WP:CFD/T

See Wikipedia:Categories for deletion policies for the official rules of this page, and how to do cleanup.

Deletion of a category may mean that the articles and images in it are directly put in its parent category, or that another subdivision of the parent category is made. If they are already members of more suitable categories, it may also mean that they become a member of one category less.

How to use this page

Know if the category you are looking at needs deleting (or to be created). If it is a "red link" and has no articles or subcategories, then it is already deleted (more likely, it was never really created in the first place), and does not need to be listed here.
Read and understand Wikipedia:Categorization before using this page. Nominate categories that violate policies here, or are misspelled, mis-capitalized, redundant/need to be merged, not NPOV, small without potential for growth, or are generally bad ideas. (See also Wikipedia:Naming conventions and Wikipedia:Manual of Style.)
Please read the Wikipedia:Categorization of people policy if nominating or voting on a people-related category.
Unless the category to be deleted is non-controversial – vandalism or a duplicate, for example – please do not depopulate the category (remove the tags from articles) before the community has made a decision.
Add {{cfd}} to the category page for deletion. (If you are recommending that the category be renamed, you may also add a note giving the suggested new name.) This will add a message to it, and also put the page you are nominating into Category:Categories for deletion. It's important to do this to help alert people who are watching or browsing the category.
1. Alternately, use the rename template like this: {{cfr|newname}}
2. If you are concerned with a stub category, make sure to inform the WikiProject Stub sorting
Add new deletion candidates under the appropriate day near the top of this page.
1. Alternatively, if the category is a candidate for speedy renaming (see Wikipedia:Category renaming), add it to the speedy category at the bottom.
Make sure you add a colon (:) in the link to the category being listed, like [[:Category:Foo]]. This makes the category link a hard link which can be seen on the page (and avoids putting this page into the category you are nominating).
Sign any listing or vote you make by typing ~~~~ after your text.
Link both categories to delete and categories to merge into. Failure to do this will delay consideration of your suggestion.

Special notes

Some categories may be listed in Category:Categories for deletion but accidently not listed here.

Discussion for Today

This page is transcluded from Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2025_January_21

January 21

NEW NOMINATIONS

Category:Shadow fleets

Propose deleting Category:Shadow fleets (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Nominator's rationale: Is this category necessary? The only non-eponymous article is linked from the eponymous article. Gjs238 (talk) 01:33, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Possibly fictional people from Europe

Propose renaming Category:Possibly fictional people from Europe to Category:European people whose existence is disputed

