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.

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The outcome of this request for deletion was to  Keep. Pmlineditor (t · c · l) 16:42, 24 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Category:White South African people (edit · talk · history · links · watch · logs · delete) · close request

Auntof6 has nominated this page for deletion for the reason: I see no need for this category. We don't need to categorize people by either skin color or ethnic group, whichever this is considered to be. Not long ago we deleted a lot of ethnic group categories related to the US, and I don't think we need to start adding them for other countries. Auntof6 (talk) 12:46, 17 November 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.

• The big question here is whether the classification makes sense in context. As examples look at F. W. de Klerk and P. W. Botha, both of which fall into the category white South African politicians. I doubt you will be able to talk about Apartheid without referring to the skin-color / ethnic group (in this case, probably the Boer). Of course you can try and leave out the skin color, but then you have to ask yourself: Can you meaningfully talk about people like Nelson Mandela (who was black-skinned)? - so the question becomes: if we can't talk about White South African people, should we talk about fair-skinned South African actors, or politicians? --Eptalon (talk) 13:15, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Auntof6 mentions the deletions of some of the ethnicity-related subcats of American people that she nominated. However, she didn't nominate all of them, as she recognised that some ethnicities of Americans, including African-Americans, Native Americans and American Jews have distinct identities and histories which are relevant. The same is true of South Africa, a country which had an Apartheid system which is in the living memory of most South Africans and racial identity is still relevant to SA now. This is why en WP has this category. Any biography of Mandela prominently states that he was SA's first black president. Jim Michael (talk) 15:00, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: Here is another article: Afrikaner people for an example. As Eptalon says above, this article becomes meaningless without describing the white culture or ethnicity. "White South African" largely means people from South Africa who are of European descent and keep that identity. Diaspora (although our article is not correct), can actually mean a voluntary relocation. It is like erasing the facts of social studies to avoid classing ethnic groups in different geographical locations. Fylbecatulous talk 17:26, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• A complicating factor is that the category "white" mixes two quite different groups, the originally Dutch settlers known as Afrikaners or 'Boers', and the British settlers. Since a major war was fought between the two factions (Boer War), sure as eggs are eggs some will want two sub-categories. And what about those who came from the Indian sub-continent? In fact, unlike American surnames, one can, almost always, tell to which group an individual belongs just from the name. From that point of view, we do not need separate categories. Macdonald-ross (talk) 07:41, 22 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

On en, en:Category:Afrikaner people is a subcat of en:Category:White South African people for that reason. We don't have enough - if any - south Africans of Asian origin for there to be a cat for them. For people who know how to determine national origin of surnames, it is usually easy to determine South Africans' ancestry, but most people who read Simple will not have that knowledge. Jim Michael (talk) 18:02, 22 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This request is due to close on 12:46, 24 November 2014 (UTC), seven days after it was filed, although it may be closed earlier at the discretion of an administrator.

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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.