Re Johnbod's comment about Catalot and uncategorised templates, there have been big improvements to both Hotcat and Catalot this year and the situation is somewhat improved. The problem now are the images that have been bot categorised. But Catalot now removes the uncategorised template if you use it from a Catalot grid ref category to copy otherwise uncategorised images to another category. 

As for finding and searching, sometimes the descriptions are fine, sometimes you need local knowledge, and sometimes a bit of Googling and looking the geograph images up on the map identifies the place - its a mix and categorisation is helpful.

Re Andy's suggestion of creating Geograph categories for places, we could just categorise the categories of the individual grid squares to the relevant villages and towns. Of course some will match to multiple places. But now that Catalot has been improved I'm not sure I see the benefit.

WSC 

On 14 April 2012 14:44, Andy Mabbett <andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
A simple solution would be to create new categories, such as
Geograph:West Sussex and Geograph:Barnes.

Bots could then upload images to those, which could be subcategories
of the respective parent categories, without clogging the latter, and
images could be switched manually, as they're checked (simply by
deleting the prefix were applicable).

On 14 April 2012 14:30, John Byrne <john@bodkinprints.co.uk> wrote:
> Yes, many of us are aware of the issues with Geograph, above all WSC.
>
> I agree the categorization side of it has been the real Achilles heel, and
> in my experience the problem is often worse than WSC suggests.  When I
> filled up the Commons category for Wimbledon Common,
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wimbledon_Common,  I found that a
> significant number of images were categorized in "West Sussex" categories
> (what, 80 miles away?) and several others as "Barnes" (only 5 miles out, but
> that's a lot in London).   But the good news was that I was able to find
> these images easily enough through the basic Commons search, as the original
> Geograph text info had enough detail.   I've had this sort of result doing
> other categories.
>
> I understand that because templates were mostly used to record images as
> uncategorized etc, and categorizing with cat-a-lot doesn't remove these, and
> they are a pain to remove when you're doing bulk, these tend not to get
> removed.  So a good number of the images categorized with uncategorized or
> category  query templates are actually ok, and we don't have any reliable
> numbers for what is still a problem.    Many of the ones supposed to have
> problems don't, and many of the ones supposed to be ok aren't.
>
> If you want images for a place in the UK, you should always do a basic
> search as well as looking at the category.  But actually that's true of most
> things on Commons.
>
> Johnbod
>
>
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--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

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