Category talk:People by nationality

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Discussion[edit]

Nationality This seems to treat nationality as equivalent to country. There are

  • nationalities without corresponding countries:
    • Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, various pre-colonial ethnicities of North American mainland
    • Kurdish, Assyrian
    • Chechen (arguably), various Siberian ethnic groups, Tatar, Karelian, and probably others
    • Tibetan, Uyghur, & probably other non-Han ethnic groups of China
    • Sikhs (arguably not just a religion), Tamil, Ainu, Okinawan, Hmong, Shan
    • Basque, Breton, Catalan, Galician, Scottish, Welsh, Roma, Lapp, perhaps Frisian
  • and nationalities that substantially extend beyond the corresponding countries (to name a few, and leaving out those i could list simply because "New York has more than the capital city of the corresponding country")
    • Irish
    • Armenian
    • most of the ex-Soviet historically Muslim republics (many have minorities in at least Afghanistan)
    • several East-European nationalities
    • Russian (Baltic states, Georgia, Moldova, & at least Kazakhstan come to mind)
    • Korean (two Koreas & North America)
    • Cuban, Mexican (US)
    • Asian-derived nationalities with widespread diasporas:
    • Mongolians
    • Jews (not just a religion, and arguably Jews and/or non-Israeli Jews are a nationality)

--Jerzy(t) 04:57, 2004 Sep 15 (UTC)

This is a complete misnomer if you are suggesting that you can be Irish and not born in Ireland. In this instance a person would be of Irish descent, but their nationality is determined by their place of birth. However, you can be Irish and move to another country. Your nationality/status would change, but you would, of course, be from Ireland. Your future children, if any, would not be Irish. This trend of assuming nationality based on descent seems more prevalant in America than anywhere else. --Gerald Davies 11:52, 5 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Is there some categorization project with policy to categorize people by nativity? The articles on nation and nationality make clear that there are multiple meanings. (Even nativity isn't decisive.) --P64 18:44, 31 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"People by nationality" vs "List of people by nationality"[edit]

Can anyone help me understand this? Two lists:

are not the same, eg: the first has Zimbabwean people but not Zambian people; the second has Zambians but not Zimbabweans. Both lists are partial -- presumably the lists are not generated automatically by the database?

--Mount Pleasant 16:58, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Inuit[edit]

Someone forgot to add the "category:Inuit people" in the "category:People". --Eleassar777 22:22, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

People of Nation[edit]

