Category talk:American smashers

I think you must put smashers from others regions, for example the best of Central America, I'm from El Salvador and I meet an excelents smashers from Costa Rica, they fight like or better than a professionals of Mexico and anothers countries. Skylord (talk) 20:10, 8 September 2008 (UTC) Skylord (elvin)

Yeah, we got in to this when this category was created. I figure you could use these categories: Category:South American smashers or Category:Mexican smashers. Heck, use this if you'd like. Technically, "American" can mean North, Central, and South American. FyreNWater - (Talk • Contributions ) 00:25, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

There's a fairly elaborate (albeit perpetually incomplete) category tree for regional smashers. The reason that you're not seeing a category for Salvadoran smashers is because the articles either don't exist yet, or haven't been correctly categorized.

But we really shouldn't bring up the technicality about "America." The word "American" has been used to describe residents of the United States in popular usage for many many years--if you say you're an American, nobody even questions it.

But to clarify, there has always been some dispute over how the borders are drawn between North and South America, however I would suggest subscribing to the "Isthmus of Panama" theory, where all nations south of the Panama Canal are deemed to be in South America. Panama itself has land on both sides of the canal but it, along with most other "central American" countries, is considered a part of North America politically-speaking. All that said, nothing stops you from creating categories for countries that don't have them yet--there's no reason to lump yourself into Category:Mexican smashers unless you're from Mexico! --RJM ^Talk 21:45, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Category:Central American smashers would be appropriate, imo. --Sky (t · c · w) 01:59, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Not a continent, which is why I haven't gone that route. It's just empirically incorrect is all. Then it draws more questions as to where you draw the line between Central, North and South. Jamaica is in North America....OR IS IT?! :^) There's a good read on it at Wikipedia for the curious. --RJM ^Talk 02:09, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

From what I can tell, we don't have to keep strictly to continent names if the regions are large enough... As for drawing the lines, we already have Category:Mexican smashers, and so we can define North American smashers as everyone north of Mexico, than Mexican smashers, than Central American smashers from the south Mexican border to the south border of Panama, and then South America is subsequently the countries south of Panama (you'll find Risk agrees with me ;D, save for the fact that we already have Mexican smashers). As you pointed out, Jamaica (and the other Caribbean nations) is in ambiguity - I would resolve to add one more category of :Category:Caribbean smashers, which are explicitly those smashers living on islands in the Caribbean sea. There are a few islands off the coast of Venezuela and other South American nation-states, which I would add to the South American category. I'd probably subcat Mexican smashers into Central American smashers, and then we're set. :) --Sky (t · c · w) 03:34, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I think some of those ideas confuse the issue beyond sensibility and we shouldn't overthink this. Mexico is absolutely in North America and nobody argues that but when you re-structure the category hierarchy like that it doesn't make practical sense either. I think part of the confusion stems from the fact that I never created a :Category:North American smashers that would've helped better define the tree; the reason I never did was because this wiki is based in North America and a North American category would only serve as a placeholder for other categories. Which is fine, but how do you explain that to other users...ultimately, I omitted that level of the Smasher category tree, but in theory, here's a proposition for the western hemisphere that makes sense to me to clean it up a little and account for the Central America discrepancy (not all potential nations are included in the example obviously):

• Category:Smashers

  • Category:North American smashers

    • Category:Canadian smashers
    • Category:American smashers
    • Category:Mexican smashers

      Category:Barbadian smashers

      Category:Jamaican smashers

      Category:Cuban smashers

      Category:Central American smashers

      • Category:Belizean smashers

        Category:Guatemalan smashers

        Category:Nicaraguan smashers

  • Category:South American smashers
    • Category:Brazilian smashers
    • Category:Chilean smashers
    • Category:Peruvian smashers
    • Category:Venezuelan smashers

Having :Category:Central American smashers as a sub-category to North American smashers factors in the geopolitical divide, segregates the Central American nations so they belong to both their own category on a smasher page but behind-the-scenes it all rolls up to the :Category:North American smashers level. I don't really think that :Category:North American smashers should be placed on any smasher article unless there's a really a dispute (but only one city in the world straddles a continental border, so I don't see it being an issue). If we are to come to a consensus on this, the other categories will have to be restructured a little as well and I don't mind drawing up a little policy to work out the rest of'em too. --RJM ^Talk 14:54, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments, all are very, very interesting. I decided to created a new category to do more easy the task of find people in my region, all smashers must be united, we are from the same world... Smash World!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Skylord (talk • contribs) 18:09, 23 September 2008