Writers

=General=

We seem to have both category:writers and ... :Where There don t seem to be any articles in that category. -- 22:26, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

:Ok, now I see it. Bleh, what a mess. Apparently the reasoning is that writer is a more generic and less elitist term than author . Personally, I don t care, but it s wrong to have both IMHO as the distinction is not that clear. -- 15:38, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

Should we have individual writers in this catgory Think about it in the long run: when we get close to having all writers categorised, 17:19, May 31, 2004 (UTC) :I think it would be better to break them up as is. I.e., writers by country, writers by genre, writers by type. If you want all writers, how about Writers:A ...Writers:Z. Too soon to do it yet, I think. according to 17:41, 31 May 2004 (UTC) ::Sounds good to me. So I guess we empty 18:24, May 31, 2004 (UTC)

I also notice that if you say e.g.,

=Computer people=

Should 05:09, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

More broadly, what s with all the computer people who have been categorized here 19:04, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

:Not sure specifically which people you are refering to, but every now and then a computer person does write a book... -- 22:18, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, but should people who ve written computer textbooks, or what not, be included in Is this category for anybody who s ever written anything for publication

Examples: Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Guy L. Steele, Jr., Bruce Schneier, Richard Stallman, Rob Pike, Hans Moravec, Raymond Kurzweil, Brian Kernighan, Tim Berners-Lee, Fred Brooks, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Eric S. Raymond.

Some of these do not even seem to have written books. (I haven t included the variety of science and technology journalists who are also listed here, because they surely count as writers). 22:32, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The problem is that most writers of textbooks don t have any considerable biography and what they write is completely impersonal to them. 23:11, Jun 5, 2004 (UTC)

Of the people on your list I recognize (except Bill Gates), I know them mostly because of what they have written! Some of them I didn t know anything about until I started reading their published works, or I read their books before I knew their name. If you want to make a category for technical writers or something like that, and move them to it, go for it! I would have done it a while ago, but I couldn t decide what to call the category. -- 05:16, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)

:I have created 05:43, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

::Shouldn t the page 11:23, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC) :::On reading the category description, I think there is probably a difference. When I created technology writer, I was finding scientists that just happened to have written books. I suspect scientific journalists are journalists that have bothered to learn enough science to write about it. There is a very big difference in credibility and level of writing there. Having said that, the two categories are close enough that I m sure a few are in the wrong one. Both category descriptions probably need to be expanded if they are not merged. -- 01:18, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

= Cleanup =

There are too many articles in this category; time to subcategorize. -- 14:09, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

:There are more than enough sub-categories already: the work is shifting articles into them. So far I have cut the number of letters left to 15. -- 22:57, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

::There are now just 16 articles listed, though only 4 of them should be here. Others should be moved to subcategories -- 14:02, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

= To Do =

Worthy to-do list moved from Category:authors

Add category tags to all authors so eventually the category system replaces the manually compiled lists as a more categorical system. Here are some subcategories to be made. Novelists, poets, playwrights and a few more can be broken down further by genre:

*academic writers *biographers *children s literature authors *illustrators *humorists *journalists *magazine writers *military authors *newspaper writers *non-fiction authors *novelists *laywrights *poets *political authors *religious authors *science authors *screenwriters *self-help authors *short story authors

(I did not originate the above; I found it in an HTML comment on Category:Writers. -- 00:29, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC))

:note that many of these subcategories exist, though often as writers rather than authors . -- 08:38, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)