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Please make sure you have read and understood Memory Alpha's category approval policy before editing this page. Category suggestions can be used to suggest a single category, multiple categories in the same "tree branch" or "parent category," or to determine which categories will contain or be contained by other categories. From there, they may either be approved and enacted by moving the discussion from this page to the new category's talk page, or, if not approved, moving the discussion from here to the category suggestion archive.

One of the reasons we discuss categories first is because we need to ensure that the category tag, when circumstances call for it, contains the correct sort keys to arrange the list in a predetermined order.

This page is broken down into sections:

  • In-universe categories: These categories are intended to be use for in-universe articles, and should be named to maintain Memory Alpha's POV.
  • Production POV categories: These categories are for use on production articles, which are written from the real world POV, and as such should be have the {{real world}} template on them.
  • Maintenance categories: These categories are used in the maintenance of Memory Alpha, and would include the audio and image files for example. These categories can have either a in-universe or real world POV.

In-universe categories Edit

Borg spatial designations Edit

Subcat of "Regions" and "Borg". There are a heaping helping of grids listed on the above page. --LauraCC (talk) 16:41, August 2, 2017 (UTC)

Having them all in one one category allows non-grids to be included too. Or we could template this, I suppose. --LauraCC (talk) 17:34, February 24, 2018 (UTC)

Sleep Edit

We have Category:Death for death-related items. What about a category for "sleep"? Here is a list of the sleep-related items I've compiled.

--LauraCC (talk) 19:32, August 23, 2018 (UTC)

It would also be a subcat of Category:Biology, just as death and sex already are. --LauraCC (talk) 18:23, September 18, 2018 (UTC)

Sedative could have its own category, or navbox template. --LauraCC (talk) 21:04, February 1, 2019 (UTC)

Which of the above two methods I/we should choose to classify sedatives is the sticking point here. --LauraCC (talk) 15:01, April 30, 2019 (UTC)

Fabrics Edit

Subcat of fashion and materials. For all fabrics out of which clothing, blankets, etc is made. --LauraCC (talk) 17:50, September 13, 2018 (UTC)

Intelligence agencies Edit

Currently there are 19 listed at intelligence agency. Since these are not exactly law enforcement agencies, they don't belong in that category, yet should have their own complementary category to the existing Category:Law enforcement agencies. --Alan (talk) 14:07, March 6, 2019 (UTC)

Reasonable. Support, though keep the list there to show which planet/species each originates from (the names of some don't make that clear). --LauraCC (talk) 17:28, March 7, 2019 (UTC)

Law enforcement officers Edit

Also I believe I brought up a suggestion for law enforcement officers in the past, but I think the biggest concern was not to have it be inundated with all of the Starfleet security officers that probably qualify, in a category originally intended to collect the upwards of 20 "civilian", non-military, non-Starfleet quote unquote police officers it was originally intended to highlight. Keeping that in mind, perhaps we should establish a category for Starfleet security personnel (<-- since we're already making that distinction here as an individual thing) and subcat that into the proposed law enforcement officer category as well as the current Starfleet operations personnel category. --Alan (talk) 14:07, March 6, 2019 (UTC)

Support. --LauraCC (talk) 17:28, March 7, 2019 (UTC)
Wouldn't it be better to limit this to just the "police", even when they were called something else because of translated alien language, assuming that the intention isn't to include wardens and other non-police law enforcement officers. My concern about bloat wasn't just limited to Starfleet Security, but that all Starfleet personnel fit the general "law enforcement" description. Only MPs and Starfleet Security fit the description of "police personnel" as far as I can tell, and that avoids the other issues, assuming that there isn't some "canon" term problem there. - Archduk3 (on an unsecure connection) 22:05, March 8, 2019 (UTC)

Analyses Edit

There's an aweful lot of pages called "this or that analysis", which are mostly categorized in Category:Scans and Category:Reports but also sometimes elsewhere. However, an analysis is neither a scan nor a report, but rather a distinct step between them. So, an analyses category seems useful. I imagine it would go under Category:Mathematics. Furthermore, I see no problem with this category also including analysis-related pages that aren't about a specific analysis, such as Tactical Analysis Division, Tactical Analysis, or Analysis sector. -- Capricorn (talk) 21:37, October 15, 2019 (UTC)

Agree. First you take readings, then you determine what those readings mean (by calculation and/or critical thinking), and finally you sum up your thoughts. --LauraCC (talk) 17:26, October 18, 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure Mathematics makes sense for most analysis pages. That said, I'm not sure having three distinct categories for these is the best idea either. There seems to be a lot of overlap, and some overarching category might be a better idea. I'm not sure what that would be beyond a "sci-fi technical sounding plot forwarder", but scans and reports are a form of analysis. - Archduk3 17:39, October 18, 2019 (UTC)
Wikipedia categorizes "analysis" under "Critical thinking skills", "Research methods", and "Analysis", if that helps (I like the second one best.) --LauraCC (talk) 17:45, October 18, 2019 (UTC)

