Brian de Ford

Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, Brian de Ford!

First steps tutorial Our first steps tour and our frequently asked questions will help you a lot after registration. They explain how to customize the interface (for example the language), how to upload files and our basic licensing policy (Wikimedia Commons only accepts free content). You don't need technical skills in order to contribute here. Be bold when contributing and assume good faith when interacting with others. This is a wiki. Getting help More information is available at the community portal. You may ask questions at the help desk, village pump or on IRC channel #wikimedia-commons (webchat). You can also contact an administrator on their talk page. If you have a specific copyright question, ask at the copyright village pump.

Goodies, tips, and tricks Put Babel boxes on your user page so others know what languages you can speak and indicate your graphic abilities. You can find the files you have uploaded in your Uploads. Please sign your name on Talk pages by typing ~~~~. To link to an image page without embedding the image, type: [[:File:Foo.jpg]], which produces: File:Foo.jpg. You may enable gadgets (custom features) for your account. There are several tools to upload files. Have you edited Wikipedia before? This guide might be useful. Made a mistake? Do you want to have a file renamed or moved? Use the move link and wait for an authorized user to rename it. Do you want to have your recently uploaded picture removed? Tag it as {{speedy|reason here}}. For more information read the deletion guidelines.

-- Wikimedia Commons Welcome (talk) 21:19, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Cadw references etc

Should go in the parent category of images rather than the images themselves. This is because the category exists to express the commonality between images. It also doesn't clog up the relevant monument categories with duplicate entries for which there is already a category listed. Thanks. Rodhullandemu (talk) 19:48, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Got it. Now you should leave a note on the talk pages of everybody in the world, Wikimedia user or not, telling them never to use a search engine to look for pictures on Wikimedia, otherwise they might end up directly on the page of the image itself rather than the category page and not realize they're looking at the image of a listed building. That is so much better than attaching the information to the image itself. It makes it far more usable doing it your way. I'm glad you corrected me. We'd both better hope somebody doesn't come up with some sort of templating mechanism to propagate the category page info down to the individual images or that would allow people who found the image via a search engine to see information they shouldn't. --Brian de Ford (talk) 19:05, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your belated reply. Hope you enjoyed the break. However people get to an image, they should be able to see that it is categorised, and a little knowledge of how categories work here will tell them that general information is located in the category, because that's what they're for. We don't blame anyone for not knowing stuff, but we notify people in good faith if they would benefit from knowing something they don't already know; and if you think I should be notified of your response, you should {{Replyto|Rodhullandemu}}, otherwise I might miss it. Fortunately I have this page watchlisted, but I don't watch everybody. Cheers. Rodhullandemu (talk) 19:15, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

@Rodhullandemu: And there was me thinking this project was about making it easy for ordinary people to comprehend. I now understand that it only need be comprehensible to wikiwizards. Great UX/UI design there. For very small values of "user." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brian de Ford (talk • contribs)

Well, sorry, but I didn't design the UI. Commons is a library of freely-available images to anyone who wants them, and in the same way as a library operates, we would hope that anyone who can learn how to find something in a library could also find what they want here, and more easily, because we have a search engine, primitive though it may be. Our category system is the principal way of navigating between related topics, and it seems to work for the vast majority of users, wikiwizards or not, and it does so by expressing the commonality between images at the appropriate level of granularity. I don't see it changing any time soon. Cheers. Rodhullandemu (talk) 13:03, 3 September 2020 (UTC)