Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26975268-20130605193451/@comment-188432-20130607162656

I'd just like to emphasise Shambala108's point about the need to police these categories. I am so not a fan of categories that need to be regularly policed. If the name is debatable then it shouldn't even be a category. And even putting Category:Catholics under Category:Christians is something that some people would absolutely have a problem with. I have to raise my eyebrow at your easy equivalency of category:Saracens with category:Muslims, as it was originally purely a demonym and had nothing to do with religion. I don't see Aztecs as primarily indicating a religion. That's a racial and to some extent political distinction. Yes, there is an Aztec religion, but a part of the point of The Aztecs is that not everyone who is an Aztec follows the Aztec religion. The central guest star notably loses his religion. I don't think it possible to say that every Aztec we see in the production is "of the Aztec faith". Same thing with Category:Mayans. And then there's the question of category:Tesh and category:Sevateem. Eventually, both groups completely abandon their religious beliefs. But Leela refers to herself as "Leela of the Sevateem" throughout her life. I think that introducing these categories into a religious category only complicates the matter needlessly. These are social groups or races, for the most part, one of whose characteristics may have (temporarily) been a religious element.

I have to say that I just don't see the overwhelming need for much of this. It would seem safer, to me, to just eliminate Earth religious distinctions, wholesale, identify religious leaders as such, and put the purely DWU stuff into category:Individuals by association directly. But getting into a question of whether a Spaniard in the 12th century is a Catholic — or Jackie Tyler is not a Christian because she had a civil wedding — is going to interject an apparent level of certainty where no such damned thing exists.

These categories are going to be picked up by kids who don't really know what these religious words mean, or by adults straining to find as many of their own religion in DW as they possibly can, and they'll ultimately mean nothing.

Is it okay to use categories to identify rabbis or COE vicars or Baptist preachers or imams or Buddhist monks? Sure. Such people are formal members of a religion, and we're really identifying them by their occupation. But anything else is going to be very hard to police, because you can't do it with a bot. You'd have to periodically look on every single page and figure out whether you think there's enough narrative evidence to support the assertion. And even I just don't have a complete enough Doctor Who library — nor, really, time in the day — to do that. And it would still largely be a judgement call.