Category talk:Human war criminals

Threshold for inclusion?

What's the threshold for inclusion in this category? Take Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (Silurian Earth), given the Earth he inhabited is it reasonable to categorise him as a war criminal? Or Women in the wood. Or Eckersley, or even Melody Pond. Our War crime page doesn't even really establish what it is. And even if we're to ignore T:NO RW for this for a moment, we'd still need to establish which war and which rules of war. Especially for the non-contemporary wars. --Tangerineduel / talk 05:36, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Rules of war is even more controversial than it might seem at first glance. In international law people are only bound by court decisions (insofar as they're a party to that court), treaties, and customary law. Customary law is messy and often ambiguous, so the big one here is treaties, such as the Geneva Convention. But if a country hasn't signed a treaty, its forces aren't bound by it, and aren't war criminals - unless they violated customary law. Which is often very difficult to adjudicate. This is just a mess of a category, and shouldn't be applied to anyone unless it's explicitly stated in narrative imo. Najawin ☎ 05:51, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I just assumed it was a violation of T:OVER-CAT:

Categories which characterise people as "enemies" or "allies" are strictly forbidden. Any such categories would be opinion only, as characters aren't wholly one thing or another.

As most, if not all, of the categorisation was based on connector, and it seemed to me at the time very much an analogous case, being based on opinion. But yes, I suppose it could work if we were to use it only for individuals who were textually described as war criminals. Still seems a bit dicey though. The annoying thing is that the IP user has been replacing other, useful categories with this on at least one occasion, I didn't have time to look through them all. I was going to go through and revert the changes, but I didn't have the energy. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 09:41, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I forgot about T:OVER-CAT in considering my first post.

I agree with Najawin that unless it's explicit in the narrative they should be reverted.

I'll also put it on my to do list to create a category tag like Template:Messy cat and Template:Diff cat to tag categories like this, that references T:OVER-CAT just so it's clear not to overuse categories like this. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:46, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Have created a template: Template:Suscept conject cat, that should go on any categories that are susceptible to conjectural categorisation. --Tangerineduel / talk 03:36, 17 July 2024 (UTC)