Commons talk:Project scope/Update 2013/General pages, galleries and categories

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Scope Review 2013 links: Discuss stage 2 of this review Translation Help your community by translating the review Background Main review page: Background and process FAQ Links to current rules Project Scope Photographs of identifiable people Discussion: Introductory Scope wording Aim of Wikimedia Commons Excluded educational content Discussion: Files Must be a media file Must be an allowable free file format Must be freely licensed or public domain Licensing terms Evidence Precautionary principle 'Realistically useful for an educational purpose' PDF and DjVu formats Discussion: Pages, galleries and categories General pages, galleries and categories User pages, galleries and categories Discussion: Areas of particular concern Censorship "Neutral point of view" Discussion: Identifiable people Lead Legal issues Consent Moral issues Identification Examples Removal requests Other image sources Other proposals Other proposals

Proposal 1

• The part "Excluded educational content" is ignored - there are many galleries that have significant amounts of "educational content" that serves as a mirror of Wikipedia. One example. It would be good to enforce this. Ottava Rima (talk) 01:00, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmm. That's a good example of problematic content, although its history seems to refute your statement that such content is ignored. It was much worse before Turelio's enforcement action a month or two ago, for instance.

Did you have some change to the policy in mind? --Avenue (talk) 13:59, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't know, to be honest. I think enforcement is the number one thing - too many items are not enforced in general, or, as strongly. Is there some way to use Wikidata or the rest to create a blurb that can be posted on the galleries? It would create a small, set document that would appear in a similar way that Commons image information appears on a Wikipedia image page under the same name. That way, you could completely prohibit all blurbs and have any fights over them contained to a different Wikimedia site. Ottava Rima (talk) 15:30, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Example of why I think prohibiting blurbs in galleries might not be a good idea, I think they are quite useful here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Seattle_and_the_Orient. - Jmabel ! talk 23:41, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Blurbs, sure. And that link has a blurb. :) But look how long the page was - 50k of text. Ottava Rima (talk) 02:19, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Thanks, Jmabel, that's another good example. It starts with both a short (paragraph-length) summary of the topic, plus an overview of our collection of relevant files. The gallery is well structured, and incorporates brief explanatory phrases (giving a bit more guidance than section headings would) to guide the viewer. There is a huge difference between this and the tract now archived at Talk:Coinage of India.

I think the scope policy on galleries and our galleries guideline are both reasonably clear. Our infrastructure for curating galleries is not so well developed, for both fixing problems and promoting excellence. Commons:Featured galleries is nothing but a placeholder, and I don't know of any gallery-focussed counterpart to Category:Images for cleanup. So there seem to be big opportunities for improvement there. --Avenue (talk) 02:35, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

"are both reasonably clear" Agreed. That is why I stressed enforcement as opposed to changes. :) Ottava Rima (talk) 13:58, 11 July 2013 (UTC)