Category talk:Science and technology
I'm not sure if this is a useful category. Science and technology are different things: science is the accumulation of knowledge, and technology is the construction of useful items. They have different parent categories. The confusion can already be seen because "science and technology" is currently a subcategory of both science and technology. Does that mean it's the intersection of the two? However in the "by country" subcategory, the reverse applies: science by country and technology by country are subcategories. --ghouston (talk) 02:50, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
- Perhaps it's useful for the files that represent both scientific and technological stuff? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:25, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
- The intersections that I can see are: 1) technology used for scientific research 2) organizations that deal with science and development of technology, including research institutes, government departments, educational institutions and museums. But these turn up as subcategories of science and technology, I'm not sure that there's any use in a top-level science and technology category. --ghouston (talk) 08:00, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
- Your arguments sound reasonable, but IMHO we might want to to keep this category for the stuff that can't be clearly categorized between science and technology. Though, let's hear opinions from more editors. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:43, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
- We could promote this to main category under Category:Topics and put Category:Science and Category:Technology under this one.
- Otherwise we could divide each subcategory of this category between Category:Science and Category:Technology, then delete this one. --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 02:06, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
- I support splitting this into two. Overlapping items can easily be categorized in both as appropriate. There are many intersections, but this is true among all of main topics. I don't see this category as any more justified than a 'Society and Culture' category. Josh (talk) 00:59, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
- I wondering if we may need to keep this category for practical reasons: firstly, categories in Wikipedia are also using this name, so it's handy to give them something to link to. Secondly, there are so many such categories in Commons, that it would be an enormous job to get rid of them all. I'm thinking of withdrawing my request that they all be deleted, but instead recommend creating as many separate science and technology subcategories and moving contents to those, so that the "Science and technology" categories become mere containers. I created the first science by country category at Category:Science in the United States, together with Category:Technology in the United States, leaving Category:Science and technology in the United States largely a container. Things have changed since my previous comments here, in that Science and Technology are now subcategores of "Science and technology", so at least we can see it's the union of the two. However the parent is still a problem. Currently it's Economics, which makes no sense since Economics is a social science, so there's a category cycle. Science is a subcategory of Category:Academia, while Category:Technology is only in Category:Science and technology. Technology is partly associated with Category:Objects, for example including Category:Equipment as a subcategory, but in any case it's rather high level, and doesn't have any obvious parent category to go with Science, so I'm going to follow Daniele Pugliesi's suggestion of putting "Science and technology" under Category:Topics, for now. --ghouston (talk) 01:20, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
This seems to be the best conclusion for now: 1) try to filter content from "Science and technology" to "Science" and "Technology" and their subcategories as far as possible, including in the Category:Science and technology by country categories 2) leave the "Science and technology" categories in place, even if they contain nothing except the science and technology subcategories, to link with Wikipedia categories 3) Science and technology can exist as a top-level category under Category:Topics, since it has no obvious parent. --ghouston (talk) 01:56, 2 August 2017 (UTC)