To be honest I only suggested Category:Mathematics because that was the best I could come up with, and I agree it's the weakest part of the proposal. Category:Science is the only other option I can think of, but it seems similarly imperfect. -- Capricorn (talk) 08:46, October 21, 2019 (UTC)

Departments Edit

A category for all departments, with appropriate subcategories, under Category:Organizations. These pages seem to be either under Category:Agencies or Category:Spacecraft sections. The first seems perfectly fine, while the other doesn't, since most spacecraft departments are spread out over several sections of a spacecraft, and are at the very least a group of people as well as several locations. This needs a bit more input, but it seems weird to me that Science department redirects to the group Sciences division while Engineering department is a section of a ship, not the Operations division. - Archduk3 23:08, November 15, 2019 (UTC)

I'm doing some major work on departments right now (it just so happened you caught me having sorted out engineering department but not yet science department) and there's more or less three types: firstly, starships are organized into departments (life sciences department, exobiology department, etc). Secondly, some Federation agencies happen to be called department of this or that (Department of Temporal Investigations etc) while others... aren't, and in fact there's a dizzying array of other options (bureau, office, committee, and many more). And thirdly, there's a number of 20th century Earth local organizations that happen to be departments of various government entities (Detroit Police Department, San Francisco Department of Sanitation, etc)
These three groups have very little in common except for the word. A Starship departments category that would go under Spacecraft sections makes logical sense to me, because there's a coherent idea behind that. I'm working on an article on those that would also contain a list of those and I think there's about 8-9. But as for other departments, grouping them together just because a writer decided to incorporate the word department and not something else feels like a bad idea. That would just divide things up by a more or less arbitrary criterium, even though Federation departments really do belong under Federation agencies, Earth police departments really do belong under Earth agencies, et cetera. I think the biggest real problem underlying this is the nebulous nature of the Spacecraft sections category, which is a catch-all for a bunch of different types of things. There's a lot to be said for rethinking Spacecraft sections, but a department category is not the answer. -- Capricorn (talk) 09:04, November 16, 2019 (UTC)

Production POV categories Edit

Archival footage performers Edit

I noticed that Leonard Nimoy is listed as a Discovery performer now. Having in addition "archival footage performers" would cover the use of TOS: "The Cage" footage in both DIS and TOS's episodes, as well as actors in scenes, for instance, used in TNG: "Shades of Gray", whose characters only appear in that episode by virtue of old footage from previous episodes. --LauraCC (talk) 15:49, May 8, 2019 (UTC)

Oppose. A category provides no context and the scope is unwieldily and unhelpful. Should be a page if anything, but this name is horrid. - Archduk3 06:48, May 9, 2019 (UTC)

What would you suggest instead? --LauraCC (talk) 16:56, May 21, 2019 (UTC) "Performers who appeared in archival footage"? --LauraCC (talk) 19:33, July 30, 2019 (UTC)

Why are you excluding voice over? - Archduk3* 19:45, August 21, 2019 (UTC)

Not intentionally. "Performers who appeared in archival material"? --LauraCC (talk) 14:58, August 23, 2019 (UTC)

Subcategories for production staff by series Edit

Category:Performers contains subcategories by series (Category:TOS performers, Category:TAS performers, Category:Film performers, Category:TNG performers, etc.) Is there any particular reason why other production staff should not also be subcategorized by series? The obvious place to start would be Category:Writers. I suggest the following subcats:

  • TOS writers
  • TAS writers
  • Film writers
  • TNG writers
  • DS9 writers
  • VOY writers
  • ENT writers
  • DIS writers
  • ST writers
  • PIC writers
  • LD writers

It would be a bit of work, but I think that having those categories in addition to the existing lists would be a useful tool for readers. And if writer subcats are successful, we could consider subcats for directors, special and visual effects staff, and so forth. —Josiah Rowe (talk) 02:52, September 11, 2019 (UTC)

I think this would be particularly useful for any people who worked in a creative (and prolific) capacity, to get a sense of which world they most influenced, at a glance. Not sure if that makes sense to anyone else or not...--LauraCC (talk) 15:46, September 17, 2019 (UTC)
After thinking on this for awhile now, I'm not convinced yet this is a good idea. There are over 5000 performers while there are only 400+ writers, and every other production staff category gets smaller from there. I don't think 3 pages searching in the category is enough of a problem to be worth the other issues this would create. We also have pages for each of these which, unlike the series' performer pages, are fairly easy to maintain. It seems to me that we should just add a "series work on" option to sidebar template for production personal if all we're trying to do is make that info available quickly without reading the article. - Archduk3 19:35, September 17, 2019 (UTC)
That's a reasonable solution to this. --LauraCC (talk) 18:55, September 30, 2019 (UTC)

Maintenance categories Edit

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