User:Venustar84/mentorship

Opened

I took the liberty of starting this page. Feel free to add questions or issues here that you'd like to work on, perhaps establishing sections for each topic.--CaroleHenson (talk) 01:44, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Subcategory for Welsh people

Well, what about deciding if the category Category:Welsh_people_of_Barbadian_descent should exist for the article about June_and_Jennifer_Gibbons who are twins in wales UK who committed crimes? Venustar84 (talk) 01:53, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Kristine, My rule of thumb is that I don't create a category unless there are a number of articles, depending upon the scenario, that would fall into that subcategory. The purpose of categories is not to create a category for every iteration of demographics, etc. that may occur. That would be overuse of categories and make them very difficult to manage. The current Category:Welsh people has a number of subcategories of less than 6 articles. It seems that there needs to be a clean-up to remove the number of subcategories. But that's my personal opinion.

My suggestions would be to query to see how many people would fall into this subcategory.

After getting the count for the number of Welsh people of Barbadian descent, I would recommend posting this question on Category talk:Welsh people or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wales

What are your thoughts about that?--CaroleHenson (talk) 02:13, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Kristine, It would be great to get your opinion and to see what @Tito Dutta and Sitush: have to say, particularly Sitush as this is a UK kind of issue.--CaroleHenson (talk) 02:30, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

All right discussing it on that page sounds reasonable.

I'll be happy to do that. Venustar84 (talk) 02:38, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Kristine, Cool! I am not finding many. I found a fair number of English people born in Barbados - but there's not a subcategory for English people of Barbadian descent... Yep, the talk page sounds like the way to go. I see that no one has posted on the Talk page for the category, so perhaps the Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wales is the best place so that the question sees the light of day. Sitush is likely to have some input, too.--CaroleHenson (talk) 02:43, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I would avoid this one for now. It is pretty contentious because there is no such thing as Welsh or English or Scottish nationality/citizenship: all of them are British nationals/citizens. Of course, that might change in a few weeks when Scotland holds its independence referendum but it will still be messy even if the vote is "yes" to independence, mainly because they'll have to create a citizenship law and then people will have to sign up for it (for which we would need a source). - Sitush (talk) 08:11, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, at least Scotland is geography part of the UK. Oh well, as they say; c'est la vie. Venustar84 (talk) 21:48, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Objective

Kristine, I have been trying to sort out what it is that you enjoy doing... and the goal of categorization of articles. Then, maybe we can sort out how to better meet your objective, while staying within Wikipedia guidelines.

Looking through some of the recent category changes that you've made, I am getting the impression that you like knowing the nuances of someone's life... and being able to categorize the nuances.

I'm all about stories, everything that I enjoy writing is really fundamentally because there is a story there. And, good stories explore the nuances, so I get that.

The thing is, categorization isn't so much about nuances, it's more about broad strokes. For instance, I am seeing that you like to categorize someone as being from a certain place even if they've lived there a short time. I'd like Sitush's input on this, too, but might be overcategorization to the point that the categorizes become meaningless. For instance, for Tom Cruise - he was born in New York - so that makes sense to have as a category. Categorizing him as having been from Ottawa when he lived there a short time begins to muddy the waters.

Similarly, with Olivia Wilde, categorizing six countries of descent begins to muddy the water. Generally, someone is listed based upon the country that they are born in - and if in adulthood they moved to another country, then the country that they lived most of their adult life in... and doesn't generally get into genealogy unless there is a particular reason. Perhaps Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality#Ethnicity and race is helpful.

It seems that the category assignment needs to be pruned back for these two people to get to the most salient points.

For what it's worth, when I was new I created a number of categories and had them pruned back by someone who told me pretty much that the intention is to have a manageable number of categories and adding categories for small groups of people makes the category process exponentially more complicated to manage.

Sorry if I'm being a wet-blanket, I'm just hoping to help shed a bit of light on things a bit so that you may be able to move away from the things that trip you up - into something more consistently fulfilling, if that makes sense.

