Category talk:Wikipedia requested images by subject

Merge Category:No_image_available into this page

See no reson to have two identical categories. --Stefan ^talk 14:11, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

• Agreed. Good catch! Tim Pierce 18:03, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
• Please note that most articles found in Category:Wikipedia requested photographs have {{reqphoto}} on their Talk page. You can add Category:Wikipedia requested photographs directly to the text of the article, but it would be a better fit with existing practice if an article was moved with the {{reqphoto}} template. Tim Pierce 18:05, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
  • Have now changed all added Category:No_image_available into having {{reqphoto}} on their talk page. --Stefan ^talk 00:32, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Totally.

Sure. I had no idea there was one. Thank you. Doo-dle-doo 14:19, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

proposed WikiProject Photo Requests

I've proposed a WikiProject to organize the process of cleaning up and organizing photo requests. Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals#Photo Requests and offer feedback if you're so inclined. Thanks! Tim Pierce 17:32, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Plan to reorganize. Comments here please - Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Photography#Organizing photo requests. Traveler100 05:40, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Images and Photos , project articles needing images

Do we really need to distinguish the difference? please see: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Photography#Requests for Pictures, Images and Photographs. Traveler100 (talk) 19:30, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

useful tool

• Image Existance Checker Finds articles containing some sort of .jpg image whose talk pages are in category. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Traveler100 (talk • contribs)

Historical Images

I question a number of articles in this category, e.g. Odda of Devon. At first it looks odd to be requesting a photo of anyone who lived in the 9th century, I realise striclly speaking you are only asking for an image, but e.g. the earliest Scots monarch who we have an authentic image of is James II of Scotland. Images of people from a while back are likely to be artists' impressions from later. Would it be ok if Wikipedians with a bit of artistic talent added their own drawing? PatGallacher (talk) 14:20, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

I would take the request to mean any picture related to the subject. In such cases I would add an image, maybe remains of some earthworks anything else related to the person then remove the request for photograph. If that was not what the person who made the request was looking for then they can add the request again, hopefully being a bit more specific. --Traveler100 (talk) 14:50, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Map all coordinates using OSM: Not working

The Map all coordinates using OSM link does not work, it says: "sorry, no data to show"

That's a shame as it is a great way to find nearby photographs that need to be taken, when travelling. Who could fix that? Thanks! Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:34, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

I tried downloading the KML, it only contains "No geocoded items found". Nicolas1981 (talk) 10:09, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

There are presently no articles in this category, so the OSM link doesn't load any items to map. It doesn't visit subcategories to find all of the articles there. Try loading a regional category for requested photographs. For example, the OSM link for Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Boston, Massachusetts. —Tim Pierce (talk) 16:55, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

New tool for the mapping of missing pictures

Please take a look at meta:Grants:IEG/Wiki needs pictures. All feedbacks are welcome. Thanks!--Alexmar983 (talk) 09:45, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Proposing to move this category and its children to "requested images (of/in ...)"

Template {{image requested}} currently puts all generic image requests, photographic or not, into this category and its children. I propose to separate photo requests from non-photo image requests, since the two types of requests are fulfilled very differently. I've already separated the templates {{photo requested}} and {{image requested}}; next I propose to move all the current categories to Category:Wikipedia requested images by subject and children thereof, allowing the "photo requested" categories to be populated exclusively by {{photo requested}}. (This will not fix the problem of photo- and non-photo requests being mixed in the current categories, but photos are at least truly a subset of images, while the inverse is not true.) —Swpb^talk 19:41, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Done, except for the "photograph requested in..." categories, which are likely to be exclusively photo requests. — s w p b ^T 02:07, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

@Swpb: Did you realize that you left all the "requested photographs" categories as redirects to the "requested images" categories, rather than as subcategories? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 11:10, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

For now only; the pages in the old cats still need to be recategorized by bot. That may require listing; unfortunately I will not have a chance to deal with it today. — s w p b ^T 13:05, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

They would be recategorized by bot if you had gone through CFD. Now, all of these hundreds and hundreds of pages have to be recategorized individually, as far as I know. That is why categories are not moved but are renamed. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 14:10, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't see how pages can be recategorized by bot, since the categories were added by templates. Someone is going to have to go through all those templated talk pages, one by one, and decide if the request is really for a photograph or for some other type of image. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:40, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I'd like to nominate Swpb for that task. I've got other projects to work on and this will be a very time-consuming job since it can no longer be handled by a bot. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:19, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

