Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Various Oscar-winner categories
- A collection of Oscar winners related categories were proposed for renaming on January 29, 2005. Majority consensus seems to Oppose the changes.
A large number of poorly-named Academy Award-related articles now exist. I propose the following renamings:
Yes, some of those new proposed names are hideously long. But the current names for some of these are quite inscruitable, and the long names accurately describe the contents of these categories at a glance. And substituting "Academy Award" for "Oscar" fits these categories into the same pattern as all the other Academy Award related articles. Bryan 20:37, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Comment - is it even necessary to have Category:Films casting an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nominee? That seems tenuous. Would there be a Category:Films featuring an Academy Award for Best Sound nominee? BTW, the subcateogries shouldn't exclude minor, special, and obsolete awards, like "Best Juvenile Actor." and "Lifetime Achievement." Maybe a miscellaneous category? Didn't there used to be an "Oscar award for acting" category? -Willmcw 21:25, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I included those film ones because they were already there, someone had gone to a fair bit of effort populating them and I don't want to just throw that away. There's already a Category:Academy Award winning actors that can hold generic actor winners, which I've made some of these categories into subcategories of. Perhaps even more generic Category:Academy Award nominees and Category:Academy Award winners? Bryan 21:33, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I created a category nominess to label people that were nominated. I didn't ask you, Willmcw, to populate them so what's the problem? Is organization a bad thing? Cburnett 21:53, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Overcategorization is a bad thing. Because of the rule that an article should not appear in a category and a subcategory, unnecessary subcategories have a way of hiding articles. I'm not saying that that is necessarily a problem here, just raising the question. It appears that some editors have put a lot of thought and effort into this. Cheers, -Willmcw 23:07, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I'm afraid some of your proposals are even more inscrutable. For example: Category:Films casting an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor nominee. What a strange construction; if it weren't in the above table, I wouldn't know what it meant. Films don't cast, for one thing. Maybe if you wrote "films with an Academy Award ...", that might help. Still, I think the older names are clear, concise, and not problematic. --Kevin Myers 21:19, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)
- It may not be perfect, but it's much more reasonable than tacking (film) onto the end of the name of an award that's inherently an award for people rather than films. I've no problem with changing "casting" to "with", but the old names took me a while to figure out what they actually meant and IMO that's a big problem. Bryan 21:27, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- It would take a much less effort to work on explaining them better. With as long as some of the categories were, I spent a fair amount of time trying to determine how to make them short and succinct, which you've blown through the roof. Cburnett 21:53, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I strongly agree with Kevin Myers. I've nothing against a change of name, but it should be decent English, and the shorter (and clearer) the better. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 15:09, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- It would take a much less effort to work on explaining them better. With as long as some of the categories were, I spent a fair amount of time trying to determine how to make them short and succinct, which you've blown through the roof. Cburnett 21:53, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- It may not be perfect, but it's much more reasonable than tacking (film) onto the end of the name of an award that's inherently an award for people rather than films. I've no problem with changing "casting" to "with", but the old names took me a while to figure out what they actually meant and IMO that's a big problem. Bryan 21:27, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Object, object, object...."Oscar" is synonymous with "Academy Award for". There's absolutely nothing gained by making the renames and editting literally thousands of pages. Especially some of those that are now lengthed by some 25 characters. Heck, even you named the heading with "Oscar". I thought "Best Supporting Actress Oscar Nominee (film)" was long but saw no other way to shorten it. And now "Films casting an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nominee". In the words of Dr. Brown of Back to the Future, "GREAT SCOTT!" Nothing gained in this, nothing. Cburnett 21:29, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- The grunt-work of renaming these categories and moving the articles over would be done by bots, of course, so it doesn't matter that a lot of work would be involved. As for the "Oscar" thing, take a look in Category:Academy Awards - everything uses "Academy Award" instead of Oscar in there aside from these categories. We should be consistent, so either the Oscar names should be changed or the Academy Award ones should. As for the (film) names, I've explained my objections above. The (film) names are not very good descriptions of what's actually in these categories, IMO. Bryan 21:38, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- *sigh*, this is a rather big headache that you could have proposed on a talk page before putting anything in motion. If you had taken as much time to look at who done all the work as it did for you to change everything, you'd have known it was me. Talk before action.
- Lengthening a category by 25 letters to maintain consistency between articles and categories doesn't outweigh the need to name everything "Academy Award".
