Category talk:Ecozones/Archives 1

Interwikilinks

There's been some back-and-forth edits of interwikis for this category (with and without edit summaries). Please use this talk page to discuss before reverting each other.

I think my opinion here is that there should be interwiki links only to categories on other projects, not to articles. Thus I'm inclined to support the "Revision as of 02:13, 19 February 2009". But I anticipate that users with stronger and probably also more well fundamented opinions than myself will express them here. Finn Rindahl (talk) 17:13, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I have over 9,000 edits on the commons and understand interwikilinks fairly well. It is common to have interwikilinks to the article at the top, and interwikilinks to categories in the sidebar. People coming to the commons from other languages oftentimes can not figure out the meaning of a category name. So they need the article links. The article links are sometimes difficult to find in the categories. Sometimes the article name is slightly different from the category name. So it is helpful to directly link with an interwikilink.

There are commons templates for article interwikilinks. Please take a look at Category:Maps. Note the many interwikilinks to articles at the top, and the many interwikilinks to categories in the sidebar. It helps to consolidate the article interwikilinks sometimes into a paragraph. It conserves space in the intro area. It can be condensed further if necessary by using a show/hide collapsible box.

It is not usually necessary to have so many article interwikilinks. English is the international language, and people can usually figure out the meaning of a category by looking at the English article, or if necessary, going to an interwikilink article link for another major language.

Right now nearly all the sidebar links are to articles. It would be better if they were category links so that people can find more images that could be used after they were uploaded to the commons. --Timeshifter (talk) 19:12, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I think that when I first found the Ecozone maps, I found them on English wikipedia and used the link on the image page there to get to here. I don't think that this is an unusual experience -- to go from an interesting article to the image and then to here.

I rarely go to the categories at the 'pedias. They have to the best of my experience never contained images and in the case of maps, those images should be uploaded here.

I also think that users who are reading articles at that level are also able to find the article they need via the usual links and in the language they prefer. If anyone thinks that I over estimate the intelligence of wikipedia users, do let me know.

So other than being "pretty" what does an additional box full of links like this do for what should be the typical or average wiki user (other than perhaps distract from other perhaps more important things here)? -- carol (talk) 19:28, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

We actually agree on that. I did not create the big box of interwiki article links at Category:Maps. I respect the effort someone made though to create it. I don't mind it being there either. But putting those article interwikilinks in the sidebar means that category interwikilinks for the same language can't be placed there. There is no reason we can't do both. They serve different purposes.

I find many images in the categories for other-language wikipedias. And the subcategories. That is one of their main uses. It helps people find images they need quickly, and that need to be uploaded to the Commons. Whenever I see an image in an English wikipedia article that needs to be uploaded to the Commons I try to categorize it. I don't have time to upload those many images to the Commons. I upload a few of them that I have an interest in. And I make it easier for others to find and upload the rest of them.

Actually, let me clarify. I see many images in both the categories and in the articles within those categories and subcategories. I read enough French that if I know with certainty (never easy without the category interwikilinks) that I am started off in the equivalent category then I can oftentimes find many images that could be uploaded to the Commons. I am oftentimes looking for related images, and not just images having to do with the main article. The subcategories are very helpful there. But I need an in via the category interwikilinks, or it is too overwhelming to figure out the French category trees.

Articles oftentimes are in multiple categories, and it can be very difficult to figure out which one is equivalent to the category here on the Commons. So the direct link to the equivalent category solves that problem. --Timeshifter (talk) 19:54, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

There is one article for Ecozones. I have not seen this argument apply for any of the categories which are in this tree. Unless you are suggesting that the articles at English wikipedia have not been categorized correctly?

I might understand the problem incorrectly, but English wikipedia has a problem with its method of categorization that relies (non-intuitively, in my opinion) on the second person to create a category. Some rules about needing more than one before a category is created. Other things like this which prevent that system from being successful in being a nicely noded tree. Heck, the software has the ability to show when a category is empty and what is needed. That is software though, managing information. Not people voting on procedure. There seems to be a failure to keep it simple there -- if I understand the conditions and expectations there. In real life, this might be considered a situation of over-management.

I get a little frustrated everytime I was looking for relevant information for something here, clicked through to the 'pedia of my language and found myself in poorly kept category needing to find the article in a list of other articles which were useless to me and requiring a second click upon finding. -- carol (talk) 17:47, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

The solution is to link to both the category and the article, in my opinion. It is fairly common to see this. I believe category links are most common in the sidebar. --Timeshifter (talk) 22:12, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

That is not my experience. My experience is that the category links in the sidebar are recent, and perhaps added via software assistance as they were added to category pages that also had the sister links causing what gave the appearance of a thoughtless redundancy and where I saw this done at was in the plant categories and only at the family level (and taxonomically above).

Further, the time I spent categorizing uncategorized images here would have been so much more difficult if the condition that you claim was true -- that the sidebar category links were the norm. I was actually surprised by category links in the sidebar when I encountered them after my categorization spree. I really needed access to the article to categorize images here. -- carol (talk) 10:27, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't know if at some point article links were more common in the sidebar. But it seems like category links are more common now in the sidebar. I remove redundant sister links to categories. Sister links go to more than just category links.

I use both category links and article links. People vary on which one they use more. So I suggest continuing to link to both. Then more work will get done in my opinion. People are different in how they work. Different strokes for different folks. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:09, 23 February 2009 (UTC)