Category talk:Chess

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[edit] Categorys

I re-added the categorys [[Category:Board games]] and [[Category:Mental-skill games]] for several reasons:

• It seems that adding them to a category that is a member of these category's does not get them added to the pages. It seems to me that this should happen and perhaps its a bug. I have had trouble with articles needing to be re-saved for this to happen before but the Categorys do belong.
• According to the origins of chess page placing this category in [[Category:Chaturanga game family|chaturanga game family]] is questionable, and doign so exclusivly is wrong. From that article:

While it is generally thought that chess originated from the Indian game Chaturanga from around 1400 years ago, the evidence for this theory has long been recognized as weak, primarily because no physical evidence of the ancient Indian game to date has been excavated. However textual and circumstancial evidence currently favour India over other sources.

Other possible sources listed in the article are: China, India, Egypt, Greece, Assyria, Persia, Arabia, Ireland and Uzbekistan. Dalf | Talk 00:24, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

See Talk:Origins of chess on the many problems with that article. The only real controversy is whether Chaturanga existed and was the original game, or whether all chesslike games derived ultimately from shatranj. I believe the Chaturanga origin is currently the most commonly accepted theory. The other proposed origins are not seriously considered by historians. I started the Chaturanga game family category to replace the previous chess-rooted hierarchy (where related games, and even precursors, were stuck in "chess variants", under the Chess category), which seemed both inaccurate and unfair.

Since all games in the family (and virtually no-one seriously suggests that they are unrelated) are mental-skill board games, putting chess directly in those categories is redundant. Therefore, your criticism seems more applicable to the naming of the family category, not the direct inclusion of this category in those others. — Gwalla | Talk 03:07, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Weather or not the history is in question or not is really secondary to why I made the change. Even if you are right and chess belongs in this new catagory, and even if this new catagory is in the category for board games. When someon who has never heard of Chaturanga looks at the board games catagory trying to find chess (or the Mental-skill games catagory) and they do not find chess that is problematic. Look at the article for Go (board game), it is also in several categories as well as sub-categories in the same hierarchy. I do not know if there is offical wikipedia polocy about catagory inheratence though it seems to me that you should be able to say "add this category and any further up the tree X levels", but since (it seems) that you can't I think the right answer is to include them all on the article. Otherwise you end up with the bizzar situation where looking at Category:Board_games chess is mentioned in an example of the opening paragraph but then cannot be found in the list. Dalf | Talk 03:50, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ah, I see what you're saying. Yes, that's a limitation of the existing category system. There is no official policy for this as yet, AFAIK, but including an article into a category and a subcategory of that category is generally avoided. Hopefully the developers will create a way to view categories in "flat mode", showing all articles in subcategories as well as those directly included, which would make the point moot. — Gwalla | Talk 06:44, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes I agree, infact I THOUGH it was that way and spent a good 20 minutes making sure there was not some sort of bug. After establishing that there is no sort of category inhertance and that you ahve to list them all, I looked around and found that the category and sub-category listing in the same article is use a bit. For example the article on Missouri is listed in Category:Missouri as well as Category:U.S. States even though Category:Missouri is also listed thus. I imagine this is as we say in the software industry "a feature not a bug", since if they inherited by default you might end up with some pretty strange listings at the bottom of some articles. Though I think a limited inhertance system (one, two, or a configurable number of levels) would be workable. Perhaps I will poke around on the MediaWIki and Meta sites and see, I am sure this topic is/has been discussed somewehre. Dalf | Talk 07:58, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] About the chess category

I think we should aim to reserve this category for subcategories as opposed to random chess topics, or worse an indiscriminate list of chess topics. I moved quite a few to appropriate subcategories. Category:Sports I think is very good in this sense. So have a look to see if the rest can be moved. On a side note, do we have a category on chess authors? I think this would be useful. Voorlandt 18:21, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PockBot (run by IP:74.102.154.7) - Category articles summary as of 5:10:11, Mon Jan 8, 2007