On 6/11/07, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com> wrote:
On 6/10/07, Ayelie <ayelie.at.large@gmail.com> wrote:
> They are for separate purposes, something people don't often realise.
I realize that. I just think that a combined view of both might have advantages.
> 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.
There are currently >17000 category/gallery pairs on commons. I was
thinking especially of low-volume category/gallery pairs. Large volume
categories could be automatically ignored (e.g., don't show the
"merged view" if the category or the gallery have >200 images), or
through a magic word, as suggested.
Well, 'twas just an idea.
Magnus
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 :)