To editors Liz and R'n'B: That is not right, and I blame myself for the confusion. Pages tagged with {{photo requested}} can and should stay in the photo request categories, and pages tagged with {{image requested}} will be moved automatically when that template is updated as I have requested. All that needs to happen is for many of the photo categories to be turned from redirects back into a connected tree. That's vastly less effort than the large-scale re-catting you are talking about. I have done this with the top-level categories at Category:Wikipedia requested photographs by subject; I will continue with the photo version of the sub-categories of Category:Wikipedia requested images by subject and would appreciate a hand. However, once {{image requested}} is modified, we are likely to find that many of the erstwhile photo categories are empty; I would suggest that those can remain redirects to the "image" categories. See? I did put some thought into how this would work, it just slipped my mind this morning. As to the CSD tags; as I said, the image categories will be populated once {{image requested}} is changed. I had to create the empty categories before the template would be changed; there's no avoiding that chicken-egg problem. Please remove whatever CSD tags you have applied until after the template is changed. — s w p b ^T 23:16, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Done: All non-empty photo categories re-categorized, all request templates changed except protected templates. (Some non-empty photo cats, like Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of people of Japan and Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of mountains, are awaiting edits to protected WikiProject templates, which will leave them empty.) Photo categories belong to a parent "image" category, and to a parent "photo" category where one exists. (Now that {{image requested}} has been modified, there are many photo categories which are empty of both articles and subcategories; these have intentionally been left as redirects.)

To be done: Awaiting edits to ~20 protected WikiProject banners. — s w p b ^T 17:03, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

What's going on here? Is the central discussion for swpb (talk · contribs)'s moves? I saw that several categories requesting photos of biological organisms were moved (e.g. Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of cephalopods->Category:Wikipedia requested images of cephalopods. And some of the organism "image" categories were tagged for speedy deletion (as empty categories) by {User|Liz}}. Deleting the "image" categories would leave the original "photo" categories as redirects without targets. Redirect targeting can be fixed but it still takes edits. I'd like to fix things for the dozen or so categories I care about, but I don't know whether to go Liz's route (tag "image" cat for deletion, and then go back through and unredirect the "photo" categories and readd their parent categories), or swpb's apparently intended route (unredirect "photo" categories, add readd their parent categories). At this point, swpb's route requires fewer net edits (assuming all the necessary changes are applied in one edit) than Liz's route to clean up the category structure. It looks like Liz CSD tagged 70-80 categories. There are 1117 subcategories of Category:Wikipedia requested images by subject (to see run this search), which includes some "photo" categories that swpb has already brought back into the tree as well as "image" categories that probably don't need a "photo" subcategory (e.g., requests for maps).

I've no objection in principal to making photo requests subcategories of image request. In practice, there's a big mess in the category structure now that needs to be cleaned up. And if we get beyond the mess in the category structure it's another matter entirely. There are 23,729 articles in just Category:Plant articles needing photos, which redirects to an "image" category, and the "photo" category is almost entirely populated by the |need-photo=yes parameter in Template:WikiProject Plants. As far as I'm concerned for plants, an available image that is not a photo is just as good as a photo (or better; an illustration of a tree that includes details of the flowers, fruits and leaves as well as an overall view is better than a photo that doesn't capture all these element; and an extinct organism is better represented by an illustration of it as it lived than as a photo of a fossil). Images of organisms work and may be better than photos in some case, but I think it's safe to say nobody is going to be going to be up for replacing all the transcluded |needs-photo parameters with |needs-image paremeters in various WikiProject Banners. Plantdrew (talk) 03:59, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Has this proposal been through WP:CFD? The proposal seems to have merits but has not been thought through in detail and has not been tackled systematically. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:38, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

It's been pointed out above that CFD would have been the right place to start; at this point though, the proposal has been enacted, and the less systematic aspects of the implementation are cleaned up, with the exception of the protected templates below. — s w p b ^T 16:19, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

This is a pretty massive change. Is there a community discussion on it? I hardly see the need for this, especially since in some subjects the number of images as opposed to photos would be less than 1% of articles to the point where it wouldn't be meaningful to split them. The moves of biographical articles to "images" from "photographs" for example is very wrong. -DJSasso (talk) 19:42, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

First, I sought input above, and received none after two weeks, so I went ahead. Second, not all "image" categories have corresponding "photo" categories; empty photo categories now simply redirect to image categories. The point of the change was that "photo" is an inaccurate way to describe general image requests. At any rate, the change is done. If you think it's really a good idea to identify all image requests as photo requests, you can try to gather a consensus to go back to the way things were, but I really don't think you'll find one. — s w p b ^T 20:27, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

That isn't how things work. I don't need a consensus to go back to the way things were. You need a consensus to make the changes. I don't see that you have one. In the absence of a community discussion I will be reverting the relevant changes per WP:BRD. -DJSasso (talk) 20:29, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Be my guest; it will take you days and make a lot of people grumpy, but whatever. I sought input for two weeks, then I was bold. People have complained about the implementation, but praised the result; before you make a lot of frustration for yourself, maybe straw poll around and see if anyone but you wants to take things back. — s w p b ^T 20:32, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Where did you seek input? That is what I am asking. I don't see a discussion in any of the places I would expect such a major change to have taken place such as CFD. All I see is a comment on an out of the way talk page of a category that no one watches. -DJSasso (talk) 20:34, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

