Commons:Categories for discussion/2022/11/Category:Flickr images by location

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Category:Flickr images by location and subcategories

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Redundant and incorrect category tree that mixes source and subject. Not in line with out best practices and Commons:Categories. --Multichill (talk) 20:30, 20 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

What exactly is the problem? Why are these categories redundant? What is exactly incorrect in this category tree? Why should sources and subjects not be mixed? Why may images of for instance Germany not also be categorized by source? JopkeB (talk) 03:05, 21 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
: KeepI agree with JopkeB, I cannot see a problem with Category:Flickr images of Norfolk, England. There has been for some time a category Category:Geograph images in Norfolk which is another popular source for this subject which has never been disputed, and is part of large category tree concerning Geograph images Category:Images from Geograph Britain and Ireland. Kolforn (talk) 09:02, 22 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that source and topic categories are intersected. Source categories should be flat and not split out. These categories are hidden making it harder for images to find.
This is basic established practice here on Commons to not split source categories out. Didn't you notice that we have millions of Flickr images, but only a handful are in these incorrect categories? As for Geograph, that categories experiment is up for deletion next. Multichill (talk) 20:45, 24 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I hope you realise that as a result of deleting categories which have been functioning for years, by replacing those disliked categories with a higher-tier category, you are now filling those higher-tier category pages with hundreds of random images so that it is hard to find what you are looking for, among the mass of them. How exactly is that improving Wikipedia? I like to separate out Geograph imaages from the rest, because most of them are small-size pictures, making them less useful than most of the WP-editor contributions and the Flickr pictures, which are mostly a great deal larger, better quality, and more detailed. In general, I only use Geograph pictures as a last resort, and when there are a lot of them it really helps to categorise them away from the other, better pictures. Storye book (talk) 21:54, 25 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
In spite of your explanation, I still don't understand the reason why this is an incorrect category tree. There are many other hidden categories that have subcategories by country, subject and/or date. See for instance Category:Images from Anefo, which is a source and hidden category, and then one of its subcategories, for instance Category:Photographs by Willem van de Poll and its many sub-subcategories by location, subject and/or date; this category Images from Anefo also has a flat list, so files are categorized in the main category as well as in a subcategory. Would this be a solution for the problem: to categorize files in the source category Category:Flickr as well as in one of its subcategories? --JopkeB (talk) 08:41, 26 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That's because it's correct. A photographer category is about who made it, not what the source was for providing the files. A photographer might have worked for other agencies beside Anefo. Moved them to Category:Photographs by Anefo photographer. Multichill (talk) 18:04, 22 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Multichill: Now that the delete Geograph images by place categories has taken place, in my opion it has left us with a completely useless category of Geograph Britain and Ireland which now has a massive 4,128,666 images in it. This is making it completely unworkable to find images for a particular location in the UK. I think we have made a big mistake by deleting place categories.Kolforn (talk) 14:23, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I see you felt the need to also leave this message on my talk page. You really don't get it. Don't mix the source and the topic. Source categories are flat and in the case quite huge to just indicate where an image came from. For what's in it we have the regular category tree. By creating these intersection categories you're just hiding the images in a hidden category outside the main category reducing the chance of any user ever finding it. Multichill (talk) 18:04, 22 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Multichill: The problem with that is that an awful lot of Geograph images have been transferred by a bot, which lazily loads the images without a more specific category, thus making impossible to use a regular category tree to make a refined search for any location you are looking for. By narrowing it down to a county or city had made searches a little easy, but not now as they are in the huge category of Geograph Britain and Ireland. Kolforn (talk) 10:21, 24 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Multichill, Kolforn, Storye book, and JopkeB:
 Keep but remove from the TOPIC category tree. The problem is not the categories themselves. There is no issue with having source categories subcategorized by topic in and of itself. That said, there is a big issue when files are removed from true topical categories and moved into a source category just because the source category is broken down by topic. For example, Category:Flickr images of Germany is fine, but there are images under it that appear nowhere in the topical Category:Germany category tree (except by the flawed inclusion of Category:Flickr images of Germany there. This means that someone looking for images of Germany will never find these images unless they narrow down by source, which most users do not care about. This is why, per COM:CAT, TOPIC and SOURCE category trees are two different things. They should remain separate, and images should be separately categorized and sorted in each tree independently. Instead of nesting TOPIC and SOURCE categories into eachother, {{Cat see also}} can provide a handy quick navigation without encouraging a break of the system. I know we have gotten very lazy about this but mixing the core trees is a significant problem for usability. Josh (talk) 06:55, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That just encourages bad behavior. If it would just be a redundant category next to the normal one I really wouldn't care. The problem is that users keep mixing it with the main category tree and moving images outside of the main category tree. Multichill (talk) 18:04, 22 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Multichill
OK got your message, Not a big fan of these Geograph bots, especially the main uploader one as it dumps many images in the wrong place. For example Category:Norwich. Here the bot has placed images from villages and places from all over Norfolk and has just made a huge amount of work moving them to correct category’s, I have been working on just this category for weeks. As for adding the Category:Images from Geograph Britain and Ireland, I have been doing this so as to add |Norfolk to the end of it to try to place all the Geograph images of Norfolk in one group together within the category which now has over 4,304,655 images in it, making it usless if you wanted to find images specific to Norfolk. There was a category tree within that was county specific but these have all been deleted now by a Dutch editor who decided that this was in his words just encourages bad behavior what ever that meant! Kolforn (talk) 14:13, 29 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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