User:Ayacop/temp

Hello, as a small example, please have a look at Category:Betulaceae, a family of trees within the plants. You see

• two genus categories: Category:Alnus and Category:Betula, containing themselves pictures and species galleries
• one non-botanical category Category:Hazelnut
• ten species gallery articles

This category shows all problems which have been discussed:

• Usually, photo uploaders put pictures in Category:Betulaceae, the family category. My job as one of the ToL maintainers is to either include those pics in existing species galleries or create such galleries (using taxonomic data) for those pics. I have already done this here, so all pictures you see are in species galleries, too. Now,
  • if we stop here, the family category would soon fill up with a mixture of new and old photos. Noone would know which pics are to be put in galleries. Also, if there are more than 200 entries, subcategories would no longer be shown 'all first', a well known reported bug of MediaWiki.
  • if we remove the family category tag from the pics all would be fine. Indexed pics no longer clutter the family. But people complain 'Why do you remove my category? Information is lost!' (of course, it isn't as the pic is in the species gallery which is more detailed info than only the family). This is how it was done until recently when discussions escalated.
  • For this dilemma, discussions resulted in three alternatives:
    • using DPLs. Disadvantages: not supported by devs (imagine we hit a bug), and the bug in categories with more than 200 images that prevents subcategories from being shown 'all first'.
    • changing Category:Betulaceae to Category:Betulaceae|@ or similar within images. The same bug mentioned will hit us.
    • creating a category 'Betulaceae (Indexed)' and changing Category:Betulaceae to 'Category:Betulaceae (Indexed)' within images. Advantage: we now even have a category showing all images in Betulaceae.

The name of this category is a matter of current debate. Other possibilities would be 'Betulaceae photos' or 'Unordered Betulaceae' (to reflect that galleries have their pics ordered).

This last solution was proposed to ToL here (2006-Sep-23):

• Commons_talk:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life#name of family picture category?

This solution can be done manually, or it can be helped with a bot that does the tag renaming within the image (after possibly creating the Indexed category). Exactly this is what LifeBot does, not more.

Now, interestingly, there is also another problem which can be mollified with the above solution:

• the great gallery vs category debate, see, for example Commons:Deletion_requests/Category:Betula_nigra. This category duplicated the Betula nigra gallery in Category:Betula, confusing all users as to where to put their images. So its images were listed in that gallery, the category tags removed from the images, and the gallery deleted. With revert from the offended user. And so on. Using the above solution, the category would no longer have to be deleted. It is just moved into the picture-only 'Category:Betulaceae (Indexed)', after the articles were indexed.
• this has nothing to do with LifeBot, and is not binding to ToL maintainers, only a plea to no longer delete categories and offend users.