Commons:Categories for discussion/2023/12/Category:Old women sitting

Category:Old women sitting

Other similar categories (eg. Category:Sitting women, Category:Sitting male humans, Category:Sitting young women) use "sitting" as a prefix. Regularization will simplify connecting by templates. Darellur (talk) 20:14, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

I've also had thoughts about this, and I've been confused by the inconsistent methods in several similar cases.

It may be easier to connect categories if their names all begin with "Sitting", but more importantly, it's easier to navigate categories where the names of the subcategories all begin with the headwords that differentiate them, and not the search term that they all have in common. In e.g. the sitting categories, everyone already knows that everthing is going to be all about sitting, so noone is going to be looking for "Sitting x," but rather "x sitting."

It also seems to me that the category system in general is based on the principle that what's in the image is described first, and then e.g. what's happening in the image. So in this case the question is: are these images of people who are sitting, or are they images of the action of sitting that is being done by people? I think the former makes more sense, and that the postmodifier sitting is more in line with that.

But this wording obviously doesn't make sense everywhere. In e.g. an "x by color" category, you're going to be looking for colors, so "Red x" generally makes more sense. I also assume that it's not linguistically feasible or even possible to be 100% consistent, nor is it strictly necessary when there are few subcategories.

Sinigh (talk) 13:34, 8 June 2024 (UTC)