Commons:Categories for discussion/2012/07/Category:Gallery pages

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This discussion of one or several categories is now closed. Please do not make any edits to this archive.

Category:Gallery pages

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Note. See also: Commons:Village pump/Proposals/Archive/2012/07#Gallery portals and Commons:Featured galleries.

No need to add all gallery pages in a category Foroa (talk) 09:43, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Use Special:AllPages or just type a name in the search box. --Foroa (talk) 09:46, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
See discussion here: Commons:Village pump/Proposals#Gallery portals --Timeshifter (talk) 09:47, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Discussion is here, village pump is archived in a week (or two). --Foroa (talk) 09:51, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
We can discuss there too. They are related discussions. Village Pump topics in that particular Village Pump stay up for months in many cases. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:55, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If we organise this into subcategories, it would help get an overview of what's out there. I think part of the problem with galleries is the lack of an overview. The "meta-gallery" approach mentioned at Commons:Village pump/Proposals#Gallery portals would help - but so would this, and in addition it would help build such meta-galleries. To give a concrete example: we'd like to have Neptune (planet), Uranus, Saturn (planet) etc all together somehow. One way to do it is to overcategorise, so that in addition to the relevant planet category, the gallery is in Category:Planets of the Solar System. Another is to create a category, Category:Planets of the Solar System galleries. In terms of getting a Big Picture of what's out there for galleries, the second approach is more helpful (because the category will be a subcategory of Category:Gallery pages). This has some potential to create a parallel category structure to the existing one, but with so many fewer galleries than files, I think we can live with it for the benefit of getting an overview of galleries. Rd232 (talk) 10:52, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Anything would be better than nothing. I had no idea until today that there were 106,000 gallery pages on the Commons (according to Foroa). That's insane. How is someone supposed to get an overview of gallery pages? See suggestions on the other thread too: Commons:Village pump/Proposals#Gallery portals
I started a Bugzilla thread about showing only gallery pages while browsing Commons categories:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38214 --Timeshifter (talk) 12:07, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The idea of a gallery category makes some sense - when I first arrived at Commons, I certainly looked for one! And if it's used as a parent category only (Foroa's "redundant" point is well taken), it could be quite useful! The categorization scheme here is too complex for the number of galleries here, even though it generally makes sense for files. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 06:19, 7 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed your discussion, as the gallery Rosa cultivars by alphabet (one of the subgalleries of Rosa - the 'metagallery' would be Plants) was added to the category Gallery pages. I've now read through your discussions here and in the village pump archive and I still don't really understand why you think this new category structure is needed...
As can be seen with Category:Gallery pages, Switzerland, this will create exactly what you don't want - another category tree with names for content instead of the 'metagalleries' with pictures and links to the subgalleries!
I'm working a lot with galleries (and sometimes even so called 'metagalleries') and I think it would be marvelous if more people would work on them, as they have to be created and maintained... and you are right that creating 'metagalleries' often means that you have to create quite a few of the subgalleries, too... on the other side, galleries are found quite easily by 'normal users' by just typing what you are looking for into the search box at the top of the page - if a gallery exists, that's what you will find. And if not - you are welcome to create the gallery! ;->
There is a project which would help the promotion of galleries quite a lot - Commons:Featured galleries - sadly, it never was formally proposed (I still hope it will be someday ;->).
Anna reg (talk) 09:50, 6 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with you, Anna reg, that we don't need another category tree. A flat category would be very helpful though. No subcategories. Then an A-Z TOC (with many subdivisions) would allow easy browsing of galleries. Maybe as part of creating a gallery namespace some code could be added by the MediaWiki developers to automatically populate a flat category of gallery pages. --Timeshifter (talk) 04:14, 8 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps I'm so sceptic because I personally can't see myself browsing categories without pictures ;-> - but if I understand your idea, you want to create something similar to the template-categories (helping common users to have an overview)? I'm still not sure if that can help normal users (I suspect that I'm not the only one overhelmed by categories with lots of text) but you are correct that a flat category shouldn't create more confusion.
As a warning (;->): I can tell you that the 2390 results for 'Rosa' galleries include perhaps up to 200 redirects - the others are all galleries (each rosa species and cultivars should have its own). All those galleries can be reached by links from Rosa (via subpages). Are you sure you want them all included in your category?
Best wishes, Anna reg (talk) 10:21, 8 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

People can drill down categories into subcategories by clicking the subcategory arrows in a category such as Category:Rosa. That is text, not images. So at first you probably do browse category trees without pictures. An equivalent functionality would be helpful for galleries. Manually creating gallery index pages such as rosa species and rosa cultivars is one possibility. So is the Special:AllPages idea discussed below. Right now there is no overarching gallery method. There is no entry into the wealth of galleries. There is nothing. It is haphazard, and most people do not know of the vast number of galleries, or how to scan gallery titles. Very few people will use Special:AllPages unless it is linked from an overarching entry point such as Category:Gallery pages. And that entry page would have to heavily promoted from the Main Page, etc.. --Timeshifter (talk) 04:31, 9 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

 Delete: Presently, not in any futuristic scenario, this category is completely useless and confusing to editors.    FDMS  4    15:58, 9 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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Foroa said elsewhere that there are 106,000 gallery pages. Here is the source:

It is not listed here though:

What is the source for the 60,000 redirects that Foroa mentioned elsewhere? --Timeshifter (talk) 16:05, 8 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A-Z table of contents for large categories

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An A-Z TOC template is better for the average reader than Special:AllPages.

