Category talk:American people by occupation and state or territory

Scope and the significance of the occupation–state association

The stated purpose of this categorization scheme, which subdivides Category:American people by occupation by state, is to diffuse large categories such as Category:American artists. By all reasonable standards, it accomplishes this function rather well since any category split into 50 parts will be considerably more manageable.

However, the precise scope of FOOers from BAR categories is not defined—for example, what does it mean to be an "artists from California"? I see three possible definitions:

1. An artist who was born in California;
2. An artist who lived in California; and
3. An artist who practiced his/her profession in California.

If we categorized each one separately, we would end up with three categories with significant overlap but also noticeably different membership. We can, however, safely reject at least the first one. In general, we categorize people by location only when there is a significant association or, in other words, when location is defining for them. We do (should) not categorize merely by place of birth: an American who was born in Rome while her parents were vacationing there should not appear in Category:People from Rome.

The second definition also is a trivial association. Without considering other factors, there is no substantive connection between one's occupation and one's state of residence. Why, for example, should someone who worked for 30 years as a nurse in San Francisco and for another 30 years as an artist in Miami be categorized as an 'artist from California' or 'nurse from Florida'?

The third definition is more meaningful, since it connects occupation with the state in which one worked. For some occupations, one could argue that there is a substantive connection between one's occupation and one's state of employment. For example: lawyers must learn and apply the specific law of the state in which they practice; politicians govern within the boundaries of state-specific jurisdictions (the state as a whole or its unique subdivisions). In most cases, however, the connection breaks down: actors, artists, businesspeople, musicians, scientists and most others do basically the same job regardless of where they work. An additional problem is that people often move, so an article about an artist who has worked in 10 states might need to be burdened by 10 categories.

To sum up, the current scheme successfully diffuses heavily populated categories of Americans by occupation, but does so in a way that is ambiguous—and, as a result, inconsistent—and often trivial. We ought, therefore, to take steps to correct this, either by clearly limiting their scope in a way that is meaningful and defining for the individuals being categorized or, if we cannot do that, by upmerging most of these categories to their People from BAR and American FOOers parents (e.g., Category:People from California, Category:American artists) and relying on other characteristics–such as genre for artists and musicians, or field for scientists–to accomplish diffusion.

I raise this issue here instead of nominating the whole category tree for upmerging so that we can explore alternative avenues, if they exist, to fix rather than remove this categorization scheme. Thank you, -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 21:55, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

I think your intention here is laudable. And agree point by point. However, as much as we would like only entries meeting criteria #3 to be categorised, that's simply not going to be what actually happens. I think we may be better off finding some other way to subcategorise if necessary. Or maybe just UpMerge. Honestly, there's no real reason to not have people in large categories. If anything it should help navigation. And we have several TOC-style nav templates to help. Atm, I'm leaning towards upmerge. Though I obviously welcome further discussion. - jc37 22:18, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

We would obtain a powerful tool for instructing on guidelines for categorizing if we ubiquitously added {{Fooian fooers}} to all people by country and occupation categories. Currently this template is not used for this purpose, but it could easily be amended to give such instruction. A second point is that I question why this discussion was instigated for the limited scope of American states when it clearly relates globally to all countries.

This discussion addresses a real problem, however, I don't think it will be possible to arrive at an ostensible solution at this point. I think we might need to grind in this situation a while longer before any comprehensive and integral solutions will emerge. It might nevertheless be of value and I see it as such as constructive. __meco (talk) 08:38, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't necessarily see a problem with these unless they are splitting up the most specific occupation categories (i.e., Category:Novelists from California, instead of just Category:Writers from California), because we should never force people to navigate articles by overly specific criteria by making every intersecting fact so specific. If you can't remember how to spell Krzysztof Kieślowski, you should be able to find him easily in Category:Polish film directors, without having to also know (or care) that he was from Warsaw. So I think the best way to deal with these is to just monitor the structure getting too fragmented and too specific (e.g., Category:Science fiction writers from Sacramento, California) and upmerge as needed.
Ideally, I would have wanted these to be only used for occupations that were tied to a state or other subnational entity by their very nature (such as lawyers, who are licensed by state in the U.S.), or failing that, to only be used to link occupations to the places where they were performed, but that's proven impossible to maintain. They do provide a useful function in that shared place of origin/place of work is a significant biographical fact, and where you are from can sometimes have a more express mark on your work than even where you work. It's probably futile to look to categories to perform more finely-tuned work than making such rough groupings.
As for whether these categories should include mere birthplace as well as places people actually lived (I myself never lived in the city where I was born), that's a far larger issue than just these occupation categories, dealing fundamentally instead with the whole "People from Foo" scheme because "from" is a very broad term in practice. Ultimately such concerns are probably nitpicking regarding the categories, and are better sorted out in annotated lists for each place that can explain the person-place association. In categories, the line would be impossible to draw without it being arbitrary and impossible to enforce if it is not clearly part of the category's name (Category:People who lived at least five years in Sacramento, California and preferably achieved some accomplishment there). postdlf (talk) 16:17, 26 July 2012 (UTC)