JAGrace (BYU)

Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, JAGrace (BYU)!

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-- Wikimedia Commons Welcome (talk) 18:44, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Category:19th-century photographs

I notice you've been adding this and similar categories to files. Wikimedia Commons has tens of millions of files, mostly photographs. Do you intend to add these categories to tens of millions? Jim.henderson (talk) 21:20, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi, my student worker JAGrace was categorizing some photos for me. I didn't explain the job perfectly, and she categorized some photos in the 19th-century category as well as one of the child categories. For those photos I removed the 19th-century photographs category. However, for some photos, we didn't know exactly what decade they were taken, so 19th-century photographs seemed like a more appropriate category. I'm not sure exactly what your concern is. Is there a problem with categorizing images? Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 18:30, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Valleys of the Great Salt Lake (1890)

Sorry, @Rachel Helps (BYU): I was too short, even curt. Let me back up a little ways. I only happened to be watching Saltair pictures because last week, in the course of diffusing Category:Detroit Publishing Co. I came across a postcard of that place and noticed that several other pictures had not been subcategorized to the more local cat. As you may have noticed, hardly any of the pictures of Saltair, or of Utah for that matter, are categorized as photos or drawings or woodcuts or by other technical cat. That's because pictures of a building in a place have little purpose except to illustrate the building and the place, thus the method of making the picture doesn't matter much. So, Category:1890s architecture in Utah would have great potential for someone seeking to illustrate the history of the state. Other decade / topic cats (beach resorts in the United States by decade, Great Salt Lake by decade, etc) would also have much more potential for usefulness than the category for 1890s photos. So, no, it isn't wrong to categorize pictures this way but tens of thousands of our pictures from that decade are photographs, and this technical cat is not as useful as several other ways of categorizing. I hope you'll not be discouraged from pushing on, and I hope you'll be encouraged to figure ways to make the vast, disorganized picture collection of Wikimedia Commons more easily discoverable for editors. That's what Commons categories are for, after all. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:54, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

thanks for explaining your comment! We'll try to make our image categories more specific when we can. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 21:01, 14 December 2016 (UTC)