Talk:Hester Biddle

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"Protestant missionaries" categories[edit]

I wanted to better explain the inclusion of categories on this page which include the phrase "Protestant missionaries". This person was a Quaker missionary. Quakers are Protestant, and therefore Quaker missionaries are a type of Protestant missionaries. I don't think there's any problem establishing that point: Category:Quaker missionaries is a subcategory of Category:Protestant missionaries, as it should be.

However, there was a concern expressed that applying some of these categories on this page was creating an epithet on the article page that thereby describes Biddle as a "Protestant missionary". I understand the concern, but categories are not intended to create short epithets that are applied to articles contained in them. That's one way of interpreting a category, but on Wikipedia their primary purpose is to categorize articles together that have similar characteristics so that users can quickly find articles that share these characteristics. Creating descriptive epithets for the articles in the category that can appear at the bottom of the article page is not one of the purposes of categories laid out in Wikipedia:Categorization. (Indeed, categories do not even appear in the default mobile version of Wikipedia, in part to avoid the appearance that this is what the category system is.)

As suggested in the objection, we could create a subcategory of Category:Quaker missionaries called, for instance, Category:Quaker missionaries in Canada, and make it a subcategory of Category:Protestant missionaries in Canada and Category:Quaker missionaries. I have not done that, however, because I think such a category (at this stage, at least) would probably be too small to be useful, as it would contain only one article (this one), or perhaps just a handful of other articles. Therefore, the article is grouped in the one-step-up from such a specific categorization, which in this case happens to be Category:Protestant missionaries in Canada and Category:Quaker missionaries. This is not saying that Biddle is primarily known as a "Protestant missionary in Canada". It's just grouping her in a missionary category that combines a location (Canada) with a general type of Christianity (Protestantism). She could be included in Category:Christian missionaries in Canada, but then the objection becomes – why not move her down to the next appropriate level of Category:Protestant missionaries in Canada, since that is equally applicable and more specific?

Making the category system work as a useful system necessitates creating a hierarchical systems of category parents and subcategories, and the result is that not every article will receive an ideal "category epithet" that applies to the article that is placed in the category. I think that this is one such case, but I don't think it's something we need to worry about too much, unless we want to rethink the purpose of the category system entirely, which is far too big an issue to bite off on the talk page of one specific article. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 12:22, 6 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]