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Should one-time historical events by categorized by the year and month they occurred, instead of just the year?
Background
Until this month, this category tree mainly (perhaps even exclusively) housed and organized content on periodic events such as public holidays (e.g.
Category:Observances by month). In the past two weeks, the category tree has been fully intersected with
Category:Events by year. The current structure is:
Month is typically
non-defining for historical events. To be sure, certain events are seasonal (e.g. weather), but month is not a core, defining characteristic of events—e.g. it is largely inconsequential whether
that hurricane hit Galveston in August or September 1900 or that building
was bombed in February or March 1993.
Completing and maintaining the scheme would require tremendous effort (for little/no/negative value to navigation). Level A represents potentially a few thousand categories (conservatively, let's say 2,000). Level A.1 multiplies this by 12 (24,000) and level A.2 multiplies it by perhaps 40 (80,000) based on
Category:Events by topic. Level A.1.a/A.2.a, in turn, represents about 960,000 more subcategories.
Options
Do not categorize historical events by month. Restrict this category tree's scope to recurring events that always take place in a particular month (e.g.
Christmas). (At a glance, it appears the new categories were added without replacing previous categorization, and so could be removed without any concern for upmerging.)
Categorize historical events by month. Continue to intersect this category tree with
Category:Events by year.
I'm surprised this discussion never got any engagement despite all the pings. For what it's worth, I think this is a no-brainer for 1, per
WP:NONDEF. I stumbled on this after seeing
this edit on my watchlist, which I don't think served any useful navigational purpose. The issue with an example like that is that there's no particular reason that a reader of
One, Inc. v. Olesen would be interested in, say,
Battle of Hayes Pond, just because it also happened in the US in January 1958. But I can imagine there being exceptions for certain topic-specific categorizations. For example, someone reading about a WWII battle that occurred in January 1941 might legitimately be interested in navigating to other WWII events that happened during that month (or the months immediately following/preceding).
Colin M (
talk)
17:45, 20 January 2022 (UTC)reply
CfD Notice - Merging old events by month to events by year