I suggest we consider following what seems an emerging consensus on the Commons to use "(subject) of (name of place)" categorization, thus for example "People of Japan" rather than "Japanese people". -- Infrogmation 00:31, 13 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'd support that, categorizing by Nationality seems to have created disputes and problems since the very start. How would you guys feel changing this scheme to "Categorization by Country" scheme. Category:American people for example is confusing since it refers to citizens of the US and not entire America continents. Category:American people would become Category:People from the United States/Category:People of the United States for example. -- Cat chi? 09:25, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I would oppose it, for two reasons:
  1. Moving from an adjectival construct requires greater precision about the relationship between nationality and countries than is actually the case. There are many parts of the world where there is (or has recently been) a mismatch between the two: Eritrea and Slovenia are recently independent nations, Tibet and Taiwan are countries according to some definitions but not according to others. What about East Timor?
  2. We can live with a small anomaly. There is a linguistic problem in all sets of nationality-based "fooish stuff" categories in that some countries and nationalities do not have adjectives (e.g. Category:New Zealand). In those cases, we have a workable solution in some cases by the kludge of Cat:Noun people, e.g. Category:New Zealand people. The two other problematic other cases which I am aware of are the United States (where the commonly-used adjective "American" is widely used, as in Category:American people, but is also imprecise) and the United Kingdom, where the term "British" is widely used but is also inaccurate (the country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). However, I'm wary of resructuring the whole category on the basis of three anomalies where we already have a solution which works well in practice (namely, to either use a noun as an adjective or to use a widespread and well-understood adjective where available).
  3. It's not really true for Cool Cat to say that nationality-based categories "have created disputes and problems since the very start"; it would be more accurate to say that Cool Cat has had a long-running and highly disruptive one-person campaign to remove nationality-based categories, and to permit categorisation only by nation-state or subdivisions thereof, which all seems to be targeted towards his determination delete all or most "Kurdish" categories. For examples of this effort, see (inter alia): WP:ANI Archive102, History_of_Kurdistan|CfD Cat:History_of_Kurdistan, CfD Cat:Cities on the Great_Lakes, CfD Cat:Kurdish films, and CfD Cat:Films by culture.
    These and numerous other discussions show a long-standing effort to to remove Kurdish categories, partly by direct opposition, but also by trying to construct principles which would allow their deletion through manufactured precedent (the Great Lakes cities CfD is a particularly good example of the technique.
So although the status quo isn't perfect, it seems to me that every alternative would create more problems. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:13, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I was actually expecting something like this.
Defacto countries are fine. They can be categorized as a country since there is a verifiable claim that they claim to be a country. People born inside the "defacto" country can be tagged as being both from that defacto country and the dejure country based on where they were born at. Category:British people refers to citizens of the United Kingdom. A switch doesn't even feel controversial there.
This would not affect "countryless" people. An article about a Kurdish person can be tagged with both Category:Kurdish people (ethnicity) and Category:People from Turkey (citizenship) if the person carries Turkish citizenship. Categorizing a person from Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq under same category is unhelpful.
A lot of countries such as Turkey have citizenship and ethnicity represent the same thing. Anyone who has a Turkish citizenship is by default "Turkish" (Turkish citizen). However Turkish can also mean an ethnicity. So calling a Kurd "Turkish" is not a very good idea. You can verify this by going to Turkey's entry on CIA world factbook. The word "Turkish" appears twice: once under "Nationality" and once under "Ethnic groups").
-- Cat chi? 12:49, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Cool cat, I have read and re-read what you wrote and I'm not sure what the purpose is of all this, except to strengthen your determination to draw a rigid barrier between the concepts of nationality and statehood. Sure, there is a difference, but it's an imprecise and fluid one, and in human affairs there often isn't some neat and consistent formula such as may be found in engineering. Think for a moment about the consequences of this for Catalonia: if there are different formats for nationality and country, then one side or other of the Catalan nationalism debate will be offended. Why create such a conflict where none is needed?
The change would cause massive disruption: look at the number of subcats of the people by country categories, such as the occupational categories and the religion categories. To restructure as you suggest would involve renaming tens of thousands of categories. To what end? All, it seems, to satisfy your fixation on ensuring that wikipedia does not label Kurdistan in a way that might be seen as compatible with it being a country.
For the purpose of making useable categories which assist navigation, does it matter the "country" is a defacto state, a de jure state, a former state, a wannabe state, a former Ottoman province, an ethnic region or a fantasy region designed by a bunch of crazy terrorists? Apart from the nominator's suggestion of following the lead from the Commons, the only purpose that I can see of this proposed change is the same as that in your CFD for Category:Cities on the Great Lakes: to prioritise nation-states in categorisation to permit hte removal of the Kurdish categories. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:11, 29 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"Sure, there is a difference, but it's an imprecise and fluid one" is the basis on what I am trying to do. I want categorization should be based on solid criteria which is achievable. WP:CAT#Some general guidelines #7 and #8 suggest that categories should never have hazy inclusion criteria unless absolutely necessary. Remember, categorization is a navigation aid and it should not have any other purposes.
Catalonia claims to be an Autonomous Community in the Kingdom of Spain. It is a subcat of Spain which is both a verifiable and neutral claim since Catalonia is not disputing this. People from Catalonia are people with Spanish nationality/citizenship and also people with Catalonian nationality/ethnicity which is the basis of the confusion; they are however "from Spain". Categorizing people by citizenship would fix the confusion.
"Former country/former Ottoman provinces" categories would be much more useful than blanket nationality categories. You would be able to navigate among citizens of the now defunct country. Defacto/dejure country categorization can be conducted pretty easily. We categorize cities by country, I do not see why we can't do that by country. Non dejure/defacto states (wannabe states) should not be categorized to be a country as per WP:NOT#CB.
As for "ethnic regions or fantasy regions designed by a bunch of crazies" - they do not seem to fit our basic guidelines of categorization either by nationality or country.
-- Cat chi? 13:02, 30 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Category:FOOian people[edit]

