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The following discussion comes from Wikipedia:Categories for deletion, where it is currently listed as unresolved. It may be reviewed again in the future in the light of evolving standards and guidelines for categorization. 22:06, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Category:Books by title

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Subcategories are groups of books by the first letter in their title: Category:Books starting with A, Category:Books starting with B, Category:Books starting with C, and so on. This seems to me like a prime candidate for list articles instead, and a prime misuse of categories. This does not help us classify them in anyway because it is an arbitrary fact about the books—that a book title starts with a particular letter tells you nothing more about it, and that two book titles start with the same letter does not indicate any kind of greater relationship between them. Lists are the way to go. This will simply add unnecessary clutter to every article. Delete all. Postdlf 04:12, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Completely agree. Delete them all, and do it with alphabetical lists, which looks already well established starting at List of books. Someone want to program a bot to take care of all these? -- Netoholic @ 04:31, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
One advantage over lists is that it's a lot easier to add a book to a category than to a list. I like the idea of using categories, but I think we only need one, "Books by title". Breaking them up by letter doesn't accomplish anything. Keep books by title, merge the rest. anthony (see warning) 12:32, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
That's essentially the same as dumping every article on a book into the root-level category, "books", indifferent to any subcategorization. Not how we do things. Postdlf 13:40, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Then we should keep the subcategories. By the way, can you point me to a policy on this? anthony (see warning) 13:58, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I can point to the widespread practice of placing things in relevant subcategories rather than in one undifferentiated bottom-level category. Given the talk on this issue in various places, I'm sure it's shortly to become actual policy. Postdlf 23:53, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The point of categories is to find similar articles by subject. Noone is going to click on a category link that reads "Books starting with A". There is no information value in something so arbitrary. If you want "policy", there is non as such, but take a look at Wikipedia:Categorization#When to use categories. The first example of "Not useful" parallels this book discussion. -- Netoholic @ 15:28, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The point of categories is to categorize. One possible categorization is whether or not something is a book. Now, you seem to have something against large categories, for some reason, even though you admit there is no policy against this. So, if you don't want large categories, break it up by letter. I agree this isn't the best solution, and it's not the one I suggested above. If you don't mind large categories, just stick everything into "books by title". At the very least, put all the uncategorized books into Category:Uncategorized books and make that a subcategory of books. Not doing so is destroying useful information. anthony (see warning) 19:02, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
What's so hard about categorizing a book by year of publication, genre, and author? That's an already well-established structure, so there isn't a need for a dumping ground. Postdlf 23:53, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
It's not hard to categorize one book. What's hard is to categorize lots of them at once. For instance, recategorizing all of the articles under these. anthony (see warning) 02:32, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Actually, re large categories, I was not against them in principle, but I learned from the Talk page that categories over 10k are not liked by the developers as they slow things down. If that's true I think that gives us a good, firm reason for taking a dislike to certain categories. I'm willing to take it on trust, but if anyone wants to check with a developer please do and report back. --[[User:Bodnotbod|bodnotbod .....TALKQuietly)]] 19:33, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)
I don't think we should cater our categorization schemes to bugs in the software. anthony (see warning) 02:32, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Delete all. --Gary D 02:37, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • I oppose deletion of these unless the developers add a feature to automatically create divided pages, as with Special:Allpages/a --ssd 10:12, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I vote for deletion. I appreciate that the category of books by name is going to be enormous if one doesn't have divisions like "books beginning with A".

However, that is why this situation appeals for a list. Rather than having a Category:People whose names starts with A with a subcategory of Category:People whose names start with Aa, we have a List of people by name:A, which does an admirable job of structurally organizing the data.

Wikipedia:Categorization even gives an an example of a 'not useful' category a hypothetical category called Category:Musicians whose first name starts with M.

Anything one can do with a category, you can do with a plain old page; the category system just makes it easier. So we should use the category system for what it was intended, which is arranging related objects in a natural hierarchy. Category:Books starting with A is not part of such a hierarchy. --Saforrest 23:25, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)


  • I Oppose Deletion 19:37, 3 Feb 2005 User:GeZe

Category:Books by title and subcategories, again

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  • Category and its subs were re-listed on CFD on February 8, 2005. The consensus was to delete all the subcategories.

Back in August of last year this category and its 26 subcategories (one for each letter of the alphabet) came up for CfD and went into the /unresolved bin largely because of the concern over having all those books lumped into an unmanagably large category. The discussion is here: Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Category:Books by title. Now, however, there are new tools that make very large categories much easier to deal with; Mediawiki's ability to show only 200 articles at a time and [[Template:CompactCatTOC]]Template:CategoryTOC. I'd like to reopen this case afresh, and hopefully get rid of those arbitrary subcategories. Bryan 06:30, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Now that we have a table of contents for categories, such subcategories are obsolete. Delete.-gadfium 07:54, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • There's no CFD tag on this or any of its subcategories...perhaps Pearle would like to do that? --ssd 01:23, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • I'll do it, since I made the listing it's only fair. :) Bryan 01:44, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • KILL THESE. Books are categorized by date of publication, author, genre, and award. If you can't find what you're looking for under one of these, I don't see how you'd know the title, so it's no use as a navigation aid. As for classification, books that start with the same letter bear no other relation to each other than that. Delete, delete, delete...Postdlf 02:58, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Delete. -Sean Curtin 04:07, Feb 10, 2005 (UTC)
  • Just so everyone knows, the template's been renamed. It's now Template:CategoryTOC. Oh yeah - Delete these categories. -- Rick Block 04:22, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Delete. —Lowellian (talk) 21:55, Feb 10, 2005 (UTC)
  • Delete (them all). Unnecessary categorization. RedWolf 07:00, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
  • Delete. --Conti|✉ 23:25, Feb 16, 2005 (UTC)
  • Delete based on 'table of contents argument' Courtland 23:47, 2005 Feb 16 (UTC)
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