(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