[09:20] <[redacted]> anyone knows how to get the "noteability" flag removed from a page?
[09:20] <CharlotteWebb> [redacted], see the link that says "edit this page"
[09:22] <[redacted]> CharlotteWebb: thanks! that worked

War on idiocy:

1. "Notability": is not and never has been policy [1].
2. "Consensus": please learn to spell it before claiming one exists [2].
3. "Merge and delete": is not a valid result of an AFD debate [3].

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I hope you're planning to update all the links you've broken by changing the destination of WP:.... Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:15, 17 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It was wrong of you to move this without a debate since two people at the Cfd had stated it should not be moved. The great majority of articles about peoples are in the form "Fooians", whilst the related biographical categories are Cat:Fooish people. The articles and categories do not cover the same subject. Additionally, the article covers a people (singular, means ethnic group or race) while the category is of people (plural of person, mean individuals), so that they appear to be the same name is in fact just a coincidence, a trick of the language. Johnbod (talk) 20:53, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't examined all articles of this kind but my own experience has been that most of that the categories typically match the article.

Surely this is a practical matter for some of them as no single noun exists in English:

• Malagasy people/Category:Malagasy people
• Maltese people/Category:Maltese people
• Portuguese people/Category:Portuguese people
• Vietnamese people/Category:Vietnamese people

Of course for some ethnic groups the only single nouns which exist are considered offensive/sexist/politically incorrect and probably not worth mentioning:

• Chinese people/Category:Chinese people
• French people/Category:French people
• Irish people/Category:Irish people
• Japanese people/Category:Japanese people

In some cases the adjective form is commonly used as a noun:

• "Albanians" for Albanian people/Category:Albanian people
• "Azerbaijanis" for Azerbaijani people/Category:Azerbaijani people
• "Brazilians" for Brazilian people/Category:Brazilian people
• "Colombians" for Colombian people/Category:Colombian people
• "Hungarians" for Hungarian people/Category:Hungarian people
• "Iraqis" for Iraqi people/Category:Iraqi people
• "Latvians" for Latvian people/Category:Latvian people
• "Lithuanians" for Lithuanian people/Category:Lithuanian people
• "Puerto Ricans" for Puerto Rican people/Category:Puerto Rican people
• "Thais" for Thai people/Category:Thai people

Even when there is no present-day nationality to conflate it with:

• "Assyrians" for Assyrian people/Category:Assyrian people
• "Basques" for Basque people/Category:Basque people
• "Kashmiris" for Kashmiri people/Category:Kashmiri people
• "Kurds" for Kurdish people/Category:Kurdish people
• "Maris" for Mari people/Category:Mari people
• "Tibetans" for Tibetan people/Category:Tibetan people (matter of dispute)

In other cases a less obvious but very common noun exists and could just as easily be used instead, but isn't:

• "Danes" for Danish people/Category:Danish people
• "Magyars" for Hungarian people/Category:Hungarian people
• "Spaniards" for Spanish people/Category:Spanish people
• "Scots" for Scottish people/Category:Scottish people
• "Turks" for Turkish people/Category:Turkish people

If I had to decide what to do about all these categories I'd probably use "[adjective] people" for ethnicities and "people from [country]" for nationalities (which may or may not coincide). Won't happen I know, but as a second choice I'd at least make the category match the article title in every case. Failing that we I guess we are left with "category shall use '[adjective] people' but the article shall use '[plural noun]' unless none exists (in which case it shall also use '[adjective] people')? Perhaps some of the above can be renamed to make the nomenclature more consistently inconsistent. If only category redirects worked like they should, this wouldn't matter so much. — CharlotteWebb 14:51, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Thanks! I still think the articles do not exactly correspond with the categories, so I'm not too concerned with them matching. List of Danish people would be the exact match for Category:Danish people, but we rarely have such articles. You also get cases like Category:African American, which is the category matching African Americans; Category:African Americans (which should be renamed to Category:African American people) is not. Johnbod (talk) 18:09, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for what? Just curious, not trying to be sarcastic.

I do understand the "people" vs. "people" distinction, but the meanings seem quite interchangeable in English-language prose. I checked the lead sentence of some of the articles linked above and the usage is not consistent (emphasis added):

"The Colombian people is the multiethnic nation from [...] Colombia."

"The Tibetan people are indigenous to Tibet and surrounding areas..."

If I say "I like the Danish people" I might mean "my awesome neighbors downstairs are from Denmark" or "I find Danes likable in general" or "the deliverymen who bring baked goods to my office are cute"—it all depends on the context.

Overall I think the majority of readers and editors do and will interpret "Foobar people" as "individuals who are Foobar" rather than "the group of individuals which is collectively Foobar" unless context explicitly dictates otherwise. A deliberately awkward pronoun might be too subtle, or even "corrected" as a typo, so I wouldn't rely on that.

(This assumes they see a meaningful difference between these two meanings and are not hopelessly lost just reading this—the other day I tried explaining my 7-year-old nephew the difference between "some fish" and "some fishes" and he didn't get it).

Is there a situation where failure to "disambiguate" people creates a problem? — CharlotteWebb 19:53, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for moving Silesians back. The point is that the peoples articles normally cover language, culture and art, history and all sorts of things that the purely biographical people categories obviously don't. Looking for an example, I saw Anglo-Saxons was in fact only categorized in Category:Anglo-Saxon people, which is clearly wrong, as it is really the main article for Category:Anglo-Saxon England (now changed). These are its main sections:

1 Etymology 2 Anglo-Saxon history 2.1 Origins (AD 400–600) 2.2 Heptarchy (600–800) 2.3 Viking Age (800–1066) 3 Culture 3.1 Architecture 3.2 Art 3.3 Language 3.4 Law 3.5 Literature 3.6 Religion 4 Contemporary meanings - all of which have sister-categories to Category:Anglo-Saxon people. Johnbod (talk) 20:40, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]