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Categories and best practices

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I'm giving myself a headache trying to understand the books/novels category divisions. Of course it will never be perfect, but what is best practice? Novels is for fiction of course, but when it comes to nesting by topic it all gets so confusing (and it messes up my petscan queries...) Are the novel categories supposed to be nested in books or should they both be nested in "works"? Or should the books categories be for both and we should have separate nonfiction book categories for nonfiction books? I have seen all of these done and the inconsistency is slowly driving me mad. PARAKANYAA (talk) 08:08, 11 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If anybody finds an answer, please let me know. I have yet to pick up on a consistent rule. I do not believe there is one.
In an ideal world, I think, we'd have "Non-fiction books", "Novels", and "Children's books" (+ what have you) type categories all nested together inside "Books" categories, which in turn nest inside "Works"-related categories. That way, when people inevitably put novels and nonfiction into the "Books" type, somebody just needs to move them down a level. Cons: lots of new category pages would be created and we would further formalise the inconsistency with the the scope of WP:BOOKS and the category/normal definitions of book. Advantages- easier sorting, increased consistency across categories, and this wouldn't be a difficult change to get used to. Apparently somebody thought about doing it in 2011, and received no push-back.
Actually, I might be bold and try doing this on some of the more annoyingly cluttered categories and report back if anybody raises any objections. GreenLipstickLesbian (talk) 04:57, 19 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@GreenLipstickLesbian Probably anything is better than what we are doing now. PARAKANYAA (talk) 11:54, 19 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I do agree that Works > Books > non-fiction / novels / children's books is the hierarchy that best matches how these concepts are related in the real world. I would support and admire anyone who brought some consistency to our bookish ontology here, though I have little appetite for it myself. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 06:49, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm just going to pretend we're going with that (good enough for me!) PARAKANYAA (talk) 08:25, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose this is where I pop in to throw in the "all novels are fiction, but not all fiction is a novel" wrench. See WT:BOOKS#Scope for fiction, below. -- asilvering (talk) 08:43, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Asilvering Well, yes, but as far as I can tell our category system has no accounting for said articles? This is unrelated to the project scopes for what it's worth. We don't have a category tree for non-novel fiction. PARAKANYAA (talk) 08:45, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From what I saw, though it might be biased by what I was searching, most non-novel fiction is just in the novel categories, except short stories. PARAKANYAA (talk) 09:04, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have so far managed to duck out of reach of the wrench by throwing all the plays, poetry anthologies, short stories, comics, jpop photo books, etcetera into the "Books" parent category. GreenLipstickLesbian (talk) 09:23, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This would probably make more sense if we did it the Works > Books > Non-fiction/Novels/Children's literature etc way.
But still, I don't think plays/theatrical things should go in the book category at all, in most cases (I've seen a few cases where it's a novel written like a play, but was never actually a proper one, so that would probably count). A short story is also very much not a book so should not be in that category tree. Poetry anthologies and comics I think have their own category tree. Rest of your list, understandable. PARAKANYAA (talk) 09:30, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Scope for fiction

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Right now, the main page of the wikiproject states this project was formed to organize and promote quality coverage of non-fiction books on Wikipedia. "Non-fiction" was added in Special:Diff/1181689243 in October 2023. No one objected to that addition at the time, possibly because no one noticed. Since there are many books that are not non-fiction, novels, or children's literature, I think we should remove "non-fiction" from the scope in this sentence.

Also, while we're here, I think we should probably just let novels sit in this wp rather than moving them out to novels/kidlit. People are going to intuitively reach for "the books wikiproject" and keep adding them here anyway. May as well not lose sleep over it. -- asilvering (talk) 02:45, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

PARAKANYAA, courtesy ping. -- asilvering (talk) 02:45, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Asilvering Looking through talk page archives and the scope as written before it seems that non-fiction was always implicitly the scope, as it explicitly excludes "Articles concerning fiction" as out of scope even before the October change. For use a project grouping tool I think as the category of "books" is so overly broad that the subdivision between fiction/nonfiction is useful when it comes to finding articles to work on and coordination, which is the purpose of a WikiProject, since there are specific considerations in each case and some people may only be interested in one or the other. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:52, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And (given that this was triggered by my attempt to remove mistagged articles), there are about 38,000- articles tagged with wp books, and I think about 700 are tagged incorrectly as WP Books when they should be at novels, from the queries I did anyway. That's not that bad, at least not enough to remove the distinction over. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:55, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's surely much higher than only 700. If you look at our Article Alerts, quite a lot of them are for novels. I don't see any reason to believe that the same pattern wouldn't hold for articles that aren't currently on the Alerts list. -- asilvering (talk) 08:44, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Asilvering That's because our article alerts isn't based only off of the project tagging. From looking at the AA specification for this page the WikiProject Books article alerts also includes every article that transcludes Infobox book, which is obviously all the fiction ones as well. From my queries the project tagging is mostly fine. PARAKANYAA (talk) 08:48, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

AfD discussion

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This afd discussion about The Editors (novel) may be of interest to editors participating in this project. Just putting it here because I don't know if any of the contributors to the discussion are members of the project. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 04:35, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed deletion of The Jackrabbit Factor

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Notice

The article The Jackrabbit Factor has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Unreferenced and unimproved almost 15 years. No reliable sources. Run of the mill, self-published self-help book. Author not notable. Not enough information to merge or redirect anywhere.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Bearian (talk) 14:26, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Language/nationality categories

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In most categorization schemes for books, the nationality categories are nested within the language categories, which has always felt very weird. I've seen people remove the language categories as it's already nested in a nationality subcategory, which I feel is actually a loss of information. A book can be French, and first published in English, or it can be Swiss and published in German, French, Italian, etc. I feel like initial language of publication is defining apart from nation. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:03, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hm, I share the sense that language and nationality are only correlated, not logically nested. Just consider Canada and French/English. A pure and precise ontology would probably have language and nation categories existing in parallel, at equal placement in the hierarchy. But I’m not sure how much appetite there is to essentially double-tag all works, as eg both “French books” and “books in French”. I don’t consider myself well informed about the best way to organize Wikipedia category infrastructure. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 04:16, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, it's an awkward situation. With countries like France specifically it may pose an issue - but with ones like Switzerland or Canada it is the reverse. PARAKANYAA (talk) 09:59, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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