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Would any contributors mind clarifying the purpose of this category with respect toCategory:Wikipedia maintenance?

I understand that it contains categories of course, but is the intent forCategory:Wikipedia maintenance to be emptied of categories? Or perhaps a catch-all category, whileCategory:Maintenance categories is for commonly useful maintenance categories (generally omitting technical ones like the 'Page displaying...' series)? Something else?Tule-hog (talk)23:56, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Rich Farmbrough:, who created that category in 2011, is still around. Seems like a logical place to start.Polygnotus (talk)20:18, 6 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• @Polygnotus: As far as I can see the category contains subcategories ofarticles that require maintenance.Marcocapelle (talk)06:24, 26 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Marcocapelle I think you meant to ping @Tule-hogPolygnotus (talk)06:25, 26 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Seeoriginal author's intent.Tule-hog (talk)22:55, 26 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Yours in haste is beautiful.Polygnotus (talk)23:04, 26 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It says they they are a subset ofCategory:Stairs, specifically outdoor stairs only ("outdoorstaircases, and structures for externalpedestrian infrastructure, including aspark andgarden features." (The meaning of staircase is a whole nother matter, but my research indicates that it's mostly a synonym for stairway.)

I just... I just don't think that this distinction is understood much anymore. People use them interchangeably a lot. Sloppy maybe, but we go with common usage.

Looking at dictionaries,Merriam-Webster says the definition is "one or more flights of stairs, usually with landings to pass from one level to another". Nothing about inside/outside there. In the recent web examples, three are inside and one outside. The further examples are 19-10 in favor of inside.

dictionary.com has stairway as a synonym for staircase, the example has "...from one level to another, as of a building, to another..." so that is outside, but it is qualified with "as of".

Wiktionary.com has stairway as "Aset ofsteps, with or without acase, that allow one to walk up or down.". Nothing about inside/outside there. (By "case" they mean "staircase"; I found that in a couple other places, that a staircase is a structure enclosing a stairway, but nobody talks like that.)

In our Wikipedia.Stairway just redirects toStaircase, so...

I've never heard of them differentiated -- people do use both terms, but usually use "stairs". And I've been around the track a few times. It looks like "stairway=staircase=stairs", all synonyms (as is "steps" also),de facto, and even in the dictionaries.

So, readers are not going to be helped but rather hindered by the situation. So, what I suggest is just mergingCategory:Stairways intoCategory:Stairs.

Right? It's a big job, so I want to make sure that I'm not missing something.Herostratus (talk)00:56, 26 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• @Herostratus: the better forum to discuss this isWP:CFD where you can propose to merge the categories.Marcocapelle (talk)06:17, 26 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I discovered this category while researching the RfD forMedia personalities/Media personality (seeWikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 June 21#Media personalities) and I'm not sure it's structured right in terms of what subcategories it contains. While it's clear that infotainers are media personalities and at least most broadcasters are, I don't think that the same is true for all members ofcategory:Commentators, which is not just sports commentators but includes for exampleCategory:Bible commentators, and picking a random article in that category,Maxie Dunnam, his article doesn't indicate him being a media personality at all.Similarly, whileCategory:Internet celebrities at first glance seems a reasonable inclusion, are allCategory:Webcomic creators andCategory:Animals on the Internet really media personalities?I'm not advocating for the deletion or merging of the category but I think it is sitting at too high a level in the tree, and it should contain more but lower level subcategories instead (e.g.Category:TikTokers)?Thryduulf (talk)00:54, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• @Thryduulf: it might be a solution e.g. to renameCategory:Commentators toCategory:Commentators (media) and purgeCategory:Bible commentators.Marcocapelle (talk)14:30, 11 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That might resolve one small portion of the issue, but not all of it. And I'm not sure that solution is ideal either - would it not be better to makeCategory:Commentators (media) a sub-category ofCategory:Commentators and move articles/subcats to it as appropriate? Is "(media)" even a suitable disambiguator given that books are a form of media and the bible is a book?Thryduulf (talk)15:54, 11 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

On a lark, I decided to start atCategory:Canada–Mexico–United States relations (because it happens to have been related to a recently closed CfD), and attempt to trace every single possible path through the category tree toCategory:Main topic classifications (not looking at duplicates more than once). I ended up removing several hundred parent-category relations as off-topic or inappropriate perWP:EPON, and after all that I think I succeeded, but found myself in very strange places like neuroscience, philosophy, and mathematics. I also ended up writing the essayWP:Category escape hatches to describe a common problem I ran into.* Pppery *_{it has begun...}04:50, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

 You are invited to join the discussion atTemplate talk:Possibly empty category § Rewording to non-admins.FaviFake (talk)16:06, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Do any of the watchers of this project talk page want to help us understand the meaning of 'defining' and 'non-defining' with respect to applying categories to an article describing a collection of multiple different events? If you do, please join the discussion atTalk:2025 British anti-immigration protests#Bad categories?. --DeFacto (talk).13:16, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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