Template talk:Navigation Roses by color

Colour chart not helpful, and not workable

I'm in the process of removing uses of this template from the various category pages because, sorry, it's just not helpful. There are several problems with the colour chart as it is laid out.

• The little squares of colour do not, and cannot, do justice to the range of colours that each colour-name represents. Three axes would be required to represent a colour range, and that isn't easy to do with a two-dimentional screen.
• I've checked with other wikipedians, including an art specialist, who confirm what I see on my computer screen: the colours are wrong. Pale pink is not pale, orange/vermillion/red are nearly indistinguishable, magenta/purple/deep pink are likewise much the same.
• Rosarians use a set of colour names to describe roses that do not correspond to the colour names currently used in this template. These colour names come from close study of the plants themselves, and best-practice in various reference works therefore corresponds very closely. A good example of colour names can be seen at this web site. Traditional colour names for roses include lavender, lilac, mauve, gold, silver, russet. Amaranth is not such a traditional name. The list in the template is a long way from complete, and also rather strange.

Sminthopsis84 (talk) 15:54, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

1. As someone who did a major part of the existing by colour categorization of rose photos, I find these templates useful and that's why I created and added them. This is a navbox template whose main purpose is to ease browsing through the net of multiple colour categories.
2. A third axis can be simulated by making another intensity/shade grid. Although I'm not sure there are enough damp-coloured roses to warrant their own branch on the current cat tree for now.
3. Swatches this small are challenging to get to look like the shade you want. I can assure you I have spent quite a deal of effort on getting something workable there. With the pale shades I purposefully picked darker swatches so people could make out the shade of colour that's there. You're very welcome of course to do tweaks and improvements as you see fit.
4. The swatches do not need to represent the range of expression within the scope of a single colour name -- they are here to provide a quick-and-dirty reference for those who do not fluently talk English or are not familiar with colour terminology. I am no botanist and chose colour names as simple and clear as I could think of. Thinking outside the strict range of natural Rosa flowers, colour terms such as "Silver roses" (a type of white?) and "Gold roses" (a type of yellow) would be problematic to distinguish from artificial gold and silver coloured roses for instance.
5. The list is incomplete by the virtue of our collection not having enough media of rarer rose colours categorised by colour yet.

--Pitke (talk) 15:00, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

I agree with the statements made above in 2014 that the choice of color names in the template does not accord at all with the terms used by rosarians (and the colors shown do not match the names given). Do you have a citation that uses "amaranth" to describe roses in some language other than English?

I personally feel welcome to tweak this template, but can see no useful way to do so. Sorry.

Since, as you say, categorization by color is insufficient in Commons, I think it would be better to concentrate work on categorization and omit the template. Categories provide a way of navigating, and if it becomes possible to accurately represent the colors, a swatch can be placed on a category page, and it could be a large swatch which would overcome the limitation of tiny swatches in the template.

Silver(y) as used at the web site linked above is not a type of white. That web site will produce a long list of roses that are said to be silvery(y), with various different overall colors. If you look at the search box on the same site, gold is considered a subset of brown, not of yellow. Nadiatalent (talk) 20:17, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Using rosarian terms of art does not necessary contradict sorting by layman terms. The template can present both, even with swatches representing ranges rather than single shades for the rosarian terms. I personally would argue that sticking to rosarian terms only would be way more confusing than using the current layman system, point in case: silver(y) and gold roses. One of those isn't even a colour. Words can be presented next to each other, single swatches can be made into small selections, and cat page descriptions can be used to make distinctions. I'm just one person, and chose the swatches and colour names largely based on my individual artistic, cultural, and linguistic background. For instance, amaranth is the only word I found I could find that felt even slightly common-use for a purplish red straddling the line between red-heavy purple and red. --Pitke (talk) 05:40, 3 November 2015 (UTC)