Talk: Holidays

We have this unwritten rule that a category with a random bunch of sub-categories and articles mixed together looks messy and disorganized. Christmas grew and grew and became a huge and messy mix of songs, merchandise, productions and characters. It was overwhelming! So we split it up into sub-categories and it worked nice as there was just so much ("Christmas Songs" has become a great category, for example).

But I don't think the other holidays, which have much smaller numbers of related articles, really need all the subcategoies like Christmas has. I mean the 11 articles in "Thanksgiving" could be split up into 7-8 sub-cateogies (each with 1-2 articles in them), but that seems pointless and defets the fun of being able to surf around the category to see all the Thanksgiving connections. I'm not sure if the subcategories to compartmentalize everything up is necessary in Mother's Day or New Years Eve. And I don't see the point in having a "Halloween Stage Shows" category just to hold one article. I think with the exception of Christmas (which is pretty big) we should just do a catch-all category for each holiday. If in the future they grow so big that it becomes overwhelming and messy we can sub-categorize everything in it, but at this point I don't see the need in any of the other holidays (currently Halloween and Birthdays are sub-divided up).

Thoughts on keeping Halloween & Birthdays divided up? Thoughts on merging them into catch-all holiday categories? Thoughts on dividing up the other holidays? Thoughts on anything? -- Brad D. (talk) 22:42, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

You made a good point on your talk page about Halloween Stage Shows being a waste. I mean, what's the point? I also don't necessarily think that articles and subcategories together is a bad thing. If we had a Halloween Episodes subcategory for Halloween and then everything else fell into Halloween general, that's fine. Compartmentalizing it is trivial and obsessive, and Misc. Halloween is pointless. I'd say if a sub-cat can sustain 5 articles, it's good. But anything less than that should just be grouped together in the general parent directory. — Scott (talk) 23:11, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm sort of in the middle. I agree that some of the subcats are unnecessary, like Halloween stage shows; Birthdays has some which are useful, but some like Birthday albums are pretty finite, or largely re-issues of the same thing. But as it stands now on Halloween, with half subcats and the rest random pages, everything from Vincent Price to Ghostbusters, it's not coherent in any way. When the category was created, it was generally agreed that things like Mulch and Dracula which play off of images associated with Halloween but are not Halloween-themed in themselves could fit in. But if Alfred Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone are considered Halloween, why not The Omen? My thoughts are a) if subcats and articles are mixed, it should either be kept to a minimum or make some sort of sense; right now, there's no real reason King Kong couldn't be considered a Halloween character, for example. And b), reminiscent of the ultimately fruitful debate Scott and I had over Category:History, there should be some definition and explanation of what's included and why. Really, I'd say The Witches is more Halloween-ish than Ghostbusters, for example, unless we're defining Halloween as any and all things horror, supernatural, or as in the case of Hitchcock and Twilight Zone, mildly eerie at best but psychologically suspenseful. The main reason I'm personally iffy on mixing subcats and articles isn't just that it's messy and pushes things down, which seems to be Danny's point of view, but that it's messy and tends to confuse people when looking for something or unsure of how to categorize things. The fact that several recent additions to Category:Birthdays have been just in that category and not in the subcats, even when they exist and are applicable, is a strong argument for changing that to all articles, though with all of these, it does provoke a mild problem with episodes. So a compromise might be to, apart from Christmas, keep only subcats for holiday episodes, and find a way to organize those both all together, and in the appropriate categories (either as a see also or, if insisted upon, a subcat). -- Andrew Leal (talk) 01:27, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

I think the question isn't whether to have things in categories or subcats. The question is: What is the Halloween category for? If categories are a navigation tool, then what are we helping people to find? Right now, that category is kind of a mishmash. Some of it is specifically Halloween-related -- albums, books and videos with an official Halloween theme. But then there's also random monster characters and songs, with no particular rhyme or reason.

Why is "Night and Day" in the Halloween category, but not "I'm Looking Through You" or "I've Got You Under My Skin"? Why Gorilla suits, when there's nothing particularly Halloween-ish about the article? Why Alfred Hitchcock?

I don't think it matters whether the subcats are combined or not. What matters is figuring out what the category is supposed to be for. Personally, my choice would be to have it be material that's officially supposed to be Muppet Halloween -- costumes, albums, books, the stage show. Everything else is extraneous -- it's just random monstery stuff. -- Danny (talk) 01:28, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

The purpose of the Halloween category is to group together Muppet projects that have had a theme that could be interpreted as Halloween-y. "Night and Day" is a sketch that could easily end up on a video compilation of Halloween-y segments if one were ever to be made. I can only imagine that those other songs are not in ther ebecause no one thought of adding them.

As for things like The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock, while I might categorize them as Halloween for my own DVD collection, I wouldn't do it here. The category should be more strictly defined because at a certain point, it all becomes subjective to the contributor. 03:29, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

I see Scott already started cleanup, so this renders a lot of this response (typed earlier redundant), but for the record, I'd vote for keeping real people out of all holiday categories (as opposed to theme categories like mystery, and hey Hitchcock should be in there, or Westerns where we include Roy Rogers). Yeah, Vincent Price was a horror star, but while the Price episode is unquestionably appropriately Halloween-themed, it feels iffy to say that he himself is. Horror and halloween are close but not identical, and while we're at it, we can decide whether that deserves its own category. Dracula and Frankenstein are horror but also indisputably iconic of Halloween, where as The Omen is generally deemed horror, but not particularly Halloween-ish. -- Andrew Leal (talk) 03:38, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

I updated the description of Category:Halloween. — Scott (talk) 03:45, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

That's a big improvement. There's still the mix of cats and subcats, but there's a much clearer logic, and it's easier to see how the miscellany fits in. -- Andrew Leal (talk) 03:58, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Halloween looks great now. Birthdays is a mix of subcats and articles, but its not a huge deal. -- Brad D. (talk) 02:48, 3 November 2006 (UTC)