There are several A-Z TOC templates available for categories:

Click on "What links here" for those templates to find the categories using the templates. Some of the categories with those templates have hundreds of thousands of pages/files in them. Some over a million. For example;

Two good points: there are some very enormous categories, and we have some tools for making them slightly more manageable. Rd232 (talk) 19:38, 8 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep this tree. I see galleries as underutilized. We normally only find them when we are looking at the category tree which has a gallery of the same name, or when using the search function for a phrase. A gallery like London should really be more discoverable. rigt now its only categorized under London. we either need to categorize galleries more (like putting London in Category:Cities or Category:Europe, which we would not do with individual images of london), or have a separate tree for navigation, like this.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 16:46, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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It may be a long time before tens of thousands of gallery pages get categorized in a galleries category, and be browsable via an A-Z table of contents.

And that would still not make gallery pages as easy to find as they need to be.

See Help:Namespaces. A gallery namespace could be created. Since it is a namespace it could be searchable.

In Special:Search there is an option to search for galleries but it is confusing. I do not believe that all pages without any other namespace are galleries. An explicitly named gallery namespace would be helpful. --Timeshifter (talk) 00:44, 7 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was starting to wonder why we didnt have a way to separate disambiguation pages and redirects from galleries. If we are committed to using galleries (which we appear to be), i think we need very specific search tools for them, in addition to eventually having a category tree for them. What can we do to get action on this?Mercurywoodrose (talk) 01:27, 7 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I had to find out why a 'gallery search' could be confusing - if I follow your link to Special:Search, I just have to check the first box - it's even called (Gallery) - and leave all others empty and the results will be galleries and redirects (but that can be seen in the short description available in the search result - even though I agree that it's strange that the option list redirects doesn't influence the result at all). I finally found out that I'm automatically directed to the tab 'advanced' (the rightmost tab), where those options can be easily found. I hope that helps for further searches... Anna reg (talk) 01:34, 7 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

An option to search only page titles would help

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Special:Search has a box (advanced tab) to search galleries. But it is very inadequate. It actually does not search just gallery pages. It pulls up disambiguation pages, redirects, and more. Unchecking "List redirects" does not seem to change the results.

Also, there is no option to search only titles. That would help tremendously in many cases. So one would check the gallery box and a titles-only box.

Currently, searches with the gallery box checked returns pages with the terms found in the title or on the page. This can pull up many irrelevant results. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:06, 8 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Need an improved Special:AllPages

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Special:AllPages defaults to searching pages without any namespace. It is a start. But it is not browsable due to the huge number of gallery pages.

There needs to be an easier way to browse the entries. Currently one has to manually copy and paste into these 2 forms

  • "Display pages starting at ..."
  • "Display pages ending at ..."

Then one can browse a section of gallery page titles.

It would be better if there were a link to the side of each entry in Special:AllPages to dig deeper until one gets to a browsable list of page titles. --Timeshifter (talk) 00:58, 7 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Can be very useful for readers/viewers

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(old discussion. pinging to get some action - @Timeshifter: , @Anna reg: , @Mercurywoodrose: , @Foroa: , @FDMS4: , @Rd232: , @Philosopher: )

Initially I thought that it is of no use except as a tracking category but then I thought that if the contents were organised into a categorisation scheme that parallels what already exists on Commons we will end up with a useful resource for readers/viewers. English Wikipedia has portals as a means for readers to get an overview of a topic. What does Commons have? We really only have categories but categories have inherent limitations. Readers/viewers should be served up something better. With gallery pages different languages can be served up, sections and TOCs can be added, images can be organised by topic/subject/theme rather than simply dished out alphanumerically, Featured/quality/valued images can be nicely displayed, etc.

Incidentally I notice that the MediaWikisoft does actually call these pages as "Gallery" on the actual page file link (next to the Discussion" link).

If this page is kept there is a huge amount of work needed to set up the gallery pages infrastructure. There will be thousands of galleries (pages) and categories that will need to be created. I feel that the current system where things get constructed organically over time is not the right way to do it. We can use a number of automated and semi-automated tools to do some of the work. One problem that I have struck in an attempt to build Commons infrastructure from the ground up rather than on the fly resulted in all of the empty categories that I created getting deleted! Alan Liefting (talk) 01:25, 4 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. It looks like there is a general feeling to keep it. It is serving as the root directory for all of the gallery pages. Deleting this one leaves a hole in the categorisation scheme. Also, two and a half years is far too long for a CfD to remain open.Alan Liefting (talk) 20:39, 6 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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