Category talk:1970s Meta

On proposed deletion

This category was created by MPH in 2017, so I'm surprised there are no pages here. I've started a discussion at Category talk:Meta by Year to find out how decade categories are currently being used - because there are a lot of pages in the 1990s and 2000s categories but few in the 1970s and 1980s categories. --Auntags (talk) 09:13, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Good question!

This is my own personal use of all of these decades categories (meta, cons, interviews, various fanworks), a practice which may or may not align with the common good. I began putting only a decades category on pages when I don't know the specific year. As soon as I can determine the specific year, I use that category instead and remove the decades one. It's simply a placeholder for me, a marker to help lead the way to later, more exact info. This is especially true of fics, meta, interviews, and "single" fanworks. In fact, I like to go through the decades categories periodically and see if more information has popped up so I can be more specific. But now that there are so many in them, this is getting harder to do.

Pages like archives, and websites, and long-running cons (for instance Shore Leave (US convention)) have many, many individual years as categories, which can be cumbersome and arduous. Are we okay with that? (My vote is yes, but others may disagree.)

I LOVE having individual years on fanworks, cons, and such, both for the granular information, but also for being able to refer to them in fan comments and to wikilink. Very often, being able to triangulate two, sometimes three references, is what saves the day! Example, a fan says "that crazy con in Detroit in 1982" or a fan in 1991 refers to a con "three years ago" makes it possible to find one's way to what they are talking about. MPH (talk) MPH 13:26, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks so much MPH. That usage makes sense and personally I don't see the point of decade categories for meta or fanfic etc., if we're aware of the year a work was produced. I do think its a little trickier when it comes to archives and cons, because a number of longstanding archives and cons are not included in any year categories at the moment. Two example I noticed were Worldcon and FFN, but that's probably a separate conversation for those categories.

In this case, would it make most sense to delete the 1970s meta category as its currently empty? We could also add guidance to Category:Meta by Year to make it clear that year categories are preferred when the year of publication is known. --Auntags (talk) 22:41, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that deleting the 1970s meta category is a good idea. MPH (talk) MPH 23:29, 10 April 2023 (UTC)