- The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
- The result of the discussion was: no consensus on Category:Semitic peoples, delete the sub-cats. – Fayenatic London 20:53, 19 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Nominator's rationale: Per Wikipedia:EGRS#Ethnicity_and_race we don't do race-based categories which is how these are currently being used. Semitic is not an identified ethnic grouping, rather it is an ethno-linguistic term that is also used here with racial connotations. It's better to group ethnic groups by country or region of origin as this is neutral vs terms like 'Semitic' which are ultimately making a racial claim. Indeed, Semitic musicians is an example given of a race-based category that should not exist.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 00:06, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- @Hmains: in what way is this not a racial grouping? You do know that Semite has been claimed to be a race by a great many people. If this is not a racial grouping, what kind of grouping is it? Are we linking people based on a shared language group? I don't think we do this elsewhere, especially not such a broad grouping. Shall we create indo-European categories or Teutonic or Latin-peoples? As far as I can tell this is a race-based category - Semitic is not an ethnic group or even a meta-grouping of ethnic groups, it is ultimately a race-based classification.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 02:45, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- A starting point to understand what race means now and in the past is Race (human classification). Nothing in that article supports anything like what you are saying. Hmains (talk) 02:54, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm not sure what the point of linking that article is. I know what it says. you could perhaps google 'Semitic race' and see the great number of arguments made perhaps 100 years ago about what the Semitic race is and what it is composed of, and how Semitic race is still discussed today. However per EGRS we don't do race-based categories, which this one is.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 02:59, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- I also point you again to EGRS which literally gives an example of 'Semitic' as a classification we should not use.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 04:26, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- keep. first of all, "EGRS" is an editing guideline which anyone can edit, and not Wikipedia core policy. As such it is subject to discussion and interpretation. I am tired of attempts to censor content for ideological reasons not via discussion of content but via bureaucratic application of guidelines. It's dishonest. There is no clean-cut division between race and ethnicity, and pretending that there is in a Wikipedia guideline isn't going to change that fact. It's a complex topic to be sure, open for informed and referenced exposition in article space, not via deletion debates or guideline manipulation. A casual search for "Semitic peoples" on google books (46k hits) shows that the term is perfectly straightforward and in common use in normal ethnographic literature. The fact that a category is being misused, or used ineptly, is no grounds for deletion. I share Obi-Wan Kenobi's concern that a category "Semitic musicians" is idiotic. "people of Semitic descent" etc. should not have direct sub-categories like "Semitic musicians", of course. It should have categories like "people of Arab descent" etc., i.e. grouping categories dedicated to the individual groups within the "Semitic" category. If you submit stuff like "Semitic musicians" for deletion, you can certainly count on my support. --dab (𒁳) 14:08, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- yes, but 'white people' and 'black people' and many other racial categorizations are also used widely in the literature, but we don't accept such categorizations. When speaking of languages Semitic is a reasonable language group descriptor but when speaking of peoples it becomes an essentially race-based categorization, and yes there is a difference between race and ethnicity, since 'Semitic' is not an ethnic group in any sense of the word. If you don't accept 'Semitic musicians' you should not accept these groupings either, they are problematic for the same reason. Please tell me, what does 'of Semitic descent' mean exactly? This is not guideline manupulation, and if you want to ignore a guideline you must explain why and how it benefits the Wiki, and why an exception should be made for Semites to our general guidance around such groupings. I think it's a detriment because it suggests there is some hereditary connection between these people who are now spread across the world - and more importantly 'Semitic' excludes groups which are or have lived in the levant but who aren't considered racially or linguistically Semitic. It's useful as an article where subtleties can be captured but it's a terrible idea as a category since inclusion is binary and there is no clear objective criterion for what constitutes a 'Semitic' person - since race-based and ethnolinguistic answers are quite different to the same question. We don't with few exceptions group ethnicities or peoples by language groups that they are considered to speak, and if this isn't a language grouping the only other criteria I can think of is a race-based distinction. Even more problematic is the way the category is currently used, which is filled with sets of nationalities - in what way are white European-descent Americans who emigrated to israel 'semites'? No matter what definition you use, all citizens of nation X will never fit into 'semites'Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 15:02, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Keep Category:Semitic peoples -- This is a lingistic classification for ethnic groups speaking languages of that linguistic group. The sibling categories should be Indo-European, Finno-Ugaric, etc. Delete the rest, as this is not a usual way of categorising these peoples. "Semite" has often been used in Europe as a synonym for Jewish, so that Arabs may not welcome its use for them. