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Usefulness of automatic category[edit]

Every page with this template gets put into Category:Quotations, which makes that category almost unusable, with many repeated sections like:

and

It's not even possible to tell whether the redirects go to the same place without clicking them. Should this be switched off, with categories instead added manually? Or some guidance given that the template shouldn't be added to all possible variations of anything that could be considered a quotation? Lord Belbury (talk) 14:37, 25 July 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Pinging User:Tamwin who introduced the category include last year; I'm not sure I agree with their assessment that Every mainspace redirect that warrants this template should be in Category:Quotations, given the examples above. It doesn't look like any of the other "r from..." templates do anything like this, including the similar ((R from phrase)), and the potentially useful ((R from pseudonym)) and ((R from drug trade name)). I doubt there's an easy way past the fact that redirects often include repeated variant spellings and intentional typos, and generally aren't very carefully maintained (there seems to be no attempt to defaultsort the quotation redirects that begin with "the", for instance). --Lord Belbury (talk) 12:42, 9 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Oh my. Yes, I agree that this is quite a mess. I can't remember my exact reasoning for adding the category, but I imagine I was thinking was thinking that everything with this template was a quotation (per the template output and docs) and that every quotation should be in that category. It seems to me that most of those redirects you've mentioned are incorrect, or at the very least imprecise. In my ideal world, the one canonical form of the quotation would be tagged ((R from quotation)), and the others, which are logically redirects to the canonical form, would be tagged ((R avoided double redirect)) and ((R from modification)) or whatever. I'm not sure how viable that is though, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. The alternatives I can think of are to separately add canonical quotations to the quotations category, or to add a flag to this redirect to do so optionally. No matter what long-term solution we go with, I think the obvious short-term solution is to remove the category. I don't want to do that unilaterally, but you certainly have my go-ahead to do so, or I can do it if you'd prefer. And thanks for bringing this up. Tamwin (talk) 04:53, 10 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I think my ideal would be for a quotation redirect to appear case-by-case in this category when it pointed to an article which went into significant detail about that quotation, and not when it didn't. So just a category that's added manually when appropriate, as in Wikipedia:Redirect#Categorizing_redirect_pages. But perhaps the insignificant cases (where a line is spoken in a film but had no wider societal impact) shouldn't exist as redirects anyway, and just be deleted. I'll remove the automatic category for now. --Lord Belbury (talk) 11:02, 23 September 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I realise now that this is already being done in subcategories like Category:Quotations from literature and Category:Quotations from film, which I hadn't previously noticed. The above Yippee-ki-yay motherfucker had been manually categorised into Category:Quotations from film all along, with its variants remaining uncategorised. --Lord Belbury (talk) 16:08, 23 September 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
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