Re: Gallery policy

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Carcharoth
<[email protected]> wrote:
> It's a tricky one. I favour more image use, not less, but then I work
> with images a lot (outside Wikipedia), so I'm kind of biased there. I

Yeah, I wonder if there is equally a pro-text/anti-image bias amongst
some editors?

(Me, I love images for skim reading - get a quick impression of a
subject without having to read every word.)

> do think that galleries that are large and purely illustrative are not
> really suitable for Wikipedia.

Honest question: what does "illustrative" mean in this context? Any
image is "illustrating" something. Are you distinguishing between
decoration (say, lots of pretty pictures of similar things) and adding
information?

>Commons *categories* are not the
> equivalent of Wikipedia galleries, but you can create *pages* on
> Commons that you can arrange into galleries and divide into sections
> and annotate as needed.

True, but putting effort into crafting such galleries on Commons
seems...misplaced. I care about the encyclopaedia. And no one has ever
heard of Commons. And no one ever goes there to find out more about a
subject. Ever.

> I do think that a section or article paragraph
> on (say) waterfalls in a National Park known for having many
> waterfalls could have a limited gallery of a few waterfalls, but
> something showing *all* of them would either have to be part of a
> standalone article, or a wikibook on the topic, or a Commons page, and
> you should be able to link all three directly from the article
> section, rather than hiding the link away down the bottom of the
> article.

Well I think there's only half a dozen or so in that national park.
And there are only photos of two. (And excellent photos at that.)

> It is mainly a question of layout and placement and context,
> and can sometimes require creative thinking. The key is always to make
> the reader *aware* that image-rich resources are available, but not to
> shove the images in their faces. Give the reader options, but don't
> force-feed them.

Yep. Wish there were better tools for this. An expanding box with one
or two images shown as a teaser would be great.

Steve

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
[email protected]
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l