Category talk:American actors

Merge with US Actingand Actresses

You may want to think about merging this with Category:US Actors and actresses. DJ Clayworth 17:07, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

How about we merge both into "U.S. actors"? -- Infrogmation 06:20, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Actually, the whole point of doing this was to impose consistency by eliminating "and actresses". VeryVerily 06:25, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes. I'd long thought the "and actresses" unnecessary, and am glad to see it go. However with the eternal discussions about American bound to come up again, I'd prefer either "U.S. actors" or "United States actors" as a better choice for the name. -- Infrogmation 06:31, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, we already have Category:American people, and lots of others I don't want to list. I think it's better this way, and I've already converted a good deal of them anyway. VeryVerily 06:46, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Fork?

Maybe actors and actresses should have their own separate categories. There's a lot of articles in this category, and it would work out for the best to split it before it gets too big. -- LGagnon 17:57, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)

• I agree. I think splitting them would be a good idea. [[User:Lachatdelarue|Lachatdelarue (talk)]]

U.S. actors

This has been brough up before, but I would like to revive this discussion. Why is this category not called U.S. actors instead? It seems less ambiguous than "American" which can mean many things, and most of the other categories-by-nationality use U.S. in lieu of American. Hall Monitor 22:02, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Looking at Category:Actors by nationality, 56 categories are '(nationality) actors' and 3 are '(nation) actors. Even the parent categority is by 'nationality', not by 'nation'. Unless you want to change all of them, I think it should stay 'American actors'. Lachatdelarue (talk) 14:30, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Surely such a menial task could be scripted to avoid ambiguity? Hall Monitor 16:22, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Removed tag

I removed the tag about the category getting too large. The tag suggests that people use the subcategories to classify actors. However, the subcategories duplicate the listings in this category. For example, Halle Berry can be found on this caategory and Category:African-American actors. This is the way it should be. The only reason to move people from this list to a set of subcategories would be if there was a set of subcategories that had a place for every entry. An example would be "American actors by state". I don't think subcategories by state would be a good idea either. Perhaps there is a good way to subcategorize actors and someone will have a brilliant suggestion. What is the problem with the category being big? I can get wherever I want using the table of contents. I'd like to leave things be. --Samuel Wantman 06:21, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

For those just stopping by, this idea is also being discussed at Category talk:Film actors. (For the record, I disagree that a table of contents is all that helpful in a category if you don't already know the person's name.) NickelShoe 22:55, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps this category could be classified by decade? (and yes, some actors would have multiple classifications) For me it seems more useful to browse "American film actors of the 1930's" if I'm looking to make connections between people whose name I'm not sure of. Likewise I think a "by genre" classification system would be wonderful. "American film noir actors," "British sci-fi television actors," "Chinese horror film actors," etc. Just a thought. See also Wikipedia talk:Categorization#Actors by time period. David Gale 23:08, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

All these schemes run the risk of adding to overcategorization. By decades will put some actors in 6 or more categories (Katharine Hepburn), By genre will also put many actors in multiple categories. I suspect that these subcategorizations might be suitable after a future upgrade of the software. Until then, perhaps lists for these groupings might be more appropriate. -- Samuel Wantman 01:03, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Asian-American Actors

I've noticed that a few minorities have their own subcategory. Don't Asian-Americans deserve a subcategory as well? I was just trying to look for such a list, but couldn't find one. True, there is not a terribly great number of Asian-American Actors out there, but I thought it would be a good idea nevertheless.

I don't see why not. NickelShoe 15:10, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Categorization/Gender, race and sexuality before proceeding. -- Samuel Wantman 01:06, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Actresses?

There seems to be a consensus of sorts here that we shouldn't use the word 'actresses' in this category's title. To me seeing women described as 'actors' looks ridiculous. Does anyone else agree? Terrafire 18:23, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

I think actors is much better. An actor is somebody that acts. Calling them actresses because they're women is like calling female Jews "Jewesses" or even calling female doctors "doctresses". I admit that the usage of actress is much more common than Jewess, but since there is usage the other way, I think we should stick with it. NickelShoe 17:10, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

The usage of 'actress' to mean a female who acts is far more common than the use of 'actor'. In daily usage most people in my experience would consider it strange to call a woman an actor. I don't know whether that's a difference between the UK and other countries, but the usage of actress has definitely not died out. When I wanted to find an article on an actress I specifically looked for the 'actresses' category, ignoring the actors category, and there must be others who do the same.