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:18, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Peter, the problem is there are many peoples who speak languages of the Semitic language group but we don't group people in general by the language they speak - instead they are grouped by nationality and ethnicity, and a given nationality ethnicity may speak many different languages - since we don't have language-based people categories in general I don't see why we'd start language-family based category trees. Additionally you will quickly find that Semitic people is not considered to include all people who speak languages of the Semitic family, and Jews in particular even if they speak no Hebrew are still considered by some to be Semites. If you look at List_of_language_families for one semitic doesn't seem to be one of the major families, but secondly expanding this scheme of people-by-language grouping in order to be accurate would require first grouping people by the primary language they speak, and thus would require the re- categorization of hundreds of thousands of biographies, and we'd have to decide which of many different and competing language family classifications to use.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 18:23, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Delete all The more I read the more I'm confused as to what exactly a semite is. We should be basing categories, as much as possible, on words with a clear meaning, and with the exception of language, Semite does not have one. Ego White Tray (talk) 18:46, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Read Semitic people for the clear, WP, referenced meaning. Hmains (talk) 19:37, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- read White people for the clear, WP, referenced meaning of white, and read Black people for the same thing for blacks. The fact that we have articles for quasi-racial groupings does not mean we can have categories accordingly. What I read in Wikipedia is a Semite is any of an ancient peoples from SW Asia speaking a semitic language, or their descendants - however the 2nd most spoken Semitic language in the world in Amharic , and Ethiopians are notably absent from the category of Semites (but they are considered 'black' by Wikipedia?) - additionally, if this is indeed a language family grouping, underneath I would expect to see 'Hebrew speaking people' and 'arabic speaking people' and 'Amharic speaking people' - but we don't have such categories, and I don't think they should be created. Anyone defending this category and saying it's not race-based needs to define what the category IS based on, and if it's based on language it's a losing battle since we don't classify people by the language they speak so I find it hard to understand how we could super-classify them by the family of language they presumably speak. It would be an absolute nightmare to try to set up such a system in any case as we'd have to determine the native/mother tongue of every person and then put them in a whole new people-by-language-spoken tree.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 21:25, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Delete I am sympathetic to those who want to keep these categories and I don't think all Semitic categories should be deleted based on the idea that they are a race-based categories. It is an ethno-linguistic grouping that is also used by historians (like Nordic or Germanic). But I think in the case of individuals, it is imprecise. Why not just indicate the particular ethnicity of the people in this category instead of lumping them in with a regional identity? It ends up being a container category because no one belongs to this group but rather to subcategories of this group. Liz Read! Talk! 01:36, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- exactly the problem, its not an ethnicity. The current contents include Arabs (an ethno-linguistic group), Israelis and Jordanians (nationalities), and Jews (an ethno-religious grouping). Its a complete hodge-podge. If those who support claim it is a linguistic grouping, then just try to remove Jews since many dont speak hebrew natively...--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk)
- Delete as a violation of WP:CATEGRS. While semitic is a term with interelated theological, linguistic, racial, and cultural meanings, the usage here is racial. Even if we ignore the complex controversies over racial categories, they do not make good categories because the boundary conditions become impossible to define. The main itself touches on the semi-arbitary nature of the distinction here. This is a grouping based on outmoded 19th century ideas. --Andrewaskew (talk) 02:57, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Delete certainly Category:People of Semitic descent. I see nothing intrinsically troublesome in Category:Semitic peoples, since it is widely attested in the literature. The inermediate Category:Semitic diaspora is neither here nor there - too many CATs spoil the brothelhood of man.
