Regional Categories for Europe

Question

Can someonoe from the categorization project please enlighten me about the current structure for European categories we are supposed to follow: Perusal of previous G2G discussions to this subject leave me to believe the following: Europe as a category should cease to exist and be replaced by multiple categories Europe(xx) where xx stands for the language abbreviation. There are currently 6 such categories: English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. French, German, Italian, and Spanish categories contain only countries in which these languages are spoken, Finnish is labeled a misnamed category, not to be used, and English contains all sorts of European countries. The top category "Regions" contains only listings for Europe and Europe(en), not any of the other language Europes.

Am I to understand that if I am speaking German I may create a sub-category Großbritannien under Europa(de)? If so, as a thought experiment, Europe has currently 24 languages recognized as "official and working", are we, therefore, ultimately going to have 24 different sub-categories for the UK? And what about the thousands of non-European languages around? And if so, how are we to coordinate and crossreference all those categories?

Answer 1

Basically, every category (such as Europe) can exist in any language. The language codes (such as (en)) are used when the name is not unique to that language (but is not necessary when you're dealing with a place where one language is clearly dominant; eg. places in Germany needn't have (de) after them because German is clearly the primary language for them. We see the language codes a lot for the Europe categories because Europe has no main language.)

So. The currently established Europe categories are: Europe (en), Europe (fr), Europa (nl), Europa (de), Europa (it), Europa (es), Europa (sv), and Eurooppa (fi). Each of them is a subcategory of the equivalent to Regions in that language. They are linked to each other by links at the top of the category pages.

Category:Europe is the old category, and currently contains categories in an assortment of languages that don't have their own category structures set up.

As for your last question, you could create a German language category for the UK, if you think it would help. What we've done so far is basically try to create multilingual categories as needed and as we have people with the knowledge required to do so. I'd say the priority is probably to have each country's categories set up in all of that country's languages, plus English. But, if lots of Germans were working on English profiles, having that category in their language could be beneficial to Germans who aren't fluent in English.

And yes, this does mean there's potential for a lot of multilingual categories!