Yes, I'd be fine with that. I think my reservations about hierarchies of image categories can be resolved within that context through user-defined categories. My main reservation was about mixing images and article titles in the same alphabetized listing, which would not occur with this.
I tend to think that there will categories that will be effectively image-only, based on the fact that images have an inherent categorization arising from *genre* that does not exist in articles (i.e., distinction between photographs, digitalized artwork, maps, graphics, charts, etc.). For example [[U.S. history photographs]] vs. [[U.S. history maps]] vs. [[U.S. digitalized artwork]], etc. But that can all be resolved on a case-by-case basis through user contributions. Certainly it doesn't require an additional space.
I do have some concerns about the thumbnails. Overall I think it's a great idea, but it could result in a large number of thumbnails being downloaded in the case where the user isn't looking for images at all.
As an example, Texas has over 200 counties and thus over 200 corresponding county maps (even more towns obviously, many of which have maps now). Even if the display limit per page in catgories in 500, for example, you could have a potential right off the bat for a large number of thumbnails to be displayed in the case where a user isn't even looking for images at all. This could arise while paging through a long listing (I'm assuming images will listed after articles), but also in the case of a category with a small number of articles but a large number of images.
There are a couple obvious ways of handling this. Deactivating image thumbnails by default (through preferences) is one way, but knowing myself, I would probably activate that prefence much of the time and wind up running into this situation relatively frequently (downloading lots of thumbnails when I don't want them). Another solution is to require explicit loading of thumbnails for every page display (the first time, you never get thumbnails, but have to request it), but that seems like it could be annoying. What do you think would be the best approach here?
Sj said:
On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 10:39:01 -0400, Fennec Foxen fennec@gmail.com wrote:
... if there are to be categories for images only, they should be
< *enforced* as categories for images only. Otherwise, you'll
eventually get people who "insert articles into image categories and vice-versa..."
Yes, thanks Fennec. That's exactly what I meant. Dec, I think everything you want can be accomplished via changing the way categories are displayed; perhaps even listing images of maps as "Category:Image:Maps" as the section-header for images on the "Category:Maps" page (and redirecting the category-image-maps page to the cat-maps page) -- but internally separating Map-cat entries into Image and non-Image based on their namespace, not on the user-defined cat.
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