Category talk:Alexander Macomb House
Category:McComb Mansion[edit]
Redundant (and misspelled), already covered at Category:Alexander Macomb House BoringHistoryGuy (talk) 13:11, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- You should not open to discussion an empty cat but mark it for speedy deletion adding {SD|C2}. --E4024 (talk) 13:25, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- BoringHistoryGuy, E4024's advice here is bad advice. The category is empty because you manually recategorized the files that had been in the category, prior to nominating it for deletion. That is a disruptive practice. I can't tell you how many times a category I relied upon was not there, when I needed it again, because some well meaning person manually emptied it. We have a whole procedure for moving contents from one category to another. You apply a {{Move}} template. If approved a robot does the actual moving, and, more importantly, in instances where there were just a small number of images, the robot leaves a redirect.
Sometimes I have come across the process, after the well meaning but ill-advised contributor manually emptied the category, but before an administrator removed the category, due to it being empty, and have been able to make a case for why the now empty category was to be preferred over the other contributor preferred. In one case the other person was convinced a river in Africa, or Asia, had a different name than the one I created a category for. Google showed both names were in use. The nation in question used a language like Arabic, not a language like Chinese. Chinese has a strict transliteration scheme. In theory, Chinese names have just one transliteration into English. Other languages' transliterations are very hit or miss. So the other guy wasn't clearly wrong, but neither was I. In the end, when I was able to find google hits to places where the government of the nation where the river was located used the transliteration I first came across the contents of the category was restored.
In cases like this emptying, followed by deletion, should not be used, since the following choices are superior:
- Apply the {{Move}} template;
- Place a {{Category redirect}} in the category;
- Call for discussion at Commons:Categories_for_discussion, WITHOUT first emptying the category. Geo Swan (talk) 14:22, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- BoringHistoryGuy, E4024's advice here is bad advice. The category is empty because you manually recategorized the files that had been in the category, prior to nominating it for deletion. That is a disruptive practice. I can't tell you how many times a category I relied upon was not there, when I needed it again, because some well meaning person manually emptied it. We have a whole procedure for moving contents from one category to another. You apply a {{Move}} template. If approved a robot does the actual moving, and, more importantly, in instances where there were just a small number of images, the robot leaves a redirect.
- BoringHistoryGuy, if, for the sake of argument, this building is more widely known as the Category:Alexander Macomb House, not the Category:McComb Mansion, then isn't a {{Category redirect}} the best choice, not deletion? Is there some reason you chose deletion over redirection, in this particular case?
You may consider yourself an amateur expert in early American history. Congratulations! But the rest of us are not experts. I came across an image labelled "McComb Mansion", so I put it in a category with that name. Other contributors could come across similarly labelled images. Us non-experts have no way of knowing "McComb Mansion" is not the structure's real name. Even if we were aware of the existence of Category:Alexander Macomb House we can't be expected to know it is the same structure.
Surely you recognize we need that redirect? Geo Swan (talk) 13:55, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- Note: Redirects are made from alternative names, not wrong names. --E4024 (talk) 14:14, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- Hmmm. You phrase this comment as if you thought you were citing a policy, a guideline, or a long established convention. But you didn't link to one. Geo Swan (talk) 00:07, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
- @Geo Swan and E4024: Martha J. Lamb, author of History of the City of New York (1877-1880), introduces the owner of the house (correctly) as Alexander Macomb, claims "McComb" as an alternate spelling, then proceeds to use "McComb" for page after page.[1]
- Leila Herbert, author of The First American: His Homes and His Households (1900), uses "Macomb" throughout the text, although the caption under Harry Fenn's ilustration uses "McComb."
- I opposed the Redirect because it seemed to be perpetuating an error, but Lamb was an early and widely-read source, which makes the likelihood high that other authors also were misled by Lamb's misspelling, and this will pop up again and again.
- A Redirect is the best way to remedy this perpetuation of an error. BoringHistoryGuy (talk) 18:02, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
- @Geo Swan and E4024: So how/when do we close this discussion? BoringHistoryGuy (talk) 20:19, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
I notice even the official plaque says McComb Mansion (and it's mistyped as McComb once in the footnotes of the wikipedia article). But I agree that a redirect to Category:Alexander Macomb House makes sense. Since BoringHistoryGuy has withdrawn his opposition, I'll do so. Redirected to Category:Alexander Macomb House - Themightyquill (talk) 13:51, 15 December 2020 (UTC)