Nominator's rationale: parent is People whose existence is disputed. The current name is inconsistent. See conversation on the talk page for context from the creator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_talk:Possibly_fictional_people_from_Europe ^SMason_Garrison 04:20, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Updated: Add other country/continents as renames. I've added the relevant existing legendary child categories if they exist. ^SMason_Garrison 18:18, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Split between Category:Legendary European people and Category:European people whose existence is disputed. For most of these people there is no dispute, they are commonly recognized as legendary. There is already a whole tree of Category:Legendary people too. Marcocapelle (talk) 06:15, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd be in favor of that. ^SMason_Garrison 05:14, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Marcocapelle Should I nominate the rest of this tree? I think that renamed "European people whose existence is disputed" would be the parent of Category:Legendary European people, is that how you're envisioning the tree, as well? ^SMason_Garrison 05:18, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Smasongarrison: yes probably. Marcocapelle (talk) 07:59, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Will do. I wanted to double check before I started tagging them.^SMason_Garrison 18:05, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Marcocapelle I've now tagged them all as proposed them as renames. Most of them already have a child legendary category, but I'll make the missing ones now.^SMason_Garrison 18:19, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also JPL has convinced himself that people whose existence is disputed should be removed from most other categories. I've spent a lot of time restoring his removals, but that interpretation is pretty unhelpful for navigation. ^SMason_Garrison 19:21, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. I think "whose existence is disputed" is generally better than "possibly fictional". I do not think we should conflate "legendary" with "never existing". It is the nature of legends to latch onto real events and people, so if "legendary" means "not real", then Lady Godiva needs to be removed from the category. Part of the problem, though, with "dispute" is that it leaves open how disputed. In some cases, the dispute may be more or less settled in favour of nonexistence. In others, it may be just be a noisy minority disputing a consensus. "Whose existence is disputed" would seem to apply to both. Srnec (talk) 21:05, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support in general, but in agreement with Marco and Srnec that not all legendary people are necessarily people whose existence is disputed. Sometimes the question of their existence is not even the point of the tales about them. Sometimes we've got separate pages for a historical person and then the legendary character that was later modelled on them (e.g. Igor Svyatoslavich and Prince Igor); the latter's "existence" is not disputed as such, it is historical fiction. NLeeuw (talk) 02:21, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
100% agree with all the comments here. I interpret the category "whose existence is disputed" as meaning as the subject of it might exist or they might not. I think it's a helpful category for organizing child categories, like legendary etc. ^SMason_Garrison 11:49, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Rename per nom, "fictional" normally refers to modern fiction, which is distinct from myths and legends. No opposition to splitting as explained by Marcocapelle. –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 15:43, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to Category:Legendary X people, and prune. "Possibly fictional"? "Disputed"? According to who? How much about them is in dispute? These should be lists, if anything. Not sure how this is much different than "alleged criminals" categories. Imagine if these were BLPs - these would be deleted outright. - jc37 22:21, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Rename per nom. These are not fictional characters, but historical figures whose status is in doubt. Dimadick (talk) 17:27, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: I am seeing at best lukewarm support for the new name, but there is clear consensus that a change is needed. Does jc37's Category:Legendary X people suggestion work for people?
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, House Blaster (talk • he/they) 00:50, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose User:Jc37 means diffusing among the subcategories of Category:Legendary people by continent Category:Legendary people by nationality ~~and that is alright with me. We can still manually add articles to Category:People whose existence is disputed if there is a serious dispute.~~ Marcocapelle (talk) 06:57, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Striking support per discussion below. Marcocapelle (talk) 18:01, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that Category:People whose existence is disputed is really hard to navigate without some level of diffusion. ^SMason_Garrison 18:11, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Once Legendary people (including individuals from folk tales, like John Henry, or from religious texts like the Bible or the Book of Mormon) are removed, is there really that much left? - jc37 18:56, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
User:Smasongarrison has a point for sure. There are some 200 articles directly in Category:Possibly fictional people from Europe and Category:Possibly fictional people from Asia, even apart from articles deeper in the tree, and most of them do not fit "legendary" very well. Marcocapelle (talk) 18:01, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That depends on how one defines "legendary". Are we limiting it to myth and folktales? Because figures from religious texts and from "kings lists" and oral history would also meet that definition. (See Legend.) Most of what I am seeing in those categories are "legendary" people. The few that aren't should be listified to explain what is disputed about them. Another way to put it, is to say that this category scheme is a broadly defined WP:OR magnet, with membership subjectively added, based upon shakily-defined inclusion criteria at best. How is this different than saying "people who are alleged to exist"? (Or even: "People who are alleged to not exist.) We don't keep "alleged criminal", or other such "alleged" categories. We shouldn't be keeping these. As I noted above, if this included BLP articles, it'd be deleted outright. . - jc37 01:00, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That is an important point. I would understand "legendary people" to be people on which there is general agreement that they are legendary while "disputed people" are people on which such agreement is lacking. Marcocapelle (talk) 06:57, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

An individual can be "legendary" and still have existed. George Washington cutting down the cherry tree or "I cannot tell a lie". So categorizing them as Legendary isn't the issue. It's defining "disputed". According to who? I don't want to wade into the contention of fringe theories, but how "reliable" are we treating "reliable sources" for these? Are we only allowing "mainstream" historians? And how "mainstream"? Are we assessing the sources too? And therein lies one of several reasons that anything to do with "alleged" or "disputed" should be lists. Using categories, we can't quantify the "value" of the dispute or the value of the argument of the disputer(s). How firm is the foundation of the argument that such individuals are disputed? And before we dismiss all legends as fiction, please remember that Troy used to be in that category. And it's apparently been found. And does that lend credence to some or all of the characters from the Illiad or the Odyssey being real? Or should they still be considered legendary? Anyway, that's the trouble here. In the end, it's all just WP:OR. See also: Wikipedia:POV and OR from editors, sources, and fields#Source_POV, which explains how/why these things need to be explained in an article if included. Which of course we cannot do in categories. - jc37 05:31, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: Aren't "People from Europe/Africa/Asia" a slightly different thing from "European/African/Asian people"? I'm European ethnically, but I'm not from Europe, for example. Furius (talk) 16:31, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Most of these people lived (if they did) before concepts like nationality and ethnicity were invented so we should not bother too much about that. The place where they were assumed to have lived should be decisive. Marcocapelle (talk) 18:06, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I just don't see the need for creating the potential for that ambiguity by changing "from Europe" to "European". Most of the people in the North American category were European, for example, and plenty of them are late enough to have been considered that by contemporaries. Furius (talk) 18:44, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- I don't see why the nominated categories are any different in this respect than e.g. Category:European people or Category:North American people. North American people may be of European descent but not Europeans themselves. Marcocapelle (talk) 07:22, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  I agree with Marco that "European" doesn't mean "of European descent". I also worry that this category might close as no-consensus. I don't really care whether we do "from FOO" or "FOOian". ^SMason_Garrison 14:40, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support "X people whose existence is disputed". I don't think "Legendary X people" is suitable for many of the entries currently in this category tree: e.g. Diotima of Mantinea was either a real person or a fictional character; Metrodora is either a real person, a pseudonym, or the result of a misinterpreted text. Neither has the folkloric component which I associate with a legend. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:12, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relist also clears out an old CfD log page
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 01:30, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Maghrebian people stubs