You can propose the change at WP:CFD. It is sure to generate a good deal of discussion. I would first look around for pages that discuss this issue, as it has come up many times. -- Samuel Wantman 00:34, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

There is no reason to breach good practice applied to all other professions

Leaving people in this category just creates category clutter, and category clutter is getting out of hand on biographical articles. Everyone should come out of this. Those of us who are against the idea of adding people to this category can't stop other users doing so, but given that what we prefer is very much in line with normal practice, there it is not acceptable to try to ban us from tidying up articles by removing this category. Chicheley 09:41, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

It looks like most all other American profession categories are fully populated, so depopulating this category would be breaching good practice. It also looks like the actor categories of other countries are fully populated as well. -- Samuel Wantman

Category duplication

(This was copied from User talk:Chicheley)

Hi Chicheley, I've been dealing with this issue for about a year and a half, so I want to give you some background on the issue and explain what I'm doing:

When Categories began, about 2 years ago, the situation was very different than it is now. Category "clutter" was not an issue because nothing was in categories. The big problem that shaped the initial discussions was the problem of categories getting "too big". "Too big" at that time was larger than a few hundred categories because there no easy way to navigate a large category. Back then, there were no table of contents for categories. To deal with large categories the standard practice was to create subcategories and depopulate the larger ones. The first categories that were "too big" were people categories, and subcategories "by nationality" were created to break them up. As this was happening, I and others became frustrated as some perfectly fine categories with 500 or so articles got broken up into 'by nationality' categories that were much less useful for browsing.

Another oft stated principal of categorization is that categories could be broken into different systems of subcategorization, so that several systems of subcategorization could co-exist. As more and more subcategorization methods proliferated, more and more categories got broken up into small pieces. Early guidelines for categorization reflected this way of doing things.

This was about the time I started getting involved in categorization policy. Two categories particularly bothered me. One was Category:Film directors which in its first incarnation contained film directors from all over the world. One day I discovered that it had been depopulated and replaced by Category:Film directors by nationality. The original category made it very easy to browse through all the articles on film directors. When it was broken up it became difficult. I found this especially irksome because I don't find nationality to be at all relevant to film directors.

Another category that bothered me was Category:Bridges in New York City. I spend alot of time working on articles about bridges. At the time, all the toll bridges in New York City had been removed from the category because they were in the sub-category:Toll bridges in New York City. It didn't make sense to me that a reasonably sized category would have half of its contents removed because there was a sub-category that was a subset of the larger category. Someone looking for the bridges in NYC shouldn't have to look in both places. The distinction of a bridge being a toll bridge may be of use to some people, but it is not an important attribute of bridges.

When I inquired about the reasons for the categorization policy, the rationale given was that categories had to be broken up when they got to big to make them useful. This inspired me to create the first version of a category table of contents which has evolved into the TOC found in virtually every large category in wikipedia. With the acceptance of CategoryTOC, I started examining what parts of the categorization policy was out of date. This led to some long discussions at Wikipedia talk:Categorization, a rewrite of the page about 7 months ago, and the addition of Wikipedia:Categorization/Categories and subcategories.

This leads us to our current situation. Here is the issue in a nutshell:

• Wikipedia's categorization scheme allows for multiple taxonomies. This is a good thing and a powerful feature.
• People want to create subcategories which are essentially intersections of larger categories.
• Wikipedia categories act as indexes that help users browse through subjects.

The problem is that these 3 qualities of categorization conflict unless there is categorization duplication. If there is no duplication, the larger categories are less useful for browsing and indexing. If everything is broken into small subcategories it is very difficult to browse through all of them. If they exist combined and broken up, you can browse at whatever level you desire. After the discussion about this at talk page, or the relevant discussions at Wikipedia talk:Categorization (linked from the talk page). We decided to fully populating the actors categories as an experiment to see if this way of categorizing can gain wider acceptance.

If populating higher level categories gains wide acceptance, we will need a way to make it clear which categories get populated and which do not. We have noted on the Category:Film actors page that the listings are duplicated, and there can be some sort of standard format for this. I don't really think it is all that bad, and our new way of doing it fits into the natural order of how people put people into categories. First they get entered into the more general category, and then added to the more specific subcategory The populating of categories should be an all or nothing decision. Either they contain all the articles that fit or none of them. I find the current common situation, where categories only contain the un-differentiated articles to be very unsatisfactory.