How is it my fault if no one is watching the parent category of all photo requests? That's not "out of the way", it's the very center of the action! The change is of interest to people who deal with image requests; seems like a perfectly appropriate place to me. — s w p b ^T 20:39, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Calm down there, swpb. Getting all defensive when it really is you who did things incorrectly is not going to help matters. Category talk pages are generally not watched by very many people. A few minutes of homework on your part, looking up where to have community discussions on major changes, would have helped you find the right place pretty quickly. Even posting on the talk page of a few editors who have previously posted here would have been effective.

As it is, this has created a very large problem where none existed, and now you've got people all frustrated and annoyed that the changes were made without any discussion and consensus prior to the actions. I know you were frustrated that no one commented here, but that should have been a clue to go hunt down a location where people would respond (or even notice) the questions and suggestions you had. Please step back, take a deep breath, and move your mind back as if you had just asked your questions and made your suggestions. That will be far more effective here. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 01:00, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Edit-protected template edits request

The WikiProject banners above need to be modified to allow "image-needed" arguments (with backwards compatibility for "photo-needed" arguments) and to categorize pages into the new "requested images of..." categories instead of the old "photographs of..." categories. (Note: this does not apply to "photographs in..." or "photographs of roads in..." categories). Thanks! — s w p b ^T 14:02, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Actually I suggest reverting your changes until you can get an actual consensus on such a massive change. This should most definitely have been discussed and a systematical approach taken. -DJSasso (talk) 20:27, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

This proposal sat here for two weeks without comment; apparently no one really cared. As to what technical approach should have been taken, we have now gotten to the same end state regardless, so the question is academic. — s w p b ^T 20:35, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Well now editors are going to have to spend hundreds of hours resorting image requests into photo requests for example. You asked on a talk page that likely no one watches. Category renames have to go to CFD where a wider audience can comment. The whole point of having to go to CFD is because few people watch category talk pages. -DJSasso (talk) 20:36, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

No one has to resort a single image request; I've changed the request templates I can (nearly all of them) and requested changes to the protected ones. That will take care of it completely. I get that you're upset about a change you weren't aware of, but it's seriously not the crisis you think it is. Should I have handled process differently? Sure. Does it make any of sense to respond to that by tearing up a week of work that's undoubtedly made the wiki better? Hardly. If the problem is lack of discussion, then two wrongs don't make a right. — s w p b ^T 20:42, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Except they will, most of those requests were actually requests for photos which are now in categories for general images. So people will have to go back through all the requests and decide if they were actually requests for photos and split them back out. When if things had been done methodically we could have done the opposite and split out the much less common requests for images. The template switch only change those requests that were using the redirect, but I would bet most people would have just used the image template for photo requests due to the wording of the template. As it stands there are now many thousands of requests miscategorized from what was actually being requested to a more general category. -DJSasso (talk) 12:49, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Photos are a strict subset of images: requesting a photo when a general image is needed (the previous situation) is downright wrong; requesting a general image when a photo is desired is merely less specific than it could be, and will usually be met with a photo anyway. However you slice it, the situation is far better now than it was before, when you had hundreds of requests for "photos" (probably most of them) that were really requests for general images (like "photos" of animation topics, or people who lived before photography). It would certainly be nice for all photo-specific requests to be in photo-specific subcategories, but it's far less of a problem than the reverse situation that existed before. I also question the idea that there was a possible approach which would have neatly sorted photo requests from image requests; the entire problem was that the two were massively conflated. This change does not seek to completely sort photo requests from general image requests; that is impractical. What it seeks to do is to allow requests to be sorted properly from now on. — s w p b ^T 13:56, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

And that therein is the problem. With a little bit of discussion and planning, it could have been practical to split the two. Instead you rushed in and created the exact opposite problem that you were trying to solve. The vast majority of requests are very obviously for photos. So we now have many that are miscategorized in a category that implies we want just an image and not an actual photograph. It would have been fairly simple to take a targeted approach and for example categories about animation topics could have been switched over because its far more likely they wanted an image. But biographical categories for subjects that are primarily about people since photography began would likely be looking for photographs for example. In doing this we could have narrowed down the changes into smaller chunks to fix faster and more accurately. And any that couldn't easily be figured out could then be dumped into the "general" category to be sorted out more individually. -DJSasso (talk) 14:58, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