- As to "(film)", well that's what's on the category description. The point is, both the actor and movie are awarded the oscar and "(film)" is the shortest way to categories both while maintaining a consistent name between the two. So by venturing to make them more consistent, you've made this part more inconsistent. Cburnett 21:48, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I want to clarify my points and my decision that I made long before this mass renaming was made:
- Category:Academy Award winning actors is too broad which included both actors and actresses
- I wanted to create categories for nominees (they deserve at least some recognition for their efforts, so a category is justified)
- I wanted to mark the films that were awarded oscars with matching categories (a fair number already have sections to list awards)
- In order to keep the category name lengths to a minimum I used "Best Actor Oscar" instead of "Academy Award for Best Actor"
- To keep films & actors categories similar, I appended "(film)" to the end of the categories. This creates 4 categories per award: "X Oscar", "X Oscar Nominee", "X Oscar (film)" and "X Oscar Nominee (film)". There's no way to make them shorter without removing information from the name or abbreviating
Bryan's move pretty much voids these points to keep consistency between articles named "Academy Award" and categories named with "Oscar". These two are synonymous and I see little value in lengthening categories by a dozen or two dozen characters to align article names with category names where they differ by synonymous words. Cburnett 22:03, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Agree with moving them, but strongly object to new names. Surely "Academy Award nominees for X" and "Academy Award winners for X" are far more grammatical titles! And they would then be in keeping with such natural parent categories as the previously mentuioned Category:Academy Award winning actors Grutness|hello?
22:32, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I agree. And it's also how the announcers read the lists, IIRC ("And the nominees for X are...") Bryan 22:38, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Firstly, note that the move hasn't actually taken place - this page is for the discussion of potential moves and deletions. Anyway, the main thrust of my renaming proposal is to fix what I see as some violations of Wikipedia:Categorization#General naming conventions, most notably:
- Don't hard-code the category structure into names. Example: "Monarchs", not "People - Monarchs".
- Choose category names that are able to stand alone, independent of the way a category is connected to other categories.
- Category names for lists of items should be plural
- These categories won't just be under the Academy Award category tree, but also linked into other categories as well; I've already put a few of them into Category:Films and category:Cinema actors, for example. Succinctness is nice, but I think it's more important that the category name give as clear an indication as possible of what falls under it. There are other long categories out there (eg Category:World War II aerial operations and battles of the East Asian Theatre, Category:United Kingdom in the Eurovision Song Contest) and I don't think ones like the ones I've proposed would be particularly unweildy. Bryan 22:29, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Oh, I just stumbled upon Category:Costume Design Oscar Nominee now too, but I'm not adding it to the table at this time because this has become a lot more complicated and controversial than I'd originally expected it to be. :) I'm finding these articles while rummaging through Special:Uncategorizedcategories, which are in alphabetical order, so I suspect there may be others even farther along in the alphabet I haven't seen yet. Bryan 23:27, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- See my user page for details on this. Note that the award isn't "best costume design" but just "costume design". Cburnett 07:25, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I wasn't trying to say whether the name of the award was correct, just mentioning why I hadn't stumbled across that category until now. Though the article on it calls it the "Academy Award for Costume Design", so my general comments about consistency apply here too IMO. Bryan 07:51, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Oppose move. Existing categories are to the point, use common language and are easily understandable. Besides, if we were to take the formal approach, it wouldn't be Category:Academy Award for Best Actor winners but Category:United States Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Award for Best Actor winners. (After all, there are many academies, and most make awards for something or other.) jguk 01:34, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Maybe if the article on the Academy Awards wasn't at Academy Awards this might be a stronger argument, but as it is I don't see why the extra qualifications would be needed. All I'm saying is that there should be consistency, if enough people don't like "Academy Awards" then how about we move all the existing articles with "Academy Award" titles over to "Oscar" titles instead? And in any event these categories are still going to need to be moved even if nobody agrees on a better system than what's in place, since "Nominee" is incorrectly capitalized and none of the categories are pluralized. Bryan 06:50, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- 1) I just disagree that there *must* be consistency to this degree. 2) Capitalization of Nominee...well whatever. I see/saw it as title of sorts. 3) The categories are meant to reflect as they would be seen on the article, again as a title. Someone isn't a "Best Actor Nominees" but just "Best Actor Nominee". But 2 & 3 are (honestly) nit-picky details that, while more precise like your suggested names, aren't particularly necessary at this point in the game. If this was six weeks ago before I did anything then sure, rock on with the changes. Cburnett 07:25, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Ideally, in the long run Wikipedia will be "perfect". This is an ideal that I work towards by fixing (or at least pointing out) whatever flaws I percieve in my travels through it, and this sort of inconsistency is one of them. It needs to be fixed eventually, so why not now before even more articles get added to these categories? As for the pluralization and capitalization, this is an extremely common matter of the category naming conventions. Drummers get added to the "drummers" category, boxers get added to the "boxers", kings get added to the "kings" category (or one of their subcategories). So nominees for an award should be added to the "nominees" category, not the "nominee" category. If everything's as standardized as possible it makes it much easier for people to put articles into categories because they don't have to remember all the special cases, they can just guess whatever seems closest to the conventions and that's likely to work. Bryan 07:46, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Object - preciser but WAY too long... gidonb 02:58, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Oppose. Current categories are concise and clear. 