Religion
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• - Hi , please - note - additions to this category are required to comply with WP:BLPCAT - Youreallycan (talk) 19:32, 11 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I will have to look back and see if I can find the discussion (it took place several years ago), but the members of the Freemasonry Project reached a consensus that Wikipedia should not have a Category:Freemasons, and should instead limit ourselves solely to List of Freemasons. There were several reasons for this... the main one was lack of Verifiability - The fact is, being labeled as a Freemason can be controversial (and even dangerous) in some parts of the world. Throughout history, all sorts of people have been (and are) "accused" of being Freemasons for political reasons - usually without any evidence to support the claim. We need to be careful that Wikipedia does not lend credence to such accusations. With a list article, we can demand the inclusion of reliable sourcing at the time someone is added to the list... in a category we can not. There is no mechanism for providing Verifiability with a category.

I know all the arguments in favor of the idea that categorization and listification are not mutually exclusive. In most cases I would agree... but in this case, experience has shown that listification works, and categorization does not. Blueboar (talk) 14:54, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]