Commons talk:WikiProject Food and drink

Reason for joining

I am of course somewhat active on WP, but here at the commons, i cleared out (gave more specific categories) the main categories for Coffee, Chocolate, Cheese and Breads, and added new categories. I may get inspired to do more food main categories. I think Commons needs some sort of control on people uploading images of cups of coffee...Mercurywoodrose (talk) 06:28, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Haha. Well, they do have policies that affect the number of photos uploaded of various body parts. (Really, how many photos of a woman's breasts or a man's penis do we really need in order to get the concept? Probably the same for cups of coffee.) However, as long as an image is good and illustrates well the concept of a cup of coffee, there's no harm in having as many as people want to upload. Not the same cup of coffee from 30 different angles, but 30 different cups containing 30 different combinations of bean juice, dairy (and non-dairy) products, and sweeteners is fine. Remember that this isn't just a collection of media for use on the English Wikipedia. It's not even a collection of media just for all the sister wikis (Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiversity, etc.) and Wikia. It's not even a repository just for any other wiki running the MediaWiki software regardless of how diverse and scattered those sites might be. It is a repository of freely licensed images used by graphic designers, marketers, news sources, bloggers, students, and people looking for clip art for their holiday newsletters. As such, having a hundred, or a thousand, or even more different cups of coffee is a good thing, not a bad thing. Quality is key, and when we get more media in a topic, we can afford to be choosier with what new ones we allow in. Deleting images from Commons (especially ones that have been around for a while) may remove it from some site nobody has ever heard of. But just because we've never heard of it does not make it insignificant. Moreover, if people have used an image from here, and they follow the license requirements to link back to the source of the image, if the image is gone, a dead link has been created, and the license terms technically are no longer being followed--through no fault of user. We don't want that to happen any more than we want only the three best images of a coffee cup to be the only options available to designers worldwide. Embrace the unique resource that is Wikimedia Commons. :-) Glad to have you aboard! —Willscrlt ( Talk | w:en | b:en | meta ) 08:15, 25 September 2013 (UTC)