Propose deleting Category:Maghrebian people stubs (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
Propose deleting {{Maghrebis-bio-stub}}

Nominator's rationale: Underpopulated stub category, not approved by WikiProject stub sorting. As always, stub categories are not free for just any user to create on a whim for just any topic of their choosing -- a stub category requires at least 60 articles in it before it can be created, so its creation has to be authorized by the WikiProject in order to ensure that there are actually enough articles to justify it.
But this didn't go through the proper process, and has only one article in it with little prospect of finding 59 others -- the Maghreb is a multi-country region in northwest Africa, meaning that almost any potential entries for this would already be tagged for a specific country ({{Algeria-bio-stub}}, {{Tunisia-bio-stub}}, {{Morocco-bio-stub}}, etc.) anyway. (There were two other people here when I first found it, but one was reclassifiable as Algeria and one wasn't a stub at all, and three still isn't 60 anyway.)
And even the template is of questionable necessity if it can't support its own dedicated category -- the one article here just describes the subject as Maghrebi without containing any more specific information about where in the Maghreb he came from (and thus can't be reclassified to a specific Maghreb country), so the template would be defensible if somebody's got a good idea for where else it can upfile him to. But I'm still bundling it here for the sake of discussion, and it can't have its own dedicated category without at least 59 more people than this. Bearcat (talk) 16:09, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hey @Bearcat

The category can accommodate more than 60 articles easy. Its primary purpose is to address and prevent the non-editing conflicts between Algerian and Moroccan contributors regarding the term "مغربي" (Maghrebi), which is often mistranslated as "Moroccan."

It is not historically accurate to use labels such as Algerian, Moroccan, or Tunisian for people who lived before the establishment of these states. Historically, the people of the Maghreb region traveled and settled and served in various cities across the region, making clarification in such cases impossible.

The correct and most appropriate category for these individuals is Maghrebian people. Both Western and Arabic sources consistently use the terms "Maghrebi" or "North African" to describe individuals from this region, rather than the modern labels of Algerian, Moroccan, or Tunisian, which are relatively recent and impossible to adopt here.

So I created this category is to ensure historical precision and avoid misclassification. There is no valid way to attribute people from the Maghreb to modern-day countries, especially for periods before the 17th century. This category provides an accurate and neutral way to represent those people. Riad Salih (talk) 16:23, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's not enough to simply assert that it "can accommodate" 60 articles it if it doesn't actually have 60 articles in it now — any category "can accommodate" any number of articles by definition, but that isn't in and of itself proof that we actually have enough articles for it. So it's not a question of what might be theoretically possible, it's a question of how much content is actually in the category now. And you're not free to just create new stub categories yourself without following the proper process, either.
So if you want the category to exist, then your job is to (a) follow the proper process of getting it approved by the WikiProject first, and (b) ensure that it already has at least 60 articles in it the moment I see it in the first place.Bearcat (talk) 16:27, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

They are often randomly labeled as Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, etc., depending on the conflicts between countries, each of which claims belonging to modern nations. A reclassification would certainly have more than 60 possible entries. The North African wikiprojects are rarely active to not say dead so Wikipedia:Be bold. Riad Salih (talk) 16:36, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's the stub sorting WikiProject that has to approve stub categories, not the North African wikiprojects, so the deadness of the North African wikiprojects isn't a legitimate reason to bypass proposing a stub category to the stub sorting wikiproject first. Bearcat (talk) 16:40, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To be honest I dont think that the stub sorting WikiProject can effectively deal with this without involments from editors very knowledgeable about North Africa region or those directly concerned with the region. However, I would have greatly appreciated if you had initiated a discussion instead of directly proposing deletion or modifying the stubs in the articles. Given the long-standing edit wars surrounding these topics, I saw it both logical and necessary to focus on a clear categorization. Riad Salih (talk) 16:47, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We might give User:Riad Salih a week to add more than 60 stubs to the category. They have a fair point about Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia not existing in the middle ages. But I would at least propose to rename the category to Category:Medieval Maghrebi people stubs in order to clarify the scope to editors who haven't seen this discussion. Marcocapelle (talk) 19:27, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 01:24, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Mint food

Propose renaming Category:Mint food to Category:Mint dishes

Nominator's rationale: Borderline c2c, but I'm not sure this category should exist. But if it should it should be renamed based on siblings in Prepared foods by main ingredient look like Fruit dishes ^SMason_Garrison 13:22, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps a split into mint dishes and mint drinks? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:59, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The articles aren't about drinks. Marcocapelle (talk) 19:09, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes you're right, I was getting confectionaries/candies and drinks confused. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:30, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose, most articles aren't about dishes. Marcocapelle (talk) 19:09, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thoughts on deletion? Do you have a better solution? "Food" singular doesn't fit with the norms of these categories. ^SMason_Garrison 00:51, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 01:18, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]