Back to objective. What about Wikipedia is fun for you? Or, what types of things do you most enjoy about encyclopedia articles?--CaroleHenson (talk) 07:40, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

All right, I asked about the sub catgeory Welsh people at the Wikipedia_talk:Teahouse. The teahouse seems to be a great page where people give opinions. Venustar84 (talk) 21:55, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

A useful learning experience for categories is to follow Categories for discussion for a few days. While the current system is not perfect (by a long way) it more or less works and it is more or less useful. Two of the rules of thumb you'll see frequently there are 1. is it a defining characteristic, and 2. avoid too much "cross categorization". I'm not sure how they treat "X people of Y descent", but I know these categories do come up quite often.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:55, 23 August 2014 (UTC).

Would you find the teahouse to be more useful than the Wikipedia:CFD forum? And please call me by my first name Kristine. I will respond much quicker this way. Venustar84 (talk) 00:23, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for my late reply. I've been busy. I find Wikipedia to be interesting and I enjoy editing to the best of my ability. Venustar84 (talk) 00:18, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Kristine, good to see you back. There is no need to apologise, though. We all have other things to deal with in our lives and most reasonable people here realise that. If you find someone who seems not to do then point them in my direction and I will sort it out.

Rich knows what he is talking about but, yes, that CFD thing can be very confusing sometimes. He is right to suggest that you might learn from it but - if I am honest - it has at times also confused the heck out of me. If you are going to concentrate on categories then you will certainly need to get an understanding of how they work and CFD is inevitably the best way to get a sense of how people view such things. But categories are not the be-all, end-all here: if you find that it is all too confusing then either you can ask questions (here, at the Teahouse, in a CFD discussion or even directly to a person). There are also a lot of other things that we need to fix or improve and there is no reason why you should not take part in them. Wikipedia is, yes, interesting, but it is also never finished. (As a fairly trivial example, I make spelling mistakes/typos a lot and someone has has to sort it out!) - Sitush (talk) 00:36, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Linking things

Kristine - Hi, you made some edits to Olivia Wilde and one of your changes has caused you to get a note on your talk page about something that we call "disambiguation". Basically, that means we have several articles that the linked term may refer to and we need to be more precise in specifying which term we mean.

In this instance, the problem was your linking of the word British. Click on that link here and you will see that it goes to a page that lists various possible meanings of the word. In the case of your edit at the Wilde article, the one that applies is British people. You need to go back to the Wilde article and change your link so that it goes to that more precise article. We have something called "piping" that enables you to do that and still have the article make sense. I mean, if you just changed it to British people then the article would read:

• "... was born in London to British people parents ..."

That makes no sense really, so we "pipe" the link by using [[British people|British]] This results in:

• "... a journalist, was born in London to British parents and raised ..."

Can you see the difference if you click on it?

There is a very handy tool that can help you disambiguate terms, although using it can sometimes be complicated. You can find the tool here. It is called "Dablinks" (meaning "disambiguate links") and if you plug the name of an article into the text box on its page then it will scan the page for any problems and give you some options. Don't try it yet, though: I will create a dummy page somewhere with some test things in it and you can have a go on that if you want. And if you pass the test, I'll set you a tougher one!

One other thing, Kristine, some people think it is a good idea to link the first mention of a country but other people think that linking well-known countries is unnecessary. I tend towards the latter opinion but I'm not saying that you are wrong to have done what you did. All I would say is that if someone changes it back, don't fight with them - it isn't worth it.

I've got some other comments to make but will wait until you acknowledge having read this one. I don't want to overburden you. - Sitush (talk) 12:22, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Well you have a good point about over linking. Thanks for the tip. Venustar84 (talk) 21:57, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Good to see you back. I was slightly concerned that we might have put you off. The disambiguation thing is quite important because it massively eases how readers navigate the four million articles that we have. I've had a very frustrating time on Wikipedia today and I'm not going to say any more right now. The frustration has nothing to do with you but I'll pick up on things here tomorrow if that is ok. - Sitush (talk) 23:38, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Well I'm a very busy lady. To be honest, I think I will always need help on wikipedia because of my mental issues. I'm also wondering, did you see the post I put on the Wikipedia_talk:Teahouse. Venustar84 (talk) 03:26, 18 August 2014 (UTC)