[Commons-l] Categories and galleries

[Ayelie]

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.

 --
Ayelie
  ~Editor at Large


On 6/10/07, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> We need to use both.
>
> Puting images to categories is problematic in many ways:
>
>    - 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.
>
> Idealy all images should be in galleries and all galleries be in
> categories. People tend to dump images to categories which is fine but those
> images should be "moved" to galleries.
>
>         - White Cat
>
> On 6/10/07, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >
> > (Apologies is the following suggestion has been made before.)
> >
> > There has been much said about the duplication of effort by
> > maintaining a gallery and a category for a single topic. It was said
> > to abolish the one or the other, to no avail, as both have their use:
> > * Categories are good for organizing things in a hierarchical order,
> > which can be done on the image page, and not on some remote place
> > (gallery page)
> > * Galleries are good for structuring files of a topic while
> > maintaining that these files "belong together" on a single page
> >
> > Suggestions towards replacing both with some tagging system have been
> > rather vague and far-in-the-futurish (at least, implementation-wise).
> >
> > As an intermediate measure, I propose something like this: When
> > viewing a gallery page, MediaWiki checks if there is a category of the
> > same name. If this is the case, it adds a new section to the gallery
> > page (dynamically for viewing, not altering the source text!), showing
> > all the images in the category that are /not/ already shown in the
> > gallery. The section could be called "Other", "Misc", "Additional" or
> > the like. That way, the user would always see all images on the topic
> > when visiting the gallery page; it would also allow editors to see
> > what new images to the topic should be included into the gallery.
> >
> > This should be relatively easy to implement (maybe including a new
> > magic word to prevent this mechanism on certain  gallery pages). I
> > could throw some JavaScript at it, but I'd prefer an internal
> > solution, if this feature would be wanted.
> >
> >
> > The reverse mechanism (display all images from the gallery page in the
> > category) might be more problematic, as images from navigational
> > elements could show up in the category. However, it might become a
> > toolserver toy ("what images in a gallery are not in the matching
> > category?").
> >
> > Thought? Comments? Bullets? ;-)
> >
> > Magnus
> >
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> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
> >
>
>
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>


-- 
Ayelie
  ~Editor at Large
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