The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not change it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No more changes should be made to this discussion.

The outcome of this request for deletion was to  Delete. There was some very good discussion on this topic, but it appears at this point in time the community consensus is to delete this category. As with all things minds change, and this issue might be readdressed at a later date. -- Enfcer (talk) 19:29, 19 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Category:People from Long Island

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Category:People from Long Island (edit · talk · history · links · watch · logs · delete) · close request

Auntof6 has nominated this page for deletion for the reason: Long Island is an island, an entity of physical geography. It is not a city or similar entity of political geography. We categorize people as being from from political entities such as states, cities, etc. We don't categorize them as being from physical geographical places such as islands, mountains, etc.

Long Island holds four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City. Categorizing people as being from Long Island would overlap with categories for people from New York City. That is a complexity we don't need. Auntof6 (talk) 10:08, 4 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Please discuss this request below, but keep in mind that you shouldn't vote on everything and that there may be options other than "keep" or "delete", such as merging.

Discussion

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The argument to delete makes sense to me--Peterdownunder (talk) 10:56, 4 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Although Long Island varies from inner-city to rural, and is not a separate administrative entity, many of the island's inhabitants are referred to (sometimes by themselves) as being 'from Long Island', rather than identifying which county they are from. When you say that 'we don't categorize them as being for physical geographical places such as islands...', does we mean Wikipedia, or Simple Wikipedia? If the former, en:Category:People from Long Island needs to be put up for deletion. En has many categories for people from individual islands, including: en:People from Crete, en:Category:People from Java, en:Category:People from Sumatra, en:Category:People from Majorca. I can't see anything in the guidelines/policy which says we shouldn't have them and I don't know whether they are or are not administrative entities as well as islands. I take it that the existence of Category:People from Sicily and Category:People from Tasmania are indisputably valid - despite being islands - because they are administrative entities of the countries that they are part of (Italy and Australia, respectively). On several occasions, I've been told that we have extra rules here regarding particular issues. When I've asked to be directed to these different rules, in most cases I haven't receive a reply in regard to that. Jim Michael (talk) 11:06, 4 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I am sorry that you don't get replies to those questions. I know that we have many "unwritten rules" here which you sort of pick up as you go along. Sometimes these possibly defy logical explanation. However, if I read Auntofsix's argument here, it is that on Simple English we do not categorise people by geography. I think Aof6 is possibly suggesting that we should make that a guideline, which then hopefully gets written down. How Enwiki wish to organise is up to them, likewise, we make our own policy here. So the question should be, do we categorise by geography. Aof6 has presented an argument why we should not. I agree. Now it is for others to add an opinion.--Peterdownunder (talk) 11:30, 4 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
We don't categorize based on how people self-identify. As evidence of this, see Wikipedia:Requests for deletion/Requests/2014/Categories showing mixes of national ancestry and Wikipedia:Requests for deletion/Requests/2013/American actors by ethnicity, where we deleted a large number of categories that were greatly about how people self-identify.
The choice of categorizing someone isn't necessarily between Long Island and a specific city or county, it's between Long Island and the state of New York.
Unfortunately, it isn't possible to have a written policy for every possible category someone might create. We have a guideline of keeping our category structure simple. We also have precedents. Some precedents were set by RfDs like this, both successful ones and unsuccessful ones. Some precedents are a result of established practice. In most cases, though, we have to evaluate each category individually. I know that's frustrating, especially for you, since you create so many categories. We could certainly try to codify some of it, but we'd never get all of it. --Auntof6 (talk) 11:45, 8 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
To repeat what I said above, we don't categorize based on how people see themselves. If you have a number of reasons that this one is a good idea, please share them. They can't be taken into account if you don't share them.--Auntof6 (talk) 11:45, 8 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It has the requisite three articles. Our sister wiki has well over 200 articles in the same category, some of which I assume would be copied here. Unless we’re short of space I don’t see the harm in keeping it. Rus793 (talk) 13:32, 9 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Having enough articles doesn't mean a category will be kept. Also, our category structure is different from enwiki's -- we decide here which categories we'll have. --Auntof6 (talk) 18:25, 9 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - Long Island is a distinct part of New York, which is why many of its residents describe themselves as being from Long Island, rather than the more vague 'from New York'. It's not merely how they self-identify, it's fact. There isn't a rule against categorizing by self-identification, as Category:LGBT people and its subcats are based on self-identity. There are a few other articles that are eligible for inclusion in this cat, as well as those that are currently in it. Cassie Scerbo's articles on here and on en, state that she was born in Long Island, without stating the town or county. Jim Michael (talk) 18:25, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
This might be a case where a list would serve us better than a category. Long Island is a specific part of New York, but I'm not sure I'd call it "distinct" because it overlaps places that are more distinct -- counties and NYC boroughs. This makes it more complex than the other "people from" categories we have. There may not be a specific rule against this kind of category, but we don't have a lot in the way of rules about what categories to keep -- we evaluate them individually. (The example of LGBT people is rather a different kind of thing, based not on how people identify so much as by what they are.) As for articles saying that a person is from Long Island, that doesn't mean we categorize that way. Anyone from Long Island is also from a more-specific place, such as a city, one of the counties, or a New York City borough. In other words, categorizing by being from Long Island would overlap other similar categorizations. In fact, that is my main issue with this: if we categorize people as being from Long Island, we could miss categorizing them as being from NYC or the other parts of the island. --Auntof6 (talk) 23:24, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Although everyone from Long Island is from a specific borough/county, we don't always know which one. That's why I gave the example of Cassie Scerbo - we don't know where on LI she's from.
BLP policy states that we cannot put a person into LGBT cats unless he self-identifies, which is why I used it as a comparison. Jim Michael (talk) 00:39, 14 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
When we don't know which more-specific place a person is from, we put them in a higher-level category. The geographic origin categories should be discrete, not overlapping like this.
The LGBT self-identification issue is different. We need references for categorizing people as LGBT, because there are legal issues with categorizing by sexual preference. The only definitive way to know if someone is LGBT is if the person says so him- or herself, hence the self-identification issue. That doesn't mean we want categories for every kind of thing a person "self-identifies" as. --Auntof6 (talk) 02:11, 14 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Administrator note: - This RfD could use some input from the rest of our community. This RfD has been debated by 4 of our most active editors. The arguments for and against are good, and no clear consensus at this time can be reached, and to close this as no consensus does not answer this topic appropriately. The community is asked to comment on this RfD to help clarify the community standing on the topic at hand. I have added 1 week from the original expiration of this RfD to allow for further comments. -- Enfcer (talk) 02:42, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This request is due to close on 10:08, 11 18 December 2014 (UTC), seven days after it was filed, although it may be closed earlier at the discretion of an administrator.

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not change it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No more changes should be made to this discussion.
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