I think where we differ is the assertion that "the vast majority of requests are very obviously for photos". That is surely not the case. Most of the time, a non-photo image (if one exists) would be just as useful as a photo, but was previously discouraged because a "photo" was requested. The cases where an image needs to be a photo, and a non-photo image will not do, are the rare cases; and where a photo would be best (such as for a modern bio), the images that are available will overwhelmingly be photos anyway. If the choice is between permanently misidentifying general image requests as photo requests, versus provisionally lumping photo requests into image requests, the latter is clearly more accurate and preferable; I have yet to see anyone but you suggest otherwise. / I'd also appreciate if you were a bit more polite in your tone. If you think something needs to be done differently now, that's one thing; if you just want to berate me for not having done it the way you would have liked, I don't see the productivity in that. I've already conceded that CfD would have been a good idea if I'd remembered it (although I don't think it would have saved any of the cleaning up I've done). — s w p b ^T 15:11, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

@Swpb: Could you mock up these changes in the sandboxes of the relevant templates. As it is, you're leaving a lot of work for the template editors. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:21, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. All template changes are now mocked up on their respective sandboxes. These template changes complete the post-transition cleanup; until then, the respective photo categories remain populated redirects, which is not a great state. — s w p b ^T 15:08, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

@Swpb and Ahecht: I've already mocked up at the sandbox. Please let me know if I'm wrong. JJ98 (Talk) 10:07, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Deactivated edit request here which duplicates the edit requests on the individual templates. And to be frank, having over forty edit requests active is off-putting. Bazj (talk) 14:12, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Way forward

I think User:swpb now appreciates that this was not the best approach to tackling this issue. It would have been far better to discuss this on one of the village pumps and make sure there was support for the idea before launching in. We could then have discussed the strategy in detail and the result would have been smoother. The problem is that template editors will quite rightly be reluctant to make the changes on such a wide scale unless consensus has been established. Anyway we are where we are, and before mass reverting, I suggest the following:

• A temporary moratorium on changes to templates.
• Open a discussion on WP:VPR to gauge support on the issue. In my opinion this does not have to be a full blown 30 day RfC.
• In 7-10 days, if consensus is clear we reopen these requests and get everything done.

What do you think about this approach? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:28, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

@MSGJ: Right. I've only implanted at {{WikiProject Animation}} and {{WikiProject Comics}}. I think it would be best to notify all WikiProjects to reach consensus. JJ98 (Talk) 17:50, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

@Jj98: If you are going to bring this up on WP:VPR or individual project pages, can you remove or comment out the edit request templates on the individual talk pages? You can reactivate the edit request here when you are done, but if this is going to take 7-10 days to resolve it would be nice not to have it cluttering up Category:Wikipedia template-protected edit requests. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:38, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Empty categories

@Swpb, MSGJ, Jj98, and Djsasso: while some editor(s) earlier this month cleaned up many of the "Requested image" pages so that the categories were not empty, there still remain while dozens that need to be addressed: See Wikipedia:Database reports/Empty categories for examples like Category:Wikipedia requested images of people of Zambia, Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of cephalopods and Category:Wikipedia requested images of food of Romania to name a few. It seemed like CSD C1 tagging them prompted people to act so I was thinking I could tag them next week if they are all still empty.

I don't know if this is an issue that will be resolved by this Village Pump proposal (above). But unless there is a disclaimer (like on Category:90 BC deaths) or the {{empty category}} tag is used, empty categories are eligible for deletion. These categories need to be tended to and shouldn't sit around empty indefinitely. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:41, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

The WP template changes will address most (if not all) of them, and will be trivial to implement when approved, since they are all mocked up. If the feeling is that the template changes should go through VP, that's fine; I don't personally have the motivation to see that through. Note, though, that just deleting the corresponding image categories will leave those wikiprojects inconsistent with the rest of the image-request tree. If that doesn't bother you, then so be it. The master list:

Template:WikiProject Albums|Template:WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles|Template:WikiProject Animation|Template:WikiProject Arthropods|Template:WikiProject Aviation|Template:WikiProject Biography|Template:WikiProject Brazil|Template:WikiProject Canada|Template:WikiProject Comics|Template:WikiProject Dance|Template:WikiProject Fishes|Template:WikiProject Food and drink|Template:WikiProject Ice Hockey|Template:WikiProject Lepidoptera|Template:WikiProject Japan|Template:WikiProject Mountains|Template:WikiProject Physics|Template:WikiProject Spaceflight|Template:WikiProject Trains|Template:WikiProject United States

—swpb^T 20:58, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

WikiShootMe map

Ought the category header mention the map? An entry in Wikidata becomes a red dot on the map. When vising a place and having an idle moment, I bring up the map and snap and upload pictures, turning the red dots green. Later, at home with the big screen and keyboard, I put the Wikidata pic into whatever article ought to have it. Sometimes we have only a bad picture, so I kill the pic in WD, thereby restoring its dot to red. Make sure your located subject has a WD item with coordinates! Jim.henderson (talk) 17:36, 25 July 2022 (UTC)