Category talk:Photographs by Frank Scholten

How should we divide this into subcategories?

Opinions needed!

Starting this discussion here per request by user:Vysotsky on my talk page.

When I stumbled upon it this morning, the "Photographs by Frank Scholten" category had over 28,000 files in it and no subcategories. It seemed like it would be helpful to divide the photos at least a little, so that users don't have to sift through thousands of irrelevant photos to find what they are looking for.

I started by dividing them by subject - so I made several categories like "Photographs of food by Frank Scholten," "Photographs of bodies of water by Frank Scholten," and "Photographs of structures by Frank Scholten."

My plans were to divide the photos by broad subject, then further divide them based on individual subject - some future categories I had planned included "Photographs of farms...", "Photographs of automobiles...", "Photographs of markets...", "Photographs of people and horses", and other similar subcategories. Doomhope (talk) 10:33, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Category:Photographs of bodies of water by Frank Scholten or Category:Historical images of the Dead Sea?‎

In March and April 2023 User:Mr.Nostalgic uploaded 28,600 photos by Dutch photographer Frank Scholten (1881-1942) to Wikimedia Commons. Most photographs were made by Scholten in Palestine in the years 1921 to 1923. The photographs are truely unique. Scholten bequeathed his photographic archive and documentation to the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO) in Leiden. All photos and negatives were digitized and catalogued in Leiden in 2019-2020. There is an informative Leiden website. As one can imagine, describing all photographs at Leiden University will take some years. Many hands make light work, so Commons users could play a positive role. I don't want to discourage people who like to make categories like Category:Photographs of bodies of water by Frank Scholten, but I guess time could be better spent by adding more specific categories like Category:Historical images of the Dead Sea. Much more useful than adding photos in useless categories by the thousands, is adding useful categories by the dozens. Vysotsky (talk) 20:28, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

1. Personally I think it is always a good idea to subcategorize photos by subject. When I am searching for photos, I would first search by subject, and then by other aspects.
2. And I think it is a good method to devide large categories first into broad subjects and then devide large subcategories into smaller ones again, that would be my method as well.
3. I think it would be a good idea to add locations and periods (like years, decades, centuries) to category names as well, if they are known.
4. Names like "Category:Historical images" are no longer allowed, see Commons:Categories for discussion/2019/09/Category:Historical images, the category name should be more specific, like 20th-century images or, even better, 1920s images or 1920s photographs.
5. In my opinion Commons volunteers may spend their time on Commons as they wish. There may be advices, but volunteers can set their own priorities, according to their own interests, insights and area of knowledge.

Conclusion: Please, both go on with your good work on Commons, I think finally there will be a good category structure no matter which method you use. I think the method of Doomhope does not conflict with that of Vysotsky. JopkeB (talk) 07:08, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Vysotsky, thank you for your reply! I absolutely see what you mean now, and I apologize for the multiple ways I misunderstood what was going on and what you were saying - that is absolutely a reasonable concern to raise and I'm glad you brought it up!

And thank you as well JopkeB for the reply. I agree, I think having both methods of categorization would be helpful.

I do a lot of categorization on here from the perspective of an artist, scientist, and historical archivist, because that's how I use Commons - I'm always looking up reference photos for my artwork, I'll read about some piece of history and wonder what that place looked like at the time and how those people lived their lives, or I'll read about an artist and then see if their artwork is on here and if it's in the categories that it should be in.

All of this to say I do think we should create both types of categories, because they're both useful for different reasons. That's one of the things I love about Commons: we don't have to choose just one way to categorize things :) and once again Vysotsky, I'm so sorry for the misunderstanding, and I really do appreciate your input. Doomhope (talk) 19:26, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

@Doomhope and Vysotsky: Is this issue now solved? Can Commons:Categories for discussion/2023/09/Category:Photographs by Frank Scholten be closed? JopkeB (talk) 03:42, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Solved. I am grateful for the explanation by User:Doomhope, and hope that more people will be able to categorize the Scholten photographs, hopefully on a content-related basis. As for the photograph mentioned by me in this discussion, I now added Category:Historical images of the Dead Sea to this photo. Vysotsky (talk) 08:30, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

PS I still think it is useful to have a separate category with ALL photos by Frank Scholten, so I might consider adding a Category:Photographs by Frank Scholten (flat list), as is done with other photographers. Vysotsky (talk) 08:34, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

@Vysotsky, I like your idea to create a flat list for all of the photographs! That's a great solution. Also, I agree with your decision on that specific photograph, and I think for now it makes sense to add some of these photos and categories into existing "Historical images" categories as long as we're not creating new Historical images categories. At some point it would be best to create categories for specific time periods to replace the existing Historical images categories, but that's outside the scope of this discussion.

With that said, I'd say this is solved! We can continue discussing ideas on the talk page as needed. Thanks everyone! Doomhope (talk) 19:43, 24 October 2023 (UTC)