Category talk:Former populated places in Europe

This category is within the scope of WikiProject Europe, an effort to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to European topics of a cross-border nature on Wikipedia.EuropeWikipedia:WikiProject EuropeTemplate:WikiProject EuropeEurope articles

Cities

This category is within the scope of WikiProject Cities, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of cities, towns and various other settlements on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.CitiesWikipedia:WikiProject CitiesTemplate:WikiProject CitiesWikiProject Cities articles

Should geographical region subcategories be used?[edit]

This category is basically a mess.

Some articles are linked directly under the parent category of Former settlements of Europe. Example: Burhou

Some articles are linked to subcategories of countries that are directly under the parent category of Former settlements of Europe. Example: Former settlements in Hungary

Some articles are linked to subcategories of countries that are under geographical region subcategories within the parent category of Former settlements of Europe. Example: Former settlements in Eastern Europe

So, what should be done to clean this up? The guidelines (Wikipedia:Categorization#Subcategorization) are a bit vague about this, other than to suggest that if a category becomes too large that it should be broken down into subcategories. Since some of the subcategories already existing in this category have quite a few articles linked to them, I would say that we need to go ahead and add the tag {{catdiffuse}} here to indicate that it should be fully broken down into subcategories. As such, I'm also going to go ahead and include the {{verylarge}} tag in the category, to hopefully inspire a discussion about this which will lead to a resolution of cleaning up this messy category.

One of the challenges about this will be: what form should these subcategories take? Should we create subcategories based on geographical regions? Or should we create subcategories based just on individual countries? Any input is appreciated. --Saukkomies ^talk 17:09, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]