Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25626-20150618181425/@comment-21519-20150619195417

We could possibly double-cat Koreans and North/South Koreans (I hate to have no Korean category at all). Unfortunately, whereas Chinese had the opportunity to choose their government, most Koreans, like most Germans, got stuck with whatever side of the line they were on when that line was arbitrarily drawn. When the DPRK took everything except Busan, some who wanted to be in the North scooted up north while the border was to the south of them (and lived to regret it, or didn't live long at all) and others who wanted out of the North got while the getting was good when the UN was almost to the Yalu. (An old friend of mine was the grandson of such people. He really dodged a bullet there--he could have very easily been born into Kim Jong-Il's hell on earth had things gone ever so slightly differently.)  But both were just trickles, so status as a North- or South Korean said very little about political affiliation in the early 50s.

To ML4E's question about how to subcat East- and West Germans, I agree that they should go into Germans, especially since that category is already so robust. If we do that, however, we might have to consider, for consistency's sake, going through the Germans category and sorting people who died before 1870 into the appropriate subcats. We have enough articles to do at least Prussians, and a thorough search could reveal a few more.

I had also thought that East Germans could be double-catted into the People Born in Defunct Countries category (we shouldn't do that with the West Germans since the current German government traces the history of its institutions to West German days) but after about half a second I thought, Duh, East Germany's brand new at this point and they were all born into Nazi or Weimar or Imperial Germany, but Germany nevertheless. If there are any kids of six or under who manage to earn themselves articles, we'll have to remember that.

I'd assumed there'd be a lot of Chinese characters in this story, but if that's not the case, then yeah, we can wait till the categories I suggested reach critical mass. Hell, we'd pretty much have to, wouldn't we?

And now that I think of it, if we're going to separate Chinese by the government they choose, won't we have to look into doing the same for Spanish characters from TWTPE?

I think if we had Topangans we would have to do Chatsworthians as well. If the whole story is about a conflict between two equal communities, it wouldn't do to recognize one like that but not the other.

As for Quebecois, now that you've pointed out the problem I agree it needs to be addressed. Would "Citizens of Quebec" suffice for that purpose, or would that also be ambiguous? I don't know if Canada recognizes such a thing as provincial citizenship. If that's no good, then "Citizens of the Republic of Quebec" it would have to be. That would only be an additional sixteen keystrokes, not a huge difficulty.

Man, once you get beyond the rather simple concept of the nation-state, our "characters by nationality" categories really don't do that well, do they?