Category talk:Publishing companies

Latest comment: 8 years ago by Samwilson in topic Rename Category:Book Publishers

Purpose of category; capitalization

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This category has been around forever, but its purpose is unclear compared to Category:Publishers. Is it redundant, or is there some finer focus? I notice that, for example, Portal:Disney is in here currently, despite them being obviously a publisher of much more than just books.

Also, this category should probably be capitalized as "Book publishers", rather than "Book Publishers". djr13 (talk) 07:53, 11 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

Well I'm glad I'm not the only one, I've had this conundrum for quite some time now. For a better idea I've taken the time to make a flow-chart to get a better understanding of the current implementations of how Publishing categories are aligned.(there could be more but this is what I've seen so far.)
 
 
 
 
 
 
Categories
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Authors
 
Works
 
Sources
 
Portals
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Authors by occupation
 
Works by publisher
Publishing companies
 
Book Publishers
 
Portals by class
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Publishers
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Library portals
 
 
 

Basically what I show above are the main roots to different Publishing categories. The current categories are not very strictly defined, they also have no unison connected to each other. Because the topic of "publishing" is so broad it has caused disarray among categorization. For example Category:Works by publisher and Category:Book Publishers are quite redundant. I agree that Category:Publishers and Category:Book Publishers are quite misleading, but are quite different. Category:Publishers contains people while Category:Book Publishers contains publishing companies. Category:Publishers should probably be renamed to Category:Publishers (people). Although we could put Category:Publishers (people) as a subcategory inside Category:Publishers. Anyways basically it's a mess and could use reformation.--Rochefoucauld (talk) 17:31, 11 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

Will think about this a bit more in-depth when I get a minute, but one thing I notice is Category:Sources. Is there a defining purpose to that? The name seems to imply it would be EG the Internet Archive, or anything else listed at Wikisource:Sources. Perhaps that's one category worth knocking out. djr13 (talk) 22:46, 11 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
I think you might be right on that, the other 3 subcategories can easily fit in somewhere else. Sources could be considered works by type.--Rochefoucauld (talk) 23:21, 11 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
I think the optimal way, and to me what I assumed was the case anyway, would be that Cat:Publishers would be a (so to speak) top-level category on par with Authors, Works and Portals. Publishers can be both organizations (each with a portal) or individuals (each with either an author page [if they are also an author] or a portal page [if they are not]). It can't really appropriately be a sub-category of any of these other three.

Of course that still leaves the question of what to do with Cat:Book Publishers. Obviously if it is kept, it would at the very least be a subcat of Cat:Publishers, but I'm not sure it fills much of a role at all. I'd be more interested in seeing categorized publishers of those relatively exceptional non-book publications, myself. :) Plus of course if kept it should be lower-cased...

As far as Cat:Works by publisher, that is only different from Cat:Publishers because it is basically a metacategory for holding publisher categories which contain mainly works, while Cat:Publishers would directly contain the publishers' pages themselves: both fulfill a slightly different navigation purpose. So, Cat:Works by publisher would be a sub-category of Cat:Works and Cat:Publishers. djr13 (talk) 00:57, 12 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
And of course, if you want there to be a Category:Publishers (people) you could still do that, it would just be under Category:Publishers. Do note though, as I mentioned, sometimes portals can be people, if they were not authors but have a collection of works connected with them somehow worthy of a portal (it can even just be books /about/ them). djr13 (talk) 02:49, 12 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
I agree with you for the most part. I'm guessing what your saying is to create a new top level inside Cat:categories? This might help out alot.I would try to rename the top category to something more broad like, Cat:Publishing or, you might be right just to name it Cat:Publishers. This will allow for more future branches, kind of like how wikipedia does it. See,Cat:Publishing.--Rochefoucauld (talk) 13:16, 12 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
Calling it Cat:Publishing seems like it would contain works about publishing, rather than Author and Portal pages. I wouldn't be outright opposed to this, as at least it would be clearer, but it just seems the difference between it being under Category:Categories and being under Category:Works by subject. djr13 (talk) 18:04, 12 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

Rename Category:Book Publishers

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From Wikisource:Bot_requests#Rename_Category:Book_Publishers:

As per discussion on the Scriptorium, would it be possible to change Category:Book Publishers to Category:Publishing companies? Thanks! — Sam Wilson ( TalkContribs ) … 23:19, 9 February 2016 (UTC)Reply