New top-level Category: Mortality

Question

Proposing a new top-level Category:Mortality to group only the diverse high-level categories about how individuals died. This in order to facilitate navigation and finding appropriate categories.

See proposal at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Category:_Mortality

Comments

There are a few mortality categories under "Health" top level, seems like some overlap?  If your proposal is accepted it seems to me "Maternal Mortality", "Infant Mortality" etc. would also belong under it.

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Thanks, Matt. I added Child, Infant & Maternal mortality categories to the list on the proposal page. Interestingly, those three are each also under Category:World History.

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changed to an answer

Answer 1

Hi Don

I do appreciate you are attempting to make categories easier to find, but I'm not sure I understand the distinction between a top level category of Mortality and a top level category of Cause of Death which has been deprecated?

Perhaps you could explain that a bit better?

Comments

Thanks John. I don't recall ever having accessed the old Category:Cause of Death, but from what I could glean from the discussion, it had more lower level categories (per what might be under "Cause of death" on a death record) plus some other inappropriate categories.

The current proposal is limited only to grouping the existing high-level categories having to do with how people died - 7 by my count - that are are scattered in 4 parts of the category structure. The new category would make it much easier to locate death-related categories via a logical search from the top (Category:Categories). I should emphasize that the proposal is not to move these 7, but just to add them to the new category.

I'm prompted to propose this based (1) on my experience trying to find a category for assassinations through the category tree, and (2) previous experience with categories on other wikis (Wikimedia projects as well as US govt). I was puzzled why there was no top-level category for such an important consideration.

On looking through the discussion on deleting Category:Cause of Death, I got the impression that the function of that category had somewhat different goals than what I'm talking about.

(PS- The 7 are now 10, per comments on the question itself)

Answer 2

hmm, am in two minds about this, the ''cause of death'' category structure was taken out basically due to it not really bringing anything useful for research, for instance all the people who died from being kicked in the head by a horse, that can have happened all over the planet and doesn't really bring any sort of correlation.

By the same token, a category entitled Mortality is just too widespread, it's one of the few certainties of life.  And likely to get all sorts of fanciful sub-categories added to it.

I personally don't see the point of categorizing things like child mortality, infant mortality, maternal mortality, but those were created for a specific project.  They are simply too widespread.

Comments

Yes, death is one if those certitudes, so it's not hard to imagine why the manner or circumstances of ancestors' passing are of interest. From that to categorization in at least some cases does raise the question of utility, I agree, but since the categories are there, I thought it made sense to have a single top-level access to major high level categories on this topic (from which one could then drill down to more specific categories).

As for being "too widespread," I'm not sure I'd agree. But in any event, it wouldn't be anywhere near as much so as Category:Things, which evidently was deemed useful for grouping a number of diverse topics (animals, canals, heirlooms, unique names, ...).

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Things is deliberately set up to gather all the miscellaneous items that don't really fit anywhere, but that someone felt should have categories for.  Like Monuments and memorials, where persons are named on it but never came near it in life.  All these ''things'' needed a parent category to be findable.

Answer 3

The child, infant, and maternal mortality categories are part of a project and have been categorized under "health". I see no reason to have a mortality category after having deleted "Causes of Death" a few years ago. And if we did end up with this category, it should not be top level. It would be nested under Category:Health

Comments

I guess it goes back to how we use categories. For me, one old-school approach I've often used in other wikis is to follow the tree from higher to lower categories, and sometimes the reverse, in order to find something (and occasionally discover other things). Coming to Category:Categories on WikiTree, I had expected to find some top-level category for something so fundamental to the lives of people recorded in genealogy as death (for those ways of dying that merited the attention of specific categories).

Re the deleted Category:Causes of Death, I don't recall accessing it for any of the work I've done, and since it's not indexed on Archive.org, I don't know what it looked like. And I wasn't part of the discussion about its deletion. I'm imagining that one problem with that category may have been with its name, which because it echoed what is generally on death certificates, perhaps invited specific subcategories that belonged further down the tree (such as under Accidental Deaths)...?

In any event, what I'm proposing with Category:Mortality would include some high-level categories that wouldn't really fit under Category:Health (i.e., Capital punishment, Genocide, Killed in Action, Murder Victims).

I'll leave it there for now, pending other possible comments from others.

Answer 4

Is there A West Virginia Maternal Mortality subcategory. My great Aunt died of Child Bed Fever complications from childbirth. I like to get the subcategory listed if not one added. 

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Myers-22150

Billie

Comments

hi Billie, that would go under a specific project, the category for her would be Virginia, Maternal Mortality which already exists.