In my experience descent categories are made up and used for polemical purposes, aside from the dubious or useless quality of such generic labelling, which ignores the fact that history is a brothel of human groups, that, when they're not screwing each other, are usually screwing each other literally.
I have great problems with these categories because unilinear descent is alien to my understanding of historical populations. Claims, names, tribal legends, and oral narratives sweep aside complexity to choose a generic self-descriptor that erases ostensible anomalies to what is desired as one’s ultimate origin
Generally any categories that can be thought up is fine, as long as in its application it does not assert identitarian claims that are denied by the evidence. Some of dozens of anomalies created by this kind of catgeory.
(a) Hungarians have the CAT Ugric peoples though genetically they are almost wholly European, close to the Serbs and far from the Finns.
the Awan of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and elsewhere claim descent from Arabs, though they may be also converted Rajput descendants, or both, or neither. In either case, there is, in such populations substantial mixing that does not give one confidence about mechanical identification by descent. The same goes for
Pathans. One reported tradition had them decending from Saul, i.e. Jewish. See also Theory of Pashtun descent from Israelites other traditions insist on them being Arabs tracing back toQais Abdur Rashid, though their tribes speak Eastern Iranian varieties of an Indo-European languages.
Arab Indonesians claim Hadhrami descent, but they are also descended from Indonesians. It is just that in the identitarian code, one claim trounces the other historical fact (as often is the case)
Many of the noble lineagues of Badakhshan claim they descend from Alexander the Great (i.e. I.E:) but tribally they also assert an Arab provenance, though speaking an I.E group of languages.
Sayyids number in the millions from Pakistan all over sout-east Asia, and yet ‘A study of Y chromosomes of self-identified Syeds from the Indian subcontinent by Elise M. S. Belle, Saima Shah, Tudor Parfitt and Mark G. Thomas showed that "self-identified Syeds had no less genetic diversity than those non-Syeds from the same regions, suggesting that there is no biological basis to the belief that self-identified Syeds in this part of the world share a recent common ancestry.’
What do you do with Swahili people, who speak a Bantu language but have had significant genetic input from Persian and Arab traders, to the point that the former created Shirazi settlements as far down as Tanzania? And for the latter, Ibn Battuta recorded that royal families in Tanzania were of Yemenite descent? (Craig Lockard Societies, Networks, and Transitions: Volume I: A Global History to 1500, Houghton Mifflin 2008 p.336 writes:
‘Arab settlers had come in such numbers that they could not be absorbed into the dominant Bantu culture. Instead intermarriage and a fusion of cultures occurred’
Ultimately my objections is that CATS like these lead themselves to indiscriminate use by POV pushers, are conflictual, and assume that most of history, which is unrecorded, can be known by theory.Nishidani (talk) 17:19, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- So, this registers as a Delete vote, Nishidani? I agree with you on the intermixing of ethnicities and cultures over centuries (millennium), especially considering the impact of migration. But the fact is in biographies on Wikipedia, we typically include categories of gender, ethnicity and nationality. We just need to be sure that ethnic categorizations make sense and are consistent. Liz Read! Talk! 19:02, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- At best delete the second and third. One should always pause if User:dab weighs in, esp. in this area. There is nothing wrong with the CAT for Semitic peoples. The others are factitious or supererogatory. My vote therefore is a compromise. Keep (1) delete (2) and (3).
- Delete impermissible classification based on (claimed, perceived) race/ethnicity. We could have Category:People of North Germanic descent to group descendents of Swedes, Danes, Icelanders, and Norwegians (and anyone who may have some genetic material from this area, no doubt many Irish, Scots, English, French), and all their descendants throughout the world. But, alas, what value does it serve? Carlossuarez46 (talk) 19:53, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Delete The usage here is clearly racial in a way that violates the rules against categoriazing based on race.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:27, 20 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.