05:28, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I think nearly all of these should be lists rather than categories, and in fact, the lists are already included in the various articles about each of these awards (e.g. Best Actor), which BTW include both winners and non-winning nominees, and indicate the year and film, and provide a mechanism to include nominees and/or films which don't have Wikipedia articles. Rather than rename these I think they should all be deleted. Including a mention of the award (linked to the corresponding list/article) in the article related to the nominee/winner (perhaps in a standard "Awards" section) seems to me like a far better way to accomplish what is being done here with categories. -- Rick Block 02:02, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- The list and categories sort the information differently. And there are dozens of lists with categories and I don't see you proposing to delete them. Cburnett 05:01, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- No doubt that there are dozens, even hundreds (perhaps thousands), of lists with corresponding categories. However, these particular categories are already nominated for renaming, and since they're all convenivently tagged with CFD I thought I'd express my opinion. I think it would have been far less work to create differently sorted list articles if that was the objective (see, for example, List of radio stations in North Carolina which references differently sorted lists). I don't want to start a flame war about this, but do you really think Category:Best Supporting Actress Oscar Nominee (film) is worth a category given I can find all the films with best supporting actress nominees from the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress article? If there's a need to have the films sorted alphabetically (even with the actress and year) I'll volunteer to create the article. -- Rick Block 05:40, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- It's a matter of tagging articles, which is the purpose of categories. Cburnett 06:24, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Object merely on the basis of length. Gamaliel 22:52, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- Oppose. Plurals and perhaps other aspects might be tweaked, but the suggestions for renaming are too long at best. Maurreen 17:27, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- Oppose. The old category names aren't much good, but these are little better and are, as others have complained, terribly long. Frankly a number of these categories probably shouldn't exist at all, but that's another debate.... Zoicon5 23:47, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- Strong support. However, if this doesn't go through, a second poll should be held about the capitalization and plural issues ("Nominee" should be "nominees"). Such inconsistencies are unacceptable -- in fact a poll shouldn't even be necessary. Fredrik | talk 18:10, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- Oppose The new names, which are no clearer and a lot uglier. Wincoote 15:23, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- Oppose the change to "Academy Award for"... would like to see changes to capitalization and pluralization, including adding "winners" to the "XXX Oscar" categories. Also some of these categories don't have the official title. For example, it's the Directing Oscar (it's technically awarded to the film, not the person), not the Best Director Oscar. – flamurai (t) 04:57, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)
- Idea to deal with the "(film)" thing: Personally, I think the film should just go in the top level category keyed by the actors name. This would link the actor and performance in the category, since the award is really for a specific performance. For example:
- Hilary Swank gets: [[Category:Best Actress Oscar winners|Swank, Hilary]]
- Boys Don't Cry gets: [[Category:Best Actress Oscar winners|Swank, Hilary 1999]]
- Million Dollar Baby gets: [[Category:Best Actress Oscar winners|Swank, Hilary 2004]]
- Eh, thinking about it, that might not be ideal, considering some films get two nominees in the same category. Can articles be in the same category twice under different keys? Let me know if anyone has any other ideas. – flamurai (t) 08:17, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)
- Idea to deal with the "(film)" thing: Personally, I think the film should just go in the top level category keyed by the actors name. This would link the actor and performance in the category, since the award is really for a specific performance. For example:
- Support. The proposed names might be a little unwieldly, but I think they're more consistant with naming conventions. One shouldn't have to do any research to figure out what is supposed to go into a particular category. Categories such as Category:Best Actor Oscar Nominee (film) don't make sense outside the context of the rest of the categorization scheme and, frankly, I probably would have still puzzled over it if I hadn't seen it in this list. --Azkar 18:08, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- Just to add onto my previous comment, perhaps categories like Category:Films casting an Academy Award for Best Actor winner could instead be named Category:Films starring an Academy Award for Best Actor winner or Category:Films featuring an Academy Award for Best Actor winner to clear up some of the confusion over "casting" --Azkar 18:30, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- Objection to move. Sorry, the names are very unwieldy. If not for the fact that the names are very long, I would've supported. And like a few people said above: Oscar is sufficient (and the equivalent) of the Academy Awards. So I don't really see a point moving. Penwhale 01:54, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)