Category talk:Expatriates

Does an expatriate ever cease to become an expatriate?

Curious to know the purpose of this category tree, particularly after one of my edits was reverted. When an expatriate (a) goes back to their native country (b) moves to another non-native country (c) adopts the nationality of their new country of residence, do we remove the previous 'expatriate' category? Or are the categories collected like stamps in a passport?? Personally I would have thought they'd cease to be defining if the subject had patriated themselves somewhere else. Sionk (talk) 17:39, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Category:Expatriates

Since I have experienced that there is very little traffic on category talk pages I listed a discussion about the category on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_International_relations#Category:Expatriates. Please join the discussion there. Marcocapelle (talk) 06:22, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

RfC: Proposal to change the definition of "expatriate" for the purposes of categorization

Currently, this page says at the top "For more information, see Expatriate". The strong implication is "if you are unsure whether or not to place a give biography in (some sub-category) of Category:Expatriates, see the article Expatriate for definitions and guidance", n'est-ce pas? The question on the table is whether this should be changed.

• A: No.
• B: Yes, and "see Expatriate" should be replaced/supplemented, at the top of this page and/or other places as appropriate (eg, on subcategory pages or whatever), and the guidance should read:
  • B1 Something along the lines of "'Expatriate', for the purposes of categorization is usually taken to mean: 1) A person who (more or less) permanently relocated to a different country(s) than her native country, 2) A person who moved from her native country and is no longer a citizen of that country, 3) A person who moved from her native country and has explicitly (even if not legally) renounced her citizenship or attachment to that country, or 4) a person who lived ten years [or whatever] in a country(s) other than thier native country, or 5) a person with generally similar experience. Exceptions may apply as appropriate."
  • B2: Other (explain).
• C: Other (explain).

Herostratus (talk) 18:25, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Survey

• B1. I mean goodness' sakes yes. My reasons are below. This is not hypothetical, I am engaging right now with an editor who is changing many articles to include an Expatriate category for people who had brief sojourns abroad. And doesn't want to back down. And, after all, he can point this the link to Expatriate here and he is correct, by the rule. And apparently other people have done this for biographies to an extent. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Herostratus (talk • contribs) 18:25, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• A. I don't see a good reason for the Expatriate categories to use a definition different to that at Expatriate. Thryduulf (talk) 19:06, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• C mainly because we need to clearly distinguish these categories form the emigrant categories. B is not providing a way to do so. Going with B will in my view lead to a situation where these are going to rely way too much on qualitative distinctions between emigrantion and expatriation, and so they will not be worth having as 2 seperate category trees, and in that case we should just merge them all into 1.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:02, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• B or C. I think, as a matter of general principle, our guidance pages should be self-contained, and should not rely on reference to mainspace articles to work. That rules out option A. Regarding the definition to use, the salient question is how much of an expatriate someone needs to be in order for it to be a defining aspect of their biography. I'll leave it to others to answer that. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:27, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• A. The answer to the OP's "n'est-ce pas?" questions is "no". It appears that the OP is simply not understanding the purpose or bothering to read the documentation of {{Catmain}}. Tens of thousands of categories link to the main article on the subject the category is about, and it is not problematic in any way. It has nothing to do with "if you are unsure whether or not to place a give biography in (some sub-category) of [this category], see [this article] for definitions and guidance". Our articles are not guidelines and have nothing to do with editorial decision-making about categorization process, beyond the obvious that the category and article need to be about the same thing (otherwise we have a category name problem to fix). No one on the site seems confused about this but the OP. The comment below that "biographies can easily change with time but categories do not" is essentially false; while the purpose of a particular category generally doesn't change, the categories applied to an article change whenever necessary. That is, categorization is not fixed but is mutable as needed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:40, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
  • However the general rule is that a category once applied always applied, with very rare exceptions. If someone writers a book that is published and noted, and thus becomes a French writer because they are French, they will always be a French writer. Even if the next day they move to Morocco, renounce their French citizenship, and become a politician, they will still belong in the French writer category.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:18, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
• B2 (while also acknowledging that B1 is still better than A) -- I propose instead something along the lines of: "This category is for individuals who are known for having relocated to a different country(s) than her native country for a significant period of time, or for the duration of the event(s) that made them notable." I think this would work effectively to avoid trivial clutter of the category, and restrict it to something useful. Expressly not defining "significant period of time" can leave the exact definition of significant up to editors of individual articles, and "are known for" would require citations referencing their ex-pat status explicitly. Fieari (talk) 01:24, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
• A I see no reason to change the definition or the categories' scope. Dimadick (talk) 02:24, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
• A - yes, there is no reason presented for the category to have a definition different from the article, and it seems poor practice to have two definitions. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 05:23, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Conversation

