Commons:Requests for comment/Technical needs survey/Wall of images view for category pages including images in subcats

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Wall of Images View for category pages (incl sorting & subcats)[edit]

Description of the Problem[edit]

  • Problem description: Most other major comparable media websites (example) have a wall of images view on sites, just not WMC. For some reason the only way to get this here is the search results. However, there is no way to have this on category pages which are a) often more useful than using the search results and b) can be linked to and indexed by Web search engines. Moreover, it is often difficult to find good/relevant images from a category page because they are buried in (often seemingly arbitrary) subcategories (examples below) and/or among a very large number of other (often outdated) files that clutter the pages.
Categories can often be more useful than search results if the searched image is not within the results or you're looking for a specific subject that has a category / you know of (or navigated to) the category you know should contain the image. Also the search results can be sorted in a way that very low quality and irrelevant results are at the top while high-quality ones are buried far down. Often, many images are not in the results – for example because the file description does not include some specific word. Other than the search results page the UI seems rather antiqued with little regards to UX and practical usefulness. A walls of images view is especially useful in overflowing cats (containing e.g. mostly outdated charts) or cats with very long branches of subcats (e.g. by subtaxa) one can't all browse through. Currently WMC is not that useful and popular – I think implementing roughly what's proposed here would be one of the top effective ways to change that not far from improving Web search engine indexing which could be tied to the usability of WMC category pages.
Explanations with examples:
  • Brief: When looking for good-quality images for rivers from above I don't want to go through all the subcats of this; same for this...there's nothing but relevance (e.g. up-to-date charts) or quality I'm looking for, not any specific river.
  • Longer: Another usefulness-case among many is that I'd like to scroll through interesting cats Category:Microscopic images relating to biology to find interesting/high-quality images rather than going through all of the many subcats without any sorting. And there are cases where images are buried deep down in arbitrary seemingly irrelevant cats – for example when looking for a high-quality picture of a person on a ladder I don't want to go through Category:People on ladders by country or for that of a fitting pic of a bee (any bee) on a flower having to go through each cat in Category:Bees on flowers instead of scrolling (in this case there just are many still unsorted ones but often there are no images at that level).
There are many other strange or at that category relatively irrelevant criteria according to which files are buried in subcats and then missing at the cat above so it'll be hard to create other branches. For example in Category:People exercising (w. equipment) I'd like to create subcategories for the different exercises people are doing so people can use/find these in educational pages about these exercises but people have already begun moving (not copying) them to subcategories distinguishing by 'gender', images may eventually up under cats like "Women exercising‎ in India by city" but then are missing at all categories above despite being the best image for an exercise and gender not being the key or only defining criteria by which to organize these. One further problem among many is that you also can't see recent uploads or up-to-date charts+maps at the top even in categories with many files such as this.
  • Proposal type: feature request
  • Proposed solution: A toggle button that switches the page to a wall of images that looks like the search results. The images are sorted so that:
    • Recently uploaded images are relatively high up
    • The longer you scroll down the less used images are, images that are used e.g. twice on English WP and elsewhere are relatively high up (featured images and so on are also leveraged for this)
    • Year categories like Category:Charts by year of latest data or Category:2023 maps of the world are leveraged to show more up-to-date images higher up
    • Things like whether a Template:Factual accuracy is set could also be used
    • When you search for "People on ladders" you get a lot of images by the same uploader of the same scene at the top which aren't even showing what was searched for – instead use the category for what has been searched for (in this case a 1:1 text match) and sort the files so that it shows many different images at the top
    • Images directly in the cat are mostly high up but when scrolling further images of the next 3 or so levels of subcategories also show up
    • Images are also sorted according to what the user configures using filters (the above is the default and altered accordingly) – currently the filters are only available for the search results but one can't sort images in a category e.g. by recency
  • Phabricator ticket:

Discussion[edit]

yes we need an easy way to see a gallery of more than 200 images in a cat, or in subcats.
before something better is developed, here i put together a link to petscan: MediaWiki talk:Gadget-DeepcatSearch.js#Deepcat PetScan 999. please try it out and give feedback there.--RZuo (talk) 13:34, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Votes[edit]

Milky Way Galaxy and a place on Earth‎ (67 C, 51 F)
Bees on flowers‎ (42 C, 162 F)
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