I find that there is no consensus for any one option. A rename of categories for which there is no adjective, renaming to People from Foo, in Foo, of Foo, associated with Foo -- none of the possibilities emerge as consensus-backed. I would have been glad to wait for more discussion but this has been stale for nearly two months. (Closing following month-old request at WP:ANRFC.) Salvidrim! ✉ 06:35, 21 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

In a currently open CfD discussion, the following statement was made by ChemTerm:

Please no adjectives for references to countries. Category:People_by_nationality contains inconsistent/ambiguous categories. "Democratic Republic of the Congo people‎", "French Polynesian people" (Are there also Australian Polynesian people?), Frankish people?‎ Are they part of German people? Can German people have Russian citizenship, like maybe the Dalmatian people have Croatian citizenship? The whole category could benefit from clarification by restructuring.

A similar issue was stated by John Pack Lambert in a CfD a couple months ago:

The main issue I see here is that at present Category:Puerto Rican people is misued in many cases for people of Puerto Rican descent who have never been residents of the island, some of whom have never set foot on the island. This category is meant to be limited to those who at one point were residents of the island, and we need to name it in a way that people will use it according to its intent.

The question is, should we go and rename all these categories accordingly (People from Foo)? עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:27, 13 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • In cases where there is no adjective, I support changing from "Foo thing" to "thing from/of/in Foo", e.g. "People from Foo", "Culture in Foo" and "Society of Foo". However, I would oppose changing other cases to this format, because it would introduce ambiguities; e.g. see the category disambiguation page Category:People from Luxembourg; in a case like that, the noun form would have to be disambiguated as Category:People from Luxembourg (country), which strikes me as unnecessarily long. There are masses of sub-cats by occupation e.g. Category:English artists and if we are not going to change those to "Artists from England" then it is fine for the top category to remain Category:English people, even though some siblings would follow a different pattern Category:People from the Republic of Ireland‎. – Fayenatic London 18:15, 13 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose in most cases. Puerto Rico is a special case because the people of Puerto Rico have US citizenship, and there are lots of "Puerto Ricans" on the US mainland. However in cases where we are dealing with a specific country and there is a clear and undiputed adjective form to refer to its nationals (Russian, French, Spanish, etc.) we should stick to trying to limit all uses of that term to nationals of that country. Russian of course is one of the biggest offenders on this line, others being Hungarian and Austrian. Many people have been put in Russian cats with no evidence they are Russian by anything other than ethnicity (and often very slight evidence for that). I think though the "people from x" form would be misleading on the nationality level. I think we have a good handle on who goes in Category:German writers and Category:Spanish singers and Category:Nigerian dancers. Off the top of my head the one country I can think of where we might want to look at changing the used form is Armenia, because Armenian is an ethno-religious designator for a trans-national group who are second only to the Jews for being spread over multiple countries and still maintaining their ethnicity (the Roma probably beat out even the Jews in doing this, but that is another story). Still I would not unilaterally take that action, and I am not sure I could even get enough participation in a CfD and explain what I was trying well enough that people would go along with it.John Pack Lambert (talk) 23:46, 13 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • There may be Germans and Russians that don't have citizenship of Germany or Russia. ChemTerm (talk) 00:44, 24 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • To give specific examples, I do support changing these which have no adjective for the nationality: Category:Antigua and Barbuda people‎, Category:Bosnia and Herzegovina people‎, Category:Democratic Republic of the Congo people‎, Category:Republic of the Congo people‎, Category:Cook Island people‎. "People from Foo" would be better than using the noun as an adjective. – Fayenatic London 21:39, 14 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Adding to the jumble ... Wikipedia has regular and predictable arguments over whether current national boudaries are used, boundaries when the person was born, or died, whether self-identification as belonging to a "national group" is what counts, etc. etc. etc. To cover the problems we would need "People calling themselves Foovians", "People born in historic Foo", "People born in current Foo", "people born with one or more parents having Foovian nationality" etc. In short - this is a minefield. If we were to have one category per country - I would suggest "People associated with Foo" as being the least bad. Making no claim as to ethnicity, nationality, or ancestry. Collect (talk) 15:18, 16 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Short for "People associated with Foo" could be "People of Foo"? ChemTerm (talk) 00:44, 24 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • I agree with Collect here. There's no right answer in this situation and we're going to just need to pick something and move forward with it. "Of" is more ambiguous than "from" and therefore preferable in this situation. Dreambeaver(talk) 22:10, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I think "people of foo" would be preferred to "People from foo" or the current use of the noun as an adjective. "From" to many people implies former association, while "of" more generally implies the fact that there is a connection. The "of" form has been used for many historic places, such as Category:People of the Ottoman Empire, and I see no particular reason why it should not be used in the present.John Pack Lambert (talk) 01:26, 18 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • If "from" implies former association, then use "People in Foo". But there are hundreds of categories using "People from Foo". ChemTerm (talk) 00:44, 24 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Best rename all to "People of Fooplace". ChemTerm (talk) 03:41, 25 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. I think the FOOian forms works fine as generally implemented. Categories are not an exact science, and it's foolish to try to get it that way. I also think for consistency, Category:Antigua and Barbuda people‎, Category:Bosnia and Herzegovina people‎, Category:Democratic Republic of the Congo people‎, Category:Republic of the Congo people‎, etc. is better than going to "people from FOO". Good Ol’factory (talk) 21:23, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Presentations and pluralisations of peoples[edit]

