Sj wrote: That's a very good point - each category could have a partitioned off section for "Images in this category" as seperate from "Articles in this category", with no extra work on the user's part. I was also going to suggest that one benefit of having separate image categories is that they could be displayed as auto-thumbnailed galleries, rather than lists of links. I guess even this could be done within the existing structure - although it would become even *more* important to have a decent multi-page results system... -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

I think this would work up to a point. Invoking categorization of images *only* through article categories would not perhaps not bring into a account the ontological hierachies that exists for images. For examples, historical U.S. maps could be within [[Category:U.S. history]], but they could also be collected under an image-related category of all historical maps, which is a subcategory of all maps. This particular hierachy may not be one that is natural for articles, so it may be the case where we need image-only categories. I've come to this conclucsion through some experimentation with this. I think doing within the existing framework would be very useful. I like Timwi's idea of [[Category:Image:xxxxx]]. Some coding to produce thumbnails in these categories might not be too strenuous. Rowan Collins said:

You misunderstood. [[Category:Image:XXXX]] not a separate database namespace but can be done completely within the existing coding. It is purely a convention There is no additional namespace, simply a convention for images. Personally I tend to prefer separate categories for images because it is what I personally would expect, if I were looking for images. Yes, images *could* be placed within existing categories with articles, but overall I think a segragation is cleaner and more flexible overall. Sj said:

Well perhaps I did misunderstand. I work with databases for a living, but I didn't pick up on that as corruption :) I think both solutions could work. However, I'm not convinced that we would need to enforce things like that. I think users are intelligent enough to make the distinction, providing the convention is made clear enough. I think both solutions could work. I tend to favor separate categories because that would be my personal expectation. Fennec Foxen said:

Yes, I'd be fine with that. I think my reservations about hierarchies of image categories can be resolved within that context through user-defined categories. My main reservation was about mixing images and article titles in the same alphabetized listing, which would not occur with this. I tend to think that there will categories that will be effectively image-only, based on the fact that images have an inherent categorization arising from *genre* that does not exist in articles (i.e., distinction between photographs, digitalized artwork, maps, graphics, charts, etc.). For example [[U.S. history photographs]] vs. [[U.S. history maps]] vs. [[U.S. digitalized artwork]], etc. But that can all be resolved on a case-by-case basis through user contributions. Certainly it doesn't require an additional space. I do have some concerns about the thumbnails. Overall I think it's a great idea, but it could result in a large number of thumbnails being downloaded in the case where the user isn't looking for images at all. As an example, Texas has over 200 counties and thus over 200 corresponding county maps (even more towns obviously, many of which have maps now). Even if the display limit per page in catgories in 500, for example, you could have a potential right off the bat for a large number of thumbnails to be displayed in the case where a user isn't even looking for images at all. This could arise while paging through a long listing (I'm assuming images will listed after articles), but also in the case of a category with a small number of articles but a large number of images. There are a couple obvious ways of handling this. Deactivating image thumbnails by default (through preferences) is one way, but knowing myself, I would probably activate that prefence much of the time and wind up running into this situation relatively frequently (downloading lots of thumbnails when I don't want them). Another solution is to require explicit loading of thumbnails for every page display (the first time, you never get thumbnails, but have to request it), but that seems like it could be annoying. What do you think would be the best approach here? Sj said:

There is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_images which is an attempt to categorise images. It needs lots of work, of course. Caroline