The downside, as you mention is category "clutter". Categorization is imperfect. The solution, most talked about is to have an automated way to do category intersections, so you could take Category:Film actors and Category:American people and find the intersection. If this is implemented, there would be no need for a great number of the subcategories we now have. Categories would be populated at the "level of notability", by which I mean that people are notable for being actors or film actors. In these days of globalization, people are rarely known for being American film actors. So what we are doing is fully populating the actors categories at the "level of notability" and below. This essentially is the system that people hope will happen by having a software upgrade. The upgrade (if it happens) will add intersections that do not yet exist, create them on the fly, and remove a good deal of category clutter in articles.

Until there is a software upgrade the question is which is worse, having a little "clutter" in the category listings of articles, or depopulating categories at the topic level. I'd much rather live with the clutter. As more and more category intersections are created, I'd like to hope that people will think of the intersection categories as the clutter, and not the topic level categories. -- Samuel Wantman 07:31, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not against putting things in parent categories and main categories in a few special cases, but I don't think that the actors categories are special cases. It started off with film actors, then it seems all American actors were also to be put in Category:American actors, even if they had been fully subcategorised. But what about television, stage, musicial theatre, silent film, voice and radio actors. What about people with dual nationality? We could end up with people in not one or two, but 14 or 16 or more extra categories. That would be a disaster. I remain convinced that your approach is misguided, and that the "consensus" you trumpet for it does not exist. Chicheley 21:38, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

You also utterly misunderstand the usage of categories. The upgrade would not reduce the desirability of thorough subcategorisation at all, because they facilitate browsing. The intersections would only be used by people who were actively looking for something, whereas sharp subcategories encourage serendipity. Your proposal would either rob parent categories of huge amounts of relevant material or encumber them with even more irrelevant material. For example instead of placing Category:British stage actors in Category:Theatre in the United Kingdom, a choice would have to be made between using Category:British actors, withs its hundreds articles about actors who do not work in theatre, and having no actors in the theatre category at all. By suggesting that the subcategories should be abolished you are proposing to chronically undermine one of Wikipedia's finest attributes, that is its serendipity. Chicheley 21:41, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Another issue is that many of the actors are not actually in both categories. If we work on getting everyone out of Category:American actors and into the appropriate subcategories, then we will know that people who visits those places will be see all the names the should see. Otherwise, that happy situation might never be reached. I try to recategorise at least a hundred people a day across a wide range of fields as the general standard of precision and completeness of categorisation of biographical articles is low, and I am quite happy to do much of the donkey work in this area. Chicheley 22:01, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Having clicked on some random names, it seems that only a minority of the names are dual categorised. Not a minority of the big stars, but a minority overall. Thus your basic premise that we currently have a dual system is false. We just have a messy, inaccurate, incomplete system that needs an upgrade. Chicheley 22:19, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying, and I'm also not sure that you understand what I am saying, so let's keep at this. There is nothing strange about having Category:American actors fully populated. Actor categories from other countries are fully populated and other American occupation categories are fully populated. There is nothing against policy old or new about having this category populated. Except for two incomplete subsets (actor-singers and child actors), American actors are only fully duplicated in their grandchildren categories and not their two children. The two subsets are incomplete and fits one of the acceptable exceptions for duplication. As for Category:Film actors. Film is international. I have seen films with Americans, Canadians, Brits, Italians and French all in the same movie. If an occupation category is international, it seems that it should be populated with people of all nations. I have not proposed adding people above their level of notability, and this might just mean repopulating Category:Film actors. It doesn't mean that we would fully populate Actors, Entertainers, etc... Theatre, by its nature, is not very international, so perhaps this would not need repopulating. Instead, I'd probably want to add actors "by language" as this seems a natural way to collect theatre actors. Under the current system, there would be no reason not to add "Theatre actors by language" as a subcategorization scheme, so adding this category has nothing to do with the issue of duplication. My point is that there is a natural place to combine people together in fields that are international in nature.

I think you have misunderstood what I was saying about a software upgrade. Many subcategories are being added below the level of notability that are the intersection of larger categories. For example, there ethnicity subcategories like, Category:African Americans and occupation categories like Category:Film actors. So currently an African-American film actor like Laurence Fishburne is in | African-American actors | American film actors | etc... but maybe after a software upgrade he would be in | Actors | People of African descent | American people | Film people | etc... With such a system you could find and browse through categories for

• all actors
• all people of African descent
• all Americans
• all film people
• all American actors
• all film actors,
• all American film actors,
• all American film people
• all actors of African descent,
• all film people of African descent,
• all African Americans
• all African-American actors
• all African-American film people
• all African-American film actors.