The following OP has been multiply posted and my suggestion is that Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (ethnicities and tribes) might act as a centralised location for related discussion.

Use of the pluralisation of a demonym where this is possible

A recent successful RM was made for the following:

– And many similar articles which, on the same president, I would like moved - as would apply to all demonym based population describing articles in those cases those cases in which the plural form of the demonym differs from the singular form of the word.

(explanation was given)

As per: Albanians, Americans, Armenians, Australians, Austrians, List of Bahranis, Belarusians, Bosnians, Brazilians, Bulgarians, Lists of Cameroonians and Canadians, ...
As per WP:UCRN as demonstrated in searches ...

Designations that seemingly should remain as "... people" as the demonym retains the same form when indicating either singulars or plurals: Bhutanese people, British people and Chinese people,


Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ethnicities and tribes)

On this basis I would suggest that any editor with authority to directly make sensible changes to article and category contents could go ahead and make sensible moves (as relevant to article content naturally).

I would say that this issue also relates to content in which two ethnicities are mentioned such that relating to Afghan American(s) and perhaps this will also need to be sorted out at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ethnicities and tribes).

I propose that the table on that project page might read as something like the following:

Pattern Examples
Use pluralisation of a demonym
when this is practical		 Koreans · Germans · Swedes
Use ".. people" when pluralisation
of the demonym is not practical		 French people · Wauja people
Singular demonyms Iyer
Groups where two
ethnicities are referenced		 Afghan Americans
Afghans in the United Kingdom
Parenthetical disambiguation Macedonians (ethnic group)


Peoples for which two nationalities/ethnicities/descents are referenced

In the case of people who are described by use of two national/ethnic descriptions I was interested to see the navigational content at: British Korean which reads as follow:

British Korean or Korean British may refer to:

Mention of this content is also made at: Wikipedia talk:UK Wikipedians' notice board#What to do with articles for Britains with other nationalities, ethnicities and/or descents and, as potentially an example of good practice, I thought I would also present this content "here".

Again, this OP has been multiply posted and my suggestion is that Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (ethnicities and tribes) might act as a centralised location for related discussion. This is by no means meant as a discouragement of location specific discussion.

GregKaye 11:17, 31 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Citizenship requirements[edit]

What basis is there that we can only include people on a nationality list ie . Category:American people only if they are citizens of that country? This is a note that appears on every such country category that exists.--Prisencolin (talk) 19:09, 8 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"from" replacing "of"[edit]

"People of" has been standard in category names for former countries with compound names, but this is now deprecated following Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2022_September_4#Category:People_of_the_Russian_Empire, and "People from" will replace "People of". – Fayenatic London 07:54, 13 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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