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The list is missing man African American authors/writers who are quite popular and/or making a name for themselves. Like Leslie Esdaile Banks, Omar Tyree and Brenda Jackson just to name a few. What or who determines which writers go on this list?
NewSoulFan4Life17:23, 23 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Unlike a list article, a category is determined largely by editors such as yourself who add the category to the bottom of articles about authors whom they assess as belonging in that category. So if these authors are missing, there are essentially two explanations (1) no one has yet added the category to their articles yet, or (2) no one has yet written an article about that person, and therefore there's no article to add to the category. (The one other possibility is that they are in the category, but not visible on the top page of the category because they have been listed under the appropriate subdivision, such as Category:African American novelists.)
Most of the time, I'm fine with the logic that once the topic of an article has been placed in a nested category, such as "African American writers," it shouldn't also be placed in the main category, such as "American writers," because in theory, it's already in that category. However, given that there is presently no way to set a preference for seeing the members of all subcategories within the main list, that means that authors in a subcategory may be unintentionally ghettoized and not thought of under the more general heading of "American authors." I've paused for now in my process of replacing general categories with more specific ones — though I'll continue to add these without replacement — because I'd like to see a little discussion of the potential consequences of the categorization rules with respect to creating "levels" of authors and either highlighting them or burying them when authors are viewed from the angle of these categories. Hope that makes sense ... if it's a jumble, just post a note on my Talk page and I'll try to restate it more clearly. Lawikitejana02:51, 9 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
