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Indeed, who knows where those animals are now and it's not like Leptophyes punctatisimma is somehow especially a Hamburg-er animal. Samulili19:38, 13 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The idea/point of having categories "animals of xyz" is not to list species special to that area only, but to - over time create useful overviews of all species found in a certain area. Of course, in the beginning there will be only be a few species in each category, but it only adds one category marker to each image and in the end (I'm talking 5-10 years) we would end up with fair indexes of zoological variety in many areas. What's so bad about having categories "Animals of Germany" or "Animals of Hessen" (or Hamburg for that matter) to document the fauna of such an area (at some point in the future!)? I know for a fact that local biologists would love to have access to such information (which is why I started it in the first place). At some point such categories might even show geographically related variance in coloring or other characters of certain species. It's a small effort to add to image uploads, I cannot imagine that the one category marker extra in each image is a "problem" or "in the way" so why destroy extra information that comes with the images instead of putting it to possible future good use. We DO ask users to provide "Location" information with the images - to me it seems daft to NOT want that same information in a structured manner so that it can be better retrieved and organized ??? What is your "problem" other than the momentarily still scarce content? Pudding4brains20:25, 13 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
What you describe would be even more problematic. You could place the gallery Rattus norvegicus in about gazillion categories. For biologists looking for variation we don't really need categories if all images in Category:Leptophyes punctatisimma have location in their description. It's also about using the right tools for the right job. Samulili07:57, 14 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I do not think the category:animals of xyz are of any use at all, the nature of the 'sampling' process (ie what gets photographed) has all sorts of weird biases that destroy any statistical validity of animal distribution. But on a practical level some people assume such categories should include every picture of a species that can be found in a particular region regardless of where it was actually photographed, others assume it should only contain images photographed in a particular region, regardless of whether they are normally found there (eg a photo taken in a zoo). --Tony Wills20:44, 14 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I don't quite follow the logic of both replies - seems to me it's "looking for reasons" more than anything else. The way I have explained the intention of the categories, it seems clear to me that they are intended to categorize only images/animals that were actually photographed in the area (in the wild). If this is not clear to the average user it could easily be remedied with a simple one -liner at the top of the category page (template of course).
In my view the only valid concern would be Tony's "bias of photography choice", which in the end is not our problem but the problem of the scientist using the data. Nevertheless biologist seem to be very content with such collections of data/photograhps anyway - maybe not as a "main" source, but certainly as "extra info". Please have a look at waarneming.nl which has the exact same problem of non-scientific bias, but is still very popular with scientist and provides them with a lot of info that they can put to good use. Of course our categories would not be of interest only to scientists, but also to any other person (school kids?) interested in finding pictures of animals that can be found in a certain area.
@Samulili: To me the category system seems to be the perfect tool for the purpose as I really could not tink of any possible way to get an overview of say all animals photographed in Germany or Bavaria by using any other search methods Commons currently offers: Or do you suggest generating 10.000+ seperate searches with all names of Bavarias town and villages (assuming these would be entered in the info fields in a structured manner)??
On the other hand I've totally given up on the idea that Commons could actually become a place where it would be possible to find anything on the basis of such meta data as "location" (or anything else) in a structured manner. All efforts to provide anything that could be interpreted as structured information seem to be eradicated by the information police who want Commons to be just storage without any aid (extra info) to the people who might at some point want to actually use the images in various ways. So, do as you please, see if I care ... Pudding4brains14:29, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]