Great Caesar's ghost, a change is needed, mainly because biographies can easily change with time but categories do not. The article Expatriate is based on current state at this time, the lede opening with:

An expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person residing in a country other than their native country.

Note the current tense. There's a ref to to a dictionary which says that expatriate means "a person who lives outside their native country" (current tense, xx with "was") And there's a wikilink to Residency (domicile), which is is an article about law, and refers to a person's current legal status, with the third sentence of the lede being:

Although a domicile may change from time to time, a person has only one domicile, or residence, at any point in their life, no matter what their circumstances.

Alright. So if I take a semester abroad, I am an expatriate at that time. This is true. My biography could say "He is currently an expatriate, studying at the Sorbonne", and this would be entirely correct. When I go back home, the sentence could be removed, or changed to "In September-December 2021, he was an expatriate, studying at the Sorbonne" if for some reason the editor wanted to. But... if I spend a semester in France but never otherwise leave my native country, it is quite misleading IMO to put me in (some subcat of) Category:Expatriates for all time, even 100 years from now if the Wikipedia lasts that long.

Because categories are not intended to change like that very much. A category may be added (when the person dies or takes a job at XX University and so forth), but seldom changed or removed. If I teach for 20 years at Lowe Tech University, but then leave, my Category:Lowe Tech people is not removed. All else aside this would be tremendous maintenance task. Thus B, and my vote is for B1 specifically. Herostratus (talk) 18:25, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

• It is extremely rare for articles to contain any specific information about domicile or nationality. This is not going to get us anywhere. Rathfelder (talk) 18:43, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

• C- We have a whole set of categories like Category:American Rhodes Scholars and Category:Canadian ice hockey players in the United States that are based on short term expatriate status. I think in a large amount of cases people are notable for being abroad even if they do not in any way renounce their home country. In fact the definition proposed at the top would make this category indistinguishable from the emigrant categories. There are also a whole group of people who were born and lived part of their lives in one country but whose parents were clearly nationals of another country. I think as long as we can show the person took up residence in the country, they should be categorized by it. So if they had an established house there they are generally expatriates. Expatriates are in this view nationals of one country abroad. So degree seeking students from one country to another count. The same with people who are diplomats working long term. We have the whole ambassadors tree as sub-cats of expatriate categories. What we do not need to capture is people doing short term research projects, although if they lead an archeological dig over several years in a country they are not a national of this might be worth categorizing. Degree seeking students, but not short term exchange and study abroad students. I am a bit conflicted about how long a visting professorship needs to last. I know of some cases involving a few weeks and those clearly are not enough, but I am conflicted about whole year appointments. If we are going to go to a level higher than this, I would say we need to scrap the entire expatriates tree and assume that any people who were nationals of country A but in country B for a super long time are functionally emigrants and should be placed in the emigration category. Unless we are going to let these things capture cases where people lived roughly 3 years in a country and made periodic visits to their home country, while having a house in the country they were living in, than we should assume that expatriates and emigrants are functionally the same enough that they should all be in one category and that any attempt to seperate them in 2 categories is too subjective to be logically broken into two categories. In my experience "expatriate" is a term used for business people and their families on a few year assignments to another country, and several other cases where it is clear that they are going home, and may even make periodic trips back to their homes. If this is not something we want to capture with the categories we should scrap the expatriate categories in whole and go to just having emigration categories.John Pack Lambert (talk) 18:44, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

