Talk:Sciuridae

I created the sciuridae gallery.

I wasn't sure whether to create subfamily and tribe pages or do it all in a family page. It seems it might be a little more wiki commons like to skip the sub taxa so I did.

There are a lot more genera that have images than I have in the gallery right now. That's because the genera galleries haven't been created yet.

--Davefoc (talk) 06:04, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Some of the squirrel galleries include the subfamilies and tribes in their taxonavigation boxes and some don't. I decided to redirect the subfamily and tribe links to the appropriate section of this page.

--Davefoc (talk) 19:17, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

line1's recent edits

Liné1 has made several edits recently that seem to be at odds with current consensus standards about the appearance of TOL galleries.

In particular he has moved the taxobox above the vernacular name box. There was a lot of discussion on this issue and I tried to pick what seemed to be the consensus that was arrived at in those conversations that I read through when I made this gallery. I don't think that consensus has changed. I don't see where the put the taxobox first people have won over the majority that disagreed with them. Right now, all I see, is a kind of guerrilla editing effort to implement their minority views.

location of links
Wikimedia is principally a place to display images. Images are what galleries are about. They are not about links. Putting links at the top of the gallery stands this idea on its head and makes it seem like Wikimedia is a collection of links with some pictures. However, if there has been a discussion of this issue and a consensus has been established then I might see some justification for link1's approach. I am not aware of any such discussion or consensus right now on that.

Use of WikispeciesComapact instead of Wikispecies for the link to Wikispecies.
This is just my personal taste but I find the big, wikispecies link to be unattractive and I think it distracts from the look of the gallery to use it. This gallery has used the WikispeciesCompact approach to linking to Wikispecies fo a long time and I saw no advantage to changing that. Once again if there is some sort of a consensus about this that was derived from some discussion I might understand better why link1 made this change.

In general, I spent significant effort on this gallery, searching out the images and working on different arrangements with the goal of displaying the information in an aesthetically pleasing format consistent with the TOL consensus about what TOL galleries should look like. For the most part, IMO, Liné1's recent edits have reduced the quality of this gallery. --Davefoc (talk) 06:45, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Hello my friend (good contributors are friends ;-))

• About the taxonavigation at the top: I am not aware of any consensus about this. I just need the Taxonavigation temporarily at the top, so that when I look at a species, I can rapidly see that the 2 Taxonavigation matches (the above family part of course). This is only possible by having the Taxonavigation at the top. But really if there is a consensus, you can move it back to your desired place. Personaly I think that such position problem, should/could be solved globally by the templates...
• About WikispeciesCompact: The only difference between both templates is that {{Wikispecies}} is at the right and doesn't take any place (wikispecies is rarely interesting and you never know what classification they follow). I have often asked for a resolution of this problem: One template should be deprecated and a bot should be launched. Until that is done, there will be flip-flap (sorry I don't see any other word).

  By the way there is the same flip-flap problem with {{Translation table}} and {{VN}}.

  Also you add {{WikispeciesCompact}} after the gallery (for exemple here), when I have always seen it before (in case the category becomes big).

• About "Liné1's recent edits have reduced the quality": that is not very nice. When I first saw Category:Sciuridae, it contained: 200 unsorted pictures + subfamily cat + genus cat + species articles. In the contained genus categories there was also a thousand unsorted pictures. It was a mess.
  • I have created more than 40 species categories that where not created because those pictures where unsorted.
  • now all pictures are under their species category or under a "Unidentified" cat.
  • I have corrected all {{Taxonavigation}}, added a {{Translation table}}, added interwiki, added {{IUCN}} and {{MSW}} links of all sub-categories and sub-articles
  • Now there are only 5 subfamily categories under Category:Sciuridae.

At the end, don't worry, I am for consensus and I have changed a lot of thing in my editing after other's requests. I also practice Wikipedia:WikiLove, which means I don't like fights.

Cheers Liné1 (talk) 09:20, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

By the way, you do a great job a putting pictures in galleries. Cheers (I always cheer contributor, it avoid fights ;-)) Liné1 (talk) 09:33, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind remarks. I wanted to withdraw at least some of what I said, but I didn't out of the idea that changing a comment after it had been posted for awhile wasn't good practice. Your edits are appreciated. I believe part of the answer as to developing an accepted gallery standard is to update the TOL page with a currently accepted standard. Right now all the samples on that page are significantly out of date. I mentioned this in the TOL discussion page, but there wasn't much response. I was considering just removing the current samples and substituting a gallery that had been edited by you. I might not agree with everything that you've done but it might serve as a way to drive the TOL contributors to come to some kind of documented consensus. Right now, there are lots of discussions about the minutia of galleries but the results of those discussions is not captured into easily accessible documentation. Cheers. --Davefoc (talk) 16:04, 16 July 2009 (UTC)