Some bullets and points comparing categories and galleries: Categories are easier to add to an image, as you merely add the [[Category:foo]] while adding other info anyway

Gallery pages are more a pain to keep updated in terms of "let's gather every single image here" as each name has to be found, copied, and added to a separate page as well as having to add info to the image page anyway

Categories are for a more general dump/gathering of images

Gallery pages are a better gathering/compilation of useful images on a subject, or images that best portray it

They are for separate purposes, something people don't often realise.

Not every image should be in a gallery as that would make pages rediculously long and take far too long to load for some people. Categories are a dump you can add all images relating to a subject into, and it only shows a certain number of images at a time. Every image should be categorised and the best should be added to a gallery.

On 6/11/07, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote: Oh, don't get me wrong, Magnus - I think your idea is a good one, and very interesting. I was more replying to White Cat ... and stating "truths not always universally acknowledged". We do get people from time to time who *remove* categories from images saying "but it's in a gallery!" - I'm not sure if we have a policy on galleries/categories or just a guideline, or perhaps nothing official at all. I shall have to look into that. The only problems I see with your idea is that we will have the "too long to load" issue again; you would have to have some kind of limit (say, 100 images compared to the category limit of 200 - since there will be gallery images as well) and a "next 100" link. Now, something that would be interesting is if you had some way of sorting the images according to how often they are used wikimedia-wide, or how often they are linked to/viewed/etc. and had those images at the top of the cat section on galleries. Another point is that category/gallery pairings are for the most part both rather small; it would make more sense to have a magic word to *add* the category section to a gallery page than it would to have a word to *remove* it. We have (unfortunately) a lot of galleries with one or two images, and the category may only have one or two more. These are often created by newbies or anons who come from wikipedias where they are used to very specific, small cats. There are also the species galleries, which are created very frequently by people I assume coming from wikispecies or who create pages for all species under a certain class. These "galleries" more often than not have quite a bit of information and then maybe one or two images. The opposite is also true: There are some categories with more than 100 images that have no galleries. They aren't always needed, but it is nice to have a page you can go to see the "best images" at a glance. For these, galleries will probably be created eventually - my initial thought of "why not have a gallery in the category" would cause more problems than anything else, with people doing that everywhere. IMO categories should stay the same and Magnus's idea for having a "category preview" on some gallery pages could be interesting. I'd love to see a test version if this gets written; it would certainly be helpful for some gallery/category pairings :) -- Ayelie ~Editor at Large _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

* We would have to watch every image description page for vandalism rather than just galleries

* It doesn't really offer a description per image so it is not very helpful in explaining why image is significant.