On 2/18/13, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thoughts? Comments? Am I on the fringe? Are guidelines
like this still
subject to debate and change?
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
do think that galleries that are large and purely illustrative are not
really suitable for Wikipedia. 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. 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. 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. It is also a progression from summaries to the more
detailed. If you are at the overview level, don't overwhelm things
with images. But make sure that the reader can, if they want, easily
drill down to the more detailed levels where more pictures are used
(even if those levels are on other sites).
Carcharoth