Forum:Cat:Individuals of unknown species - Purpose? / Delete

What is Category:Individuals of unknown species for?

Most of the individuals that are in the category are already categorised in more than one other category, so it can't be for categorisation reasons.

Also the name implies all these individials are memebers of a species called 'unknown species', there's an 'an' missing to make it make sense it should be Cat:Individuals of an unknown species.

But leaving that aside, what is the category for? It's basically saying these people all belong to a species that doesn't have a name. But they don't all belong to the same unknown/unnamed species, which sets it apart from all the other categories in which their contents share something similar.

So I'm proposing this category is deleted. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:49, February 25, 2012 (UTC)

How about a category of categories that should be deleted, which would contain itself?Boblipton talk to me 15:14, February 25, 2012 (UTC)


 * [ignoring Bob's comment due to edit conflict]


 * Well, I'd agree that the current nomenclature is slightly confusing. It should be Cat:Individuals of unnamed species, or have an extra article thrown in there as you suggest.  So I'm all for moving the category.  But I think deletion is not warranted.


 * I think your logic is a bit flawed. The people in this category do share a common characteristic: we, as the archivists of the Index File, don't know the name of their species. (Put in real world terms: their species was never named in the narrative(s) in which they appeared.)  That's a reasonable organising principle for a category.  The category does not imply, as you suggest, that they are all of the same species.  It means only that they are from species which weren't named.  And the category is hardly on its own.  After all, there are also:


 * category:individuals with unknown names
 * category:Time Lords with unknown names
 * category:Humans with unknown names
 * category:Planets with unknown names


 * The difference here is that it's about species, and species are often vague in the DWU. The list should undeniably be a lot longer than it is, but it will always be limited by the  general propensity of some editors to just assume that a person who looks like a human is a human — without understanding the DWU is essentially built on the notion that though someone appears to be human, they may not be.


 * I know it's not quite as cut and dry as category:individuals with unknown names, but it's still not a "fuzzy" category. If a person appears in a story not set on Earth or an explicitly human colony, and there's no direct confirmation of their species, then they're an "individual of an unnamed species".  That's pretty straightforward.


 * The main reason I like this category is that it's within the spirit of the DWU. It's much better to label someone as a member of an unnamed species than just to assume human based solely on outward appearance.


 * I think it also helps out with non-humanoid species because there are cases where things are given complicated or unusual names, but they aren't actually species names. For instance, Abzorbaloff isn't really a species name, Abzorbalovian being merely an adjective derived from the term the Tenth Doctor originated.  It's useful to put this category on the Abzorbaloff page just as an added confirmation of the nature of the word Abzorbaloff.   15:17: Sat 25 Feb 2012


 * To respond to Bob's post — of which I was unaware when I wrote the above — we already have a category that organises pages which are up for deletion. It's called category:proposed deletions, and it's automatically added by the use of delete. This category is currently in the "category of things that should be deleted".  15:25: Sat 25 Feb 2012