Commons:Categories for discussion/2024/10/Category:Births by location

Category:Births by location

This category seems to for lists of random people and where they were born. Which is fine in theory, but is for images "of an organism releasing its offspring" and that's clearly not the purpose of this category or it's subcats. Per Commons:Categories "we should not classify items which are related to different subjects in the same category......The category name should be unambiguous and not homonymous."

Another issue with this is that places of birth are usually meaningless trivia except in rare instances, but there's already Category:Birthplaces for locations where notable people were born. This category seems to just be a duplicate of that one at best though.

So my proposed solution would be to either completely axe this and it's subcategories outright or at least confine it to media related to actual births and remove the subcategories from ones for people. No one knows or cares that most or all of the people in Category:Births at sea were born at sea, I doubt it's a defining characteristic of any of the people either, and unless I missed it there doesn't seem to be any images on here of actual births taking place at sea. So there's really no point in keeping the category. Category:Births in taxi looks like the one exception to that but I don't think a single image of a child being born in a taxi justifies the whole category system. @Omphalographer: and @RoyZuo: Adamant1 (talk) 19:49, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

As the editor who started this discussion: My general feeling is that non-defining biographical facts, like dates or places of birth, don't belong in Commons. Displaying data sourced from Wikidata through templates like {{Wikidata Infobox}} is fine, but Commons should not be responsible for maintaining this data, or creating categories which index it. That's what Wikidata and Wikipedia are for. There's undoubtedly a lot of other category systems which fit the same pattern and which should probably be removed as well, but this is a starting point. Omphalographer (talk) 23:57, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

It quickly became obvious that the editors who built these categories are using the Commons category structure to further the aims of Wikidata more than the aims of Commons. However, eliminating these categories will not cure a long-standing POV issue. In fact, it will only make it worse. See, before these categories existed, editors were using "People of" categories for the exact same purpose. When I discovered Category:Eminem some while back, he was only categorized according to his birthplace of St. Joseph, Missouri. This is an obvious problem, because in the public eye, he's almost universally associated with Detroit and nowhere else. One I didn't fix was Category:Jack Brooks. The only reason we have a category for Jack Brooks is because he spent 42 years in the U.S. House representing Beaumont, Texas. There's no categorization present which acknowledges this. Instead, he's only categorized according to the place in Louisiana where he happened to have been born. Even if Commons lacks an equivalent version of WP:CATDEFINING, the same principle applies: adding only birthplaces to these categories amounts to "trivial details" if those places have zero to do with the person's public life. We also need to get rid of "People of" categories if editors refuse to populate them properly.

It's not just a simple matter of inclusion and exclusion. Apparently, there are editors who believe that the "People of" tree should correspond only to data points found in Wikidata. I added Category:People of Chicago to File:Paul Harvey.jpg, which was later removed by Rhadamante after copying over categories from the file to Category:Paul Harvey. Tell me, what would you go by, the lack of any mention of Chicago in Wikidata, or credible sources such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ("Harvey composed his twice-daily news commentaries from a downtown Chicago office near Lake Michigan"), WGN ("Harvey moved to Chicago in the 1940s and originated his broadcasts from the city for more than five decades"), the Chicago Tribune ("She (his wife) is the one who persuaded him to come to Chicago in 1944 and try his hand at network radio") or the Encyclopaedia Britannica ("Following a medical discharge from the Army Air Corps in 1944, he shortened his name to Paul Harvey and began broadcasting for Chicago radio station WENR")? The quality of information on Wikidata is piss-poor and the quality of sourcing is even worse. Why should we capitulate to that simply to satisfy a small handful of Commons editors who are averse to the hard work needed to properly curate data?

Despite presenting these examples, you shouldn't get hung up on them, because the list of examples goes on and on and on and fucking on. The prevalence of such only causes the real world to view Commons as one more site populated by people with a detachment from reality. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 00:37, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

I think inevitably a lot of people are going to be associated with places, and distinguishing a birthplace (and, where relevant, a place of death) seems to me to be appropriate. In particular, I think it is very likely that a fair number of people go looking for images of people associated with the place where they themselves live. Again, we come back to the fact that categories ultimately exist to serve end users. - Jmabel ! talk 15:22, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

 Keep I don’t see how or why this category is invalid; this is a container category for a bunch of subjective, valid subcategories. The main objection I’m seeing is “meaningless trivia”— as defined by who? Every single category is “meaningless trivia” to somebody! Also, User:RadioKAOS, what on Earth are you talking about? Dronebogus (talk) 13:37, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Meaningless trivia as far as it being a way for users to look for or organize media related to people. There is a point where these types of categories are to granular and not useful even if you want to claim otherwise. I'd say that's particular true in this case since there's already Category:Birthplaces for notable birthplaces to begin with. But let me throw out an example. There's a semi-well known tech entrepreneur who was born in a hospital in the same town where I'm currently living because their mother happened to go into labour while staying at hotel here one weekend. He's never actually lived or had anything else to do with here though outside of that though, and frankly I think it would be weird for a category related to him to be a child category of one for the town. No one knows or cares that he was born here. It's in no way notable what-so-ever. Ergo it's “meaningless trivia." but you'd apparently think that would be perfectly fine "just because" though.

Semi-related to that, but a lot of these categories are sub-categories of one's for "People of" categories. I wouldn't call most of these people "people of" the locations where they were born either. As it implies that we have media related to the person and said location. Which inherently isn't the case with most or all of these categories. I think it kind of follows that every sub-category of Category:Dili (city) should have images of Dili though. but if you look at Category:Fernando Sylvan which is a sub-category of Category:Births in Dili there's isn't any actual media of Dili in there. So I really don't see what the point is. Again, that's why it's meaningless trivia. Because you have a bunch of sub-categories for locations that contain no actual media of, or related to, said locations just because the person was born there. this image has absolutely nothing to do with Dili what-so-ever but it's still in a subcategory for Dili just because Fernando Sylvan happen to be born there. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:44, 9 October 2024 (UTC)