User talk:Cameron Kay

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Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, Cameron Kay!

-- Wikimedia Commons Welcome (talk) 15:25, 5 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of categories[edit]

Hello Cameron Kay,
some of your recent edits appeared on my watchlist. After checking quite some of your edits I can see a real gain of your work for this project. For example I saw that you have removed some overcategorization, specified some stuff and so on. But I also have to say that there is one thing in particular in which I cannot agree: I have seen that you have "cleaned up" some categories by removing all remaining files with cat-a-lot. In particular I mean the Category:Construction materials where you have removed several files (~150?) such as 1, 2, 3 and 4. All of these images show some sort of construction materials and therefore are clearly in topic. In addition on Category:Cement manufacturers you also have removed ~20 images, such as this one which strongly appears to show a cement manufacturer and there is no regulation that only subcategories are allowed in the category "Cement manufacturers". I agree that these files should better be listed in specific sub-categories instead of littering the main category. But this is I'm afraid a mainly manual task which has to be done. It may appear to be a good idea, to just remove the files instead to make a quick clean up of the category. Beeing here for a while I believe that in long term such practises are quite unefficient and consume unnecessary human resources. If somehow related files are just thrown out somewhere the pre-categorizing work of other users is beeing discarded.

In fact removing somehow related but not specific enough categories ends up in an unnecessary circulation of the files in the category system. After removing the category the files get uncategorized (as far as the removed category was the last one). The files are then picked up by a bot, marked as uncategorized and therefore appear in a maintenance category. Beeing picked up again by a human most of them are put in unspecific main categories and so on. This is not only my personal opinion but instead the opinon of many community members, see Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2015/02#Removal_of_a_category_so_the_file_left_uncategorized. I would welcome if you could reconsider this habit of yours. Best regards. --Zaccarias (talk) 20:21, 31 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]