We also have Category:American alumni of the École des Beaux-Arts, which is a sub-cat of Category:American expatriates in France. Yet if we go with more restrictive proposals this would lead to the oddity of categorizing in the expatriate category indirectly those who studied at one art school in Paris, but excluding Americans who studied at other art schools there, or who studied art in Paris outside the formal setting of an institution.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:15, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

We have biographies on people like Lloyd Alexander who seems to have ben quite defined by his time in France, which was for a multitude of un-related reasons. The example that I am evidently "not backing down from" involves a person from India who was in South Africa for a total of 19 years, and whose claim to fame originated with actions he took during those 19 years in South Africa. If that person does not belong in Category:Indian expatriates in South Africa than I submit there is no reason to have that category when we have Category:Indian emigrants to South Africa. For the record some editor did feel that that person actually did belong in the Indian emigrants to South Africa cat. I only removed them from the later category because A-it makes no sense to put people in both categories. For example it could be argued that Desiderio Alberto Arnaz II as a pharmacy student in the US who got a degree counted as Cateogry:Cuban expatriates in the United States and it is clear that as someone who was connected with the regime overthrown in 1933 who then moved to Florida and lived there for the last 40 years so he clearly counts as an emigrant to the US, and so it makes more sense to only place him in the later category. Rowena Meeks Abdy is an article that shows us use of the term "expatriate" for Americans living in Europe in the late 19th-century, most of whom do seem to have planned to at some point to return to the US. Just based on the article she seems to have been in her teens before she was a resident on the US. Since the article mentions cities in 4 countries where she is said to have had "prolonged stays", I can see an argument for placing her in 4 categories. I know some think this might be excessive. One solution would be to place Abdy just in Category:American expatriates and limit this category to Americans who were abroad who still were nationals of the US, and for people who were abroad and no longer nationals place them in the various American emigrants to Y country categories. We might then determine that the people needed to be abroad at least 2 years straight in one country, or at least 4 years straight total, with some possible mitigating exceptions for less time. This would certainly cut down on potential category clutter because there are lots of people who were in a lot of different countries. This later issue applies possibly most to sports people. If it really defining what country an American expatriate basketball player was on a team in if in 5 season they played in 7 countries? I am not sure that we want Category:American expatriates to get as big as it would get under this proposal, but do we really want a system where we have no way to categorize the fact that someone who was in their teens had lived in 4 different countries as a resident and none of them were the country they were a national of, with an average time in the countries of over 4 years? In fact, since we only know Abdy came to the homeland of her parents as a permanent resident in the "early 1890s" she may well have been in each of the 4 countries she was an expatriate in on average 5 years or more at that point, she was 13 in 1890 and turned 18 in 1895, so that gives us the range of "early 1890s" ages for her.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:15, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

On the other hand it is hard to see not categorizing Vic Barnett as a sports related expatriate, since his entire career seems to have been in one country, not the country of his birth. The article indicates he played only in 1 year. The article has too little information however to determine if Barnett was only in the US that year, or if he came to the US sooner to do other things, before he took up playing baseball at the professional level. It is also unclear if Barnett remained in the US after he played baseball. It is also unclear when Barnett died. It is not even clear if there are sources that show he has died, but he would be about 107 now, so his being alive is not very likely.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:51, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

• The problem at stake seems to be that expatriates only temporarily leave their native country and we generally do not want to categorize temporary characteristics. The question then becomes: should we categorize expatriates at all? Marcocapelle (talk) 13:38, 16 January 2022 (UTC)