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Commons:Categories for discussion/2014/06/Category:Trains of Great Western Railway

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Category:Trains of Great Western Railway

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Is this "trains" (a reasonable cat), or (as it seems to be collecting lately), locomotives instead. The two are not the same and should not be cross-categorized like this. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:14, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

While it is sub-categorised by locomotive class, this is the same format as used by the other 86 categories which share the parent Category:Trains of the United Kingdom by operator. If there are images of Great Western Railway trains where the locomotive is not visible then they should go into this category too. Geof Sheppard (talk) 15:59, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Keep per Geof Sheppard. There is part of a larger category structure which is standardised across all UK mainline trains (well, getting there anyway). While I do not doubt that it occasionally delivers categories which may at first glance seem a bit odd (Category:British Rail Class 378s of London Overground being an example, as all class 378s are London Overground), I feel it is important to be consistent. In this particular example this allows consistency with all other train operator categories. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:09, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Who is asking any other than keeping this?
The question is what's it for? At present it seems to be becoming a parent category for Category:Great Western Railway steam locomotives, which we already have as a correct category. This might be a valid category for trains, we don't need it as a parent category for locomotives.
As a minor (but still valid) point, "Trains of Great Western Railway" is grammatically obnoxious. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:22, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
'Great Western Railway locomotives' actually contains locomotives of Great Western Railway design but only a very small proporation are actually images of them while owned by the Great Western Railway - for the Category:GWR 4073 Class only about 1% are GWR-era images.
Oh, and I not especially fond of the grammar either (it feels as though it should be Trains of the Great Western Railway) but it is consistent with the other categories.Geof Sheppard (talk) 07:53, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
All together now, A fooolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
There is no need for this "consistency" whatsoever. MediaWiki works by cat membership, not by text pattern matching. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:55, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
"'Great Western Railway locomotives' actually contains locomotives of Great Western Railway design "
No, it shouldn't contain any locomotives at all. It contains categories instead, as this should be a meta-category.
The categories it contains belong there. They have some useful functional relationship with being "Great Western Railway locomotives". That's all we need. We do not then need to obsessively nit-pick the transitive relationships to each image file, and remove or relocate them if they're photographed post-1948.
Doing that is pointless. Our metadata schema (any metadata schema) identifies the creation date for an image. If you want Saints in BR service, then search for Saintliness by category membership and operator by date. No need to split categories.
Doing that is harmful (and this is a regular bugbear at WP). Now we no longer have a useful category for Category:GWR 2800 Class, instead we have two sub categories, filled with identical photos of long grey locos in the West of England. There is a use cases for "Show me the 28xx" and now we can no longer serve that. Any use case for 28xx in GWR / BR service is extremely trivial in comparison.
Worst of all though, we're treating locos as trains. By the time the ignorant sub-humanoid 'bots have come along and stripped transitive categories because they think they're implied (even when they aren't) we'll lose half of this altogether because one will be seen as implying the other. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:05, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Kept (Non-admin close) - This discussion has been open for over five years with no participation since 2014. Consensus appears to be to keep it as is, and there is clearly not a consensus to rename or delete it. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 21:43, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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