletions, typo fixes, etc.)
TL;DR version: No decision to rename something wikiproject-related to either "members" or "participants" has gone the "members" route since October 2010, and most of them went to "participants" before then anyway. No proposal to rename a "participants" to a "members" has succeeded since February 2006. Almost every case of a proposal to rename a "members" to a "participants" has succeeded.
20 February 2006 [1] – A redundant pair of "participants" and "members" categories were merged in favor of "members". As far as I can determine, this (just short of ten years ago) was the last time that ever happened.
14 June 2006 [2] – A "User in..." cat. merged to "Participants in..." (later "...participants"); no "members".
20 July 2006 [3] – First attempt to standardize on "participants" came to no consensus; the WP:OWN runs very think in the opposition arguments.
6 November 2006[4] – Consensus to move all identified "members" categories to "participants"
7 November 2006 [5] – Other collaboration-related categories all moved to participate-based language (from "member", "translator", etc.)
10 November 2006 [6] – Upper-case "Participants" normalized to "participants"; this was repeated many times in later months and years.
13 November 2006[7] – Some push-back from fans of "members" resulted in "Members" being downcased to "members", not moved to "participants"; however, an examination of this decision (closed before WP:AADD was well-developed or cited much) reveals that the arguments in favor of "members" all amount to WP:ILIKEIT, while those for "participants" were raising the same legitimate concerns we still have today. Consensus can change, and this would not have been closed the same way today. This split pattern continued for some time.
30 November 2006[8] – "Member" moved to "participants"; "participants" stated to be "convention of Category:Wikipedians by WikiProject" in this and various other moves (and I did not see anyone challenge this in any of those moves). "Wikipedia Weekly Podcaster" moved to "WikiProject WikipediaWeekly participants" on the same basis [9]. However, on 5 December the same claim was made about "members", and a "Users..." was moved to a "...members" [10].
17 April 2007 [11] – But there were still those in favor of retaining two competing standards. Cases of "Members of..." tended to become "...members" and of "Participants in..." to become "...participants" in cases before and after this date, except where otherwise noted, until ca. 2008, when things began to shift toward "participants", with rare outlier decisions in favor of "members".
28 May 2007[12] – A "participants" was proposed for merger into an existing "members" category, but the exact opposite was the result.
11 August 2007 [13] – A "Wikipedians in Wikiproject ..." was moved to "...members", on the basis of one commenter's untested assertion that "members" was the dominant pattern.
15 September 2007 [14] – Another isolated case of the same move, but on the basis of "member" being used in the userbox. Seriously?
27 September 2007[15] – By this point, a "Wikipedians in the X" convention has developed for non-wikiproject WP organizations (Article Rescue Squadron cat. moved from "Members" to "Wikipedians in", style; several other cases like this back to 2005). This obviates the last remaining argument in favor of ever using "members", but no one seems to notice at the time.
29 September 2007 [16] – An odd-formatted one is moved to "participants" by default; "members" never suggested.
4 October 2007[17] – Watershed moment in the debate: 'Merge "members" into "participants". ... "Membership" as opposed to "participation" was one of the downfalls of Esperanza.' Another attempt to merge a "participants" into a "members" is merged the other way.
4 October 2007 [18] – "Participants of..." moved to "...participants", "Members of..." moved to "...members", but others ("...Wikipedians", ".../Userbox", etc.) moved to "...participants", which is now the default. "Wikipedians in the X" convention reiterated for non-wikiproject WP organizations.
20 December 2007 [19], [20] – Inexplicable results. "Wikipedians against notability" kept as-is, while "Wikipedians against censorship" was moved to "WikiProject Wikipedians against censorship members" (despite both categories being a "wikipoltical" identifier, not a project participation tag, and the default for projects long being "participants" by that point).
17 January 2008 [21] - Rejected move of "Wikipedian climbers" and "...cyclists" to "WikiProject Climbing members" and "...Cycling members" (among other proposals) (the WPP Cycling members one is now a bluelink, however).
7 May 2008[22] – Another key rationale point in this debate's history. A (non-organization) "Wikipedians in..." is moved, despite "...participants" being the long-standing default, to "...members". The reasoning that was accepted for this was actually self-defeating, if the closer had thought about it: "rename with preference for [...] members as editors may remain 'members' even when they are not currently active 'participants'." This amounts to an explicit declaration that the purpose of using "members" is the formation of WP:FACTIONs and building up a "strength in numbers" PoV-pushing army: 'Our projects counts more members than yours, so you lose.' In actual practice, properly run wikiprojects regularly sort inactive from active participants, and may even prune them from the list and category if they're inactive long enough. No interest of any kind is served by retaining "ghost", inactive users in project categories and lists just to pad them. If the user is still active in WP, but not the project, they can add themselves to a "Wikipedians interested in..." topical category that does not indicate bogus 'membership' in something.
28 October 2008 [23], [24], [25] – Three cases of duplicate "members" and "participants" categories are all merged in favor of "participants".
8 November 2008 [26] – "Wikipedians in the..." again imposed on non-wikiproject organization "members" category.
8 November 2008 [27] – Redundant "members" and "participants" merged to "participants".
7 April 2010 [28], [29] – Two pair of redundant "members" and "participants" categories merged to "participants".
27 September 2010 [30] – Redundant "members" merged to "participants".
11 October 2010 [31] – Outlier: a "User Projectname" moved to "Projectname members", again on the basis of the userbox wording, which is a senseless rationale.
29 June 2014[32] – Salient side discussion: '[E]ditors getting involved in a related WikiProject (i.e. where do you draw the line between "collaboration with" and "joining" a WikiProject?)'. Redundant meta-wikiproject cats. merged on this reasoning, which applies to the current question equally (just substitute "participation in" for "collaboration with").
31 August 2014 [33] – A "members" is merged into a "participants". Lack of standardization is commented upon.
Between 2008 and present, I also saw at least 5 CfRs for "Participants" → "participants" cleanup, and the already listed cases of "members" → "participants" changes, but only two cases of "Members" → "members", and 0 of "participants" → "members".
This is all being looked for manually. Because the terms "participants", "members", and "wikiproject" come up so frequently at CFD, it is difficult to find the relevant ones among all the false positives. One important one is missing: A discussion in which a large number of "members" cats. were moved to "participants" on the same basic rationale presented today. I think I participated in that one directly, and if so, it would have to be after April 2007. I'll try to find it by digging through my own CfD posts.
PS: I created this list for a CfR, and am not going to take the time to reformat it to match this archive. One of the archival gnomes can do that. I already spent about 6 hours on this; I'm done. — SMcCandlish ☺☏¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 15:25, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]