Commons:Categories for discussion/2025/01/Category:Cast members

Category:Cast members

Relisting this discussion, as the previous one has gone stale. I'd like to have this and every other "[Movie/TV series] cast" category deleted, as these subcategories don't exist to sort or diffuse media relevant to these movies or tv series. It also creates an enormous amount of category bloat for actors who have been in the profession for a long time, and have performed in dozens of movies and tv series. ReneeWrites (talk) 20:21, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

•  Support These types of categories could theoretically work if they we're confined to clearly notable lead actors and images of them that directly relate to the movie. Like say Category:Top Gun cast members containing a sub-category for images of Tom Cruise at a Top Gun premier. The problem is that it never works out that way. Instead you end up with stuff like Category:The Secret Life of Pets cast where the movie is a cartoon to begin with and the category contains a bunch of random subcategories for non-notable actors without any images of the movie to begin with. At that point it's just meaningless trivia that is better stored on Wikidata and accessed through infoboxes. There's already categories for images of actors at movies premiers and the like anyway. So these categories are redundant at best, if not totally meaningless at worst. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:11, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

 Delete. As I have said many times, Commons is not Wikidata, nor is it IMdb. This type of information is best represented in Wikidata - when included properly, it will show up in {{Wikidata Infobox}}, as it does in e.g. Category:Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. Replicating this data in categories is an exceptionally poor use of editor time, especially as not all films or actors have Commons categories. (Adding category links for the actors in the infobox, or reverse search links for "what films has this actor appeared in", could be desirable enhancements for the template, but that's a separate matter.)

There are a small number of images on Commons which really, truly depict the cast of a production, like File:Cast members of Game of Thrones (Comic-Con 2012).jpg. However, in most cases, there really aren't enough of those images to merit specific categories, and there's certainly no need to create an overarching category to encompass all such photos of any show's cast.

Omphalographer (talk) 23:16, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

As an additional matter, I think we also need to address related categories, such as:

• Category:Actors by role (May 2024 CfD)
• Category:Films by actor
• Category:Performing artists by production
• Category:People associated with fictional characters (containing mostly actors who have starred as those characters)

-- and probably a few more I've forgotten about. We've ended up with a lot of overlapping categories all trying to represent the same "X played the role of Y in Z" relationship from different angles, or using slightly different terminology. If we're going to represent it at all (which I don't think we should), we need consensus on how that should be done. Omphalographer (talk) 23:25, 9 January 2025 (UTC)