Category talk:Duplicate

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I have noticed problems with this tag in the past and refrained from commenting upon them, but I believe it to be one which has often been rather grievously misused to eradicate images that are NOT anything close to "duplicates" of other images and with very little or no discussion.

Yesterday Image:Napoleon4.jpg with Napoleon mounted on a piebald horse, which by usage (prior to radical edits by the Commonsdelinker bot) seemed to have been the widely preferred image among those of the 5 different painted versions of Napoleon Crossing the Alps (and which had been a featured picture on the Spanish Wikipedia), was put on the speedy deletion list as a duplicate of a muddier scan of a less striking version of the pose, with Napoleon on a brown horse. This was after the CommonsDelinker bot was used to eliminate its use everywhere in favor of the other image (in my opinion, and I believe that of many others, a clearly inferior one). I removed the tag, so as to preserve it, and reverted some of the damages done to various Wikipedia pages by the bot, including the one linked to above, where the one image would have been wrongly used to indicate 3 of the different versions.

This tag has also within the last day been used to eradicate the use of a perfectly legitimate black and white image of an engraving of Napoleon III (Image:Napoleon3.jpg) in favor of a rather garishly colorized version of it (Image:Napoleon3.PNG). I believe this one seriously detracts from the overall quality of at least one of the pages it was used on, "Causes of the Franco-Prussian War, where it clearly was out of place with the other non-colorized engravings.

Currently it has been used to place Image:Napoleon Bonaparte.jpg as a candidate for speedy deletion. Though this image is not the largest, I believe it probable that others, as well as myself, find it in many ways preferable for use on wiki pages to the more washed out version which has used to totally replace it by the CommonsDelinker bot.

I feel this tag should be used only where the sizes of the images or very minor cropping differences are the only distinguishing difference, and not when there are radically different renderings of a subject, and a cautionary notice clearly made along these lines. ~ Stormrider (talk) 17:55, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

This category and Template:Duplicate are not meant for different versions of the same image, only for exact duplicates or scaled-down versions of files. Template:Duplicate, which is used for putting images in this category, says "exact duplicate or scaled-down version". And the deletion guidelines for duplicates say "If the file is the same file type and you're sure that it is exactly the same content (colours, quality, etc) tag it with {{duplicate|Image:example.jpg}}". So the images you mention does not meet those criteria, and should not have been marked as duplicates.

In cases were one version is clearly much worse than the other, the bad image can be marked with Template:Superseded and kept, or nominated for deletion using an ordinary Commons:Deletion request if someone feels that the image really has to be deleted. If the differences are small it is usually enough to link the images together using the "Other version" parameter in Template:Information, so that user at Wikipedias and other projects can decide for themselves which version they want to use. Commons users does not have the right to decide which version should be used on all projects.

Deleting and replacing almost-duplicate images, was one of the reason that COM:DEL/S was closed, let's not make the same mistakes again. There may be some relevant old discussions there or on Template talk:Duplicate. /Ö 20:43, 17 June 2008 (UTC)