Category talk:Women

Overly broad category?

{{flag}} This is a broad category, and hence, it is very hard to decide for most of the articles. Should we even have this category. Recently it was used for Qatar appoints four women to its law-drafting Shura Council after I removed Women's rights category. I don't think it has anything to do with Women's right. If a woman becomes the president of the US, or when Amelia Earhart became the first female aviator to cross the Atlantic ocean -- gender has nothing to do with these cases. FWIW, if tomorrow, a female becomes the Pope, that too would not concern women's rights. It is just bizarre, and belongs to wacky news category [They can't be priest, that is how it is. Right to equality law is not violated]. However, when Saudi Arabia announced women would be permitted to drive, it is correct to put under that category since it was decided on the gender. Similarly for triple talaq, since the (Indian) Supreme Court said it violated right to equality. So, how to make use of this category?
•–• 18:23, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

This category as it exists is too broad and ill-defined to be useful, imo.

I agree that the Shura Council article is not a good fit for Category:Women's rights. It does seem like there ought to be some category where it belongs, though; some place for articles about the changing roles of women in their societies. --Pi zero (talk) 21:25, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

category is too broad: Why do you say it is too broad? With only 2 articles in 2017, none in 2016, one in 2015, etc. How can you say it is too broad? Sounds like an excuse to keep an important topic off wiki-news. Ottawahitech (talk) 16:04, 13 January 2018 (UTC) please pin me

(@Ottawahitech: I'll try to provide a helpful answer to your question, "How can you say it is too broad?"; although, frankly, if you think it's remotely plausible that we'd be trying to "keep an important topic off [Wikinews]", you've somehow got yourself deeply misguided about the nature of this place.)

Few articles get added to this category for much the same reason few get added to Category:World: if interpreted in a simplistic way they would be so absurdly inclusive that they would be useless, so the only way there's any point to populating them at all is they're given some narrower interpretation — but the name of the category gives no obvious support to any narrower interpretation, leaving it up to individuals to occasionally put things here as it's not clear what else to do with them. It is also an important part of maintaining our categories that there be keywords that naturally redirect to the category and are likely to get wikilinks from an article when, and largely not unless, the article belongs in the category; otherwise, it is currently difficult to populate the category. --Pi zero (talk) 17:03, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

@Pi zero: You may not be doing it on purpose, but I believe you do not understand that women are now very much in the news as a topic. Take for example my very first article for wikinews (New book by Ellen Pao, former Chief Executive of Reddit, explores sexism in Silicon Valley), a book review of an autobiography written by a woman famous for trying to right the w:gender gap, initially rejected by you as as "spam", then stale, and after a long and arduous journey on wiki-news finally deleted rather than userified as I requested.

the same reason few get added to Category:World: The point is articles about women on wiki-news are not as prolific as one would hope. Comparing Category: Women to Caegory: World (which would encompass all wiki-news articles) is a red-herring. Ottawahitech (talk) 18:59, 13 January 2018 (UTC) Please ping me

@Ottawahitech: From your second remark, it seems that you have a particular topic in mind, and you've supposed that this category corresponds to that topic. But it doesn't, and that's a big part of the problem that this thread was established to discuss. The name of this category is simply "women"; it seems, from what you say, that you're already thinking of something narrower. I believe all of us would like a category for what you're talking about... but part of what's needed, in practice, to maintain an en.wn topic category is a category name that supports a clear-cut criterion for what does and doesn't go into it, and preferably also keywords that robustly support ongoing category-population.

The latter part of your second remark suggests that you're supposing some causal force from our choice of categories to our choice of article coverage. Such a supposition would be unrelated to how the project works. (Tbh, it seems to me that pretty much since you arrived you have consistently imagined that reviewers, rather than following stringent neutral review criteria (which is the case), are arbitrarily imposing some sort of bizarre social agenda on which articles they pass. It doesn't seem to have registered on you that we are the antithesis of that; it's not just "oh, by the way, we don't do that".)

A few words on the subject of designing suitable category names for topics. We have a category "free speech"; various other-language Wikinews projects have a category whose name translates into English roughly as "censorship"; the two should be mapped into each other for purposes of interwiki links, though the design of Wikidata (I'm actually thinking, the misdesign of Wikidata) discourages that. There is some lesson there about how tricky category choices can be, though. For many years we didn't have a category for issues relating to ownership and non-ownership of guns: "the right to bear arms", "gun control", and so on. This is not the same as a category "guns", which would be basically an encyclopedic category. The category we've ended up with? Category:Gun politics. --Pi zero (talk) 20:56, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

I would like to see this category replaced by one that's better-defined. I do not know what it should be called, but choosing a good name for it seems to me to be a desirable goal here. It seems as if the topic we're mostly interested in here is somewhere in the neighborhood of what, in academic circles, is referred to as "Women's studies" (imo clearly not suitable for a news category name). --Pi zero (talk) 21:06, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Question is, what type of articles would have this category as such? There are well defined categories like women’s rights, and discussion from the last night suggested about if Hillary Clinton won the US presidential election, that would be a probable candidate — Women in politics could be a better option, but seems like encyclopaedic.
•–• 12:18, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

I do not think we need this category at all. I have seen {{editprotected}} requests to add it to articles that seem to merely mention a woman in the title. I did allow it on requests that were related to a "first" by a woman. But if we have this category, we ought to have Category:Men as well. And before you know it, someone will say that these categories are gendered and gender is not binary, but a spectrum, and demand 73 more categories. Well, by now, you all probably know my feelings about category proliferation. Cheers, --SVTCobra 22:47, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Heh. I don't think one has to be opposed to expanding the category hierarchy in order to not want that scenario. --Pi zero (talk) 22:50, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Here's a particular case of interest:

• "Margot Duhalde, Chile's first female military pilot, dies aged 97" — Wikinews, February 7, 2018

It seems to me this typifies the sort of article that belongs in... the sort of category we want to have instead of this category. --Pi zero (talk) 17:52, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

But in that case, it is not that she was not allowed to join the air club, or the FFF/RAF/ATA -- she was even honoured for her services.
•–• 23:36, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

She bucked the system. That's the way sexism was in that generation. From the sources, when she arrived in England with about a dozen other Chileans and reported to the Free French, the bureaucracy had gotten her first name wrong and they didn't know she was a woman, and when they found out she was a woman they didn't know what to do with her; they had her tending wounded pilots, till she transferred to the transport auxiliary where they let her fly (remember, she supposedly learned the word for plane before she learned the word for her mother, and she lied about her age to start flying lessons two years before she was allowed to). The male pilots were inclined to believe women didn't fly as well as men did, a belief that was spoiled by the reality of how good the few women pilots were. Yes, the war made people care a lot more about what a person could do, (it also induced the British military to tolerate Alan Turing despite his homosexuality), but it still took an exceptional person, with gumption, to create an example such as Duhalde did. --Pi zero (talk) 01:39, 8 February 2018 (UTC)