By categorizing Fishburne in the four large categories he would also automatically be in all 11 of the intersection categories. Now I don't know if, when and how category intersection will ever be implemented, but my question to you is which of the 15 possible categories mentioned above should Fishburne be in now, until a new system is created? The problem as you point out is that we cannot create and fully populate all possible categories without creating quite a bit of clutter. Each additional attribute roughly doubles the number of possible combinations. My point is that Fishburne is notable as a film actor. I will forgo many of the other possible combinations if he is in at least the category for which he is known. In my view, what has happened in the past is that the important categories got chopped up and depopulated for the sake of the intersections. I just want to add back some of these significant categories.

I am certainly NOT advocating removal of ANY subcategories. Absolutely not. I am just saying that duplication should be considered more acceptable since there has been a proliferation of subcategories that are the intersection of larger categories. Let me give you another example. Recently, someone took Category:Bridges in England and depopulated it by moving all the bridges to dozens of smaller categories, one for each county in England. I plan on repopulating the larger category because I find the smaller categories are much less useful, and unlikely to create serendipity for users (especially those who are not British).

It may seem useful for those of us who categorize to have these large categories function as a holding tank for the articles that haven't yet been categorized more precisely. But I think these categories, randomly populated with a small number of obscure people, look very bad to the general user of Wikipedia. If people have a natural inclination to put someone in the category "Film Actor" I think that sends the message that this is what makes the person notable. A small number of people appearing in a category may be be the result of users not understanding how to categorize. A large number seems to be evidence that WE have made a mistake and the category needs to be repopulated. I know this means some extra work, but I think it is worth it.

Yes we have a messy, inaccurate, incomplete system that needs an upgrade. It also needs a consensus as to how it works. I think you are misunderstanding what I am trying to do, and I hope you will reread what I have written above. When I mention a dual system, what I mean is that some people think it is x and some think it is y. I'm trying to push this issue so that there can be some agreement about how it works. What I am proposing is that whenever we categorize someone we should say this person is notable for being _______. If they are notable for being a film actor they should be in the category for film actors. If they are notable for being a film director they should be in the category for film directors. Same for English-language authors. If their profession is not international, they may be notable for being an American politician, a German lawyer, etc... Just because someone is in a small subcategories should not be a reason for taking them out of the larger notability categories. They can be duplicated in the smaller categories. People who want to browse through the small categories are able to. I don't understand why we don't want to have a single category that functions as a central index of film actors, yet allow dozens of Actor by series categories adding to category clutter. -- Samuel Wantman 08:40, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I am copying this discussion to Wikipedia talk:Categorization Please reply on the Categorization talk page. --Samuel Wantman 08:40, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

FYI regarding the (now deleted) California actor categories

Just wanted to post a quick follow-up here on the now-deleted categCategory:California film actors and Category:California television actors. Unfortunately I missed the discussion on the deletion (apparently it wasn't on my watch list), or I would have responded to some of the comments there. But better late than never.

Contrary to what appears to have been assumed, those categories were NOT created solely as a means to subcategorize Category:American actors. Rather, I made them in the process of cleaning up and subcategorizing Category:People from California, which was overly large at the time. In doing so, I wanted to use two common subdivisions of bio articles: division by geographic area (eg by county) and division by occupation (eg writers, actors, politicians). Many of those subcategories already existed, and some didn't.

As it turns out, there was no "Category:California actors" subcategory, even though acting is one of the major professions in that state. Since American actors already had the major divisions of Film actors and Television actors, it seemed like those would likewise be good choices for California people by occupation.

So Category:California actors would be meant as a way to identify people from California with similar occupations. The side effect is that everyone is that category is also, by definition, an American actor, and so therefore can be removed from that parent category. Articles normally are not in both a parent category and its subcategories simultaneously, since it would be a redundant duplication of information. Thus when an article qualifies for "Cat:California actor", it wouldn't appear directly in either "Cat:American actors" or "Cat:People from California".

Hope that clears up the reason for the categories. In fact, were I to do it again, I would not bother with the "film/tv" split and would simply do "California actors" for all actors, because probably 90% of the film/tv actors have done both. Dugwiki 21:02, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

American actors to American male actors

Should actors in this category be moved to Category:American male actors considering there's only a few actors in the Category:American actors?--Mjs1991 (talk) 22:08, 1 April 2015 (UTC)