So you'd like to help out with the CFD backlog but don't know where to begin? You've come to the right place! Before we start, let me say something about categories first.

What are categories for?

Although categories have been one of Wikipedia's enduring features, people don't really understand them very well. Why are they there? What are they for?

One of the most common misconceptions is that a category is simply a set, as if it was a bubble in a giant hyperdimensional Venn diagram. The problem with this is that an article could potentially be in many, many bubbles, and it doesn't seem ideal for the bottom of the article to look like a box of detergent dumped into a fountain. In fact, it seems optimal for this sort of "set" style of information to be put in list form, where inclusion can be properly sourced and verified.

That is why the purpose of categories is navigation. When you categorize an article, it should be obvious why it's there, and why it's connected with everything else in that category. In a way categorization evades verifiability, and that is one of the key reasons why categorization needs to be as parsimonious as possible.

Closing CFD

The process of closing a CFD is actually very simple. Here's the easy breakdown.

  1. Read the discussion and determine consensus.
  2. Close the discussion using the proper tags.
  3. List the pages discussed in the proper section in WP:CFDW and the bot will take care of it.

What does the bot do? Basically, just pushing the delete button on the category doesn't do anything about the pages that are in the category. The pages have to either be emptied out to complete the process, or moved to a different location. Obviously, this would be a very laborious task to do manually, so we have a bot take care of emptying/recategorizing the pages, and then deleting/moving the actual category page itself.

Well, that doesn't sound too bad. But aren't there complications?

There are certainly different nuances to CFD that the other XFDs don't have, for sure. Let's consider each of these in terms of those three steps.

Reading the consensus

Unlike most XFDs, CFD isn't just about deletion. In fact, there are three major nomination types:

  1. Deletion. This means that the category shouldn't exist, and the pages don't need to be categorized together (or there's already a scheme that works).
  2. Renaming. This means that the pages in the current cat should be moved to another cat that doesn't already exist. In practice, this is really a normal pagemove, but with the added burden of recategorizing everything to the new name.
  3. Merging. This means that the pages in the current cat should be moved to another cat that already exists. In practice, this is a deletion, but you still want the pages to be categorized together.

In your closure, of course, the nomination may have no support behind this. Some people will refer to this broadly as a keep, regardless of whether it was deletion, renaming, or merging. No consensus in CFD defaults to keep. If there's little discussion, generally you'll want to relist, or simply roll with the absence of opposition.

In the process of discussion, you may see some other proposed courses of action. These courses of action are generally manual (meaning that they require someone to selectively recategorize the contents):

  1. Alt proposals. Very commonly, you'll see people agree with the suggested course of action, but they may advocate for a different name or merge-target, for example. They may even involve a combination of deleting, merging, and moving.
  2. Purging. This means that the category itself is fine, but it needs to be trimmed down. There are pages that perhaps don't belong in this category.
  3. Listifying. As mentioned previously, it is often better to talk about information in the same "set" in a format that can be verified. One practice that you may see in closing is that the closer will copy/paste the contents of the category into the talk page of the discussion to preserve the contents for listification. The end result may be to create an entirely new article, or merge it (in a sense more similar to AFD) into the content of another article.
  4. Split. Sometimes, the contents of a category should be recategorized into multiple categories, which may or may not already exist.

Purges, listifies, and splits are usually listed on WP:CFDWM instead.

One key note! Sometimes, instead of saying the action they want to see happen, participants in CFD will say support or oppose. Be very careful for the context with which they say these things! They could mean opposite things from discussion to discussion! In general, these terms are used in reference to the course of action as proposed by the main nominator, unless an alternate proposal is specified.

Things to watch out for when you're closing

Listing things

There are three places to list the results after you close a CFD.

  • Make sure to abide by the format in the hidden comments!
  • For moves and merges, you may specify that you'd like a redirect to be created in the original category.

Tidying up

The other aspect of the WP:CFDW pages is that they need to be cleared manually. This is an area that you can definitely help out in even if you don't feel comfortable closing CFDs! Here's what to look out for:

After checking these things, you can proceed to remove those processed actions from the working page.

Q&A

To be continued...

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