Commons talk:Category redirects

Structure

The initial information I've provided should be reasonably neutral: Not starting with the presumption they are good or bad. More advantages/disadvantages should be listed. The solutions section allows further expansion of that area. That should give enough background info to inform further discussion.

The appropriate/inappropriate use sections should be populated as best as possible, as it is that is where the actual guidance is. If there any controversial uses that cannot be put into one slot or the other, then they should be left to a community-based poll.--Nilfanion (talk) 10:43, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Looks like a good start. However I would put the "background" section at the bottom of the page as "detailed explanation" - most visitors don't need to know this, and having read it once, they won't need to read it again if they come back to the page in future to check something. I would also use the tick/cross scheme of COM:OVERWRITE - symbols help people absorb information more quickly. Finally, some of the cases will need slightly more explanation and/or linking to explanations elsewhere (eg "disambiguation category"). Good start, thanks. Rd232 (talk) 14:08, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Agree with all that. The tick/cross scheme strikes me as a very good idea.--Nilfanion (talk) 21:05, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Missing in Background: Wikidata example d:Q1144392 will concentrate all interwiki links, includeing references to Commons. Half of the rationale will disappear.

Disambiguation categories: AFAIK don't exist on wikipedias, and I have my doubts on the usability of it. It takes me half to one hour of maintenance work per day, mostly to remove the overcats. Those categories are hardly updated and most of the time very incomplete. The only reason why I make them is that people don't try to move their categories to that "free" slot.

Missing: numbers: If we have a redirect of all 270 languages to commons categories, then we will have close to one billion categories. So they can launch a bot to create all possible redirects, which solves their translation problems indeed. Who will maintain that after a rename.

Missing: many words have a quite different significance in different languages: Category:Berg can be mountain and hill in several languages, a number of cities, ... This is a real problem as till recently, bots added one to two hundred of berg categories per week for mountains. Who will manage that.

Only 98 % of redirected categories are moved by bots, the others fail because of templates (institutions, other templates) or because the category description is somewhere in another template.

A substantial part of the redirected moves are overcats, especially for things like Deutschland, Arte, Chitarra, castell, ... Those are often from people that don't care about English or naming rules. Our experience is that when there are red categories, people are more inclined to correct or they appear in Special:WantedCategories where we can often trap batches of wrong categorisations and send in the right ones.

Several more comments to come later. --Foroa (talk) 14:41, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

If its missing - add it - but try to keep it short and neutral (2 sentences). In response to specifics:

Remember no matter how Wikimedia evolves we cannot correct all incoming links - as we do not control all media that may link here. Wikidata may well help with links from WP (note in the solutions).

en.wp uses disambiguation cats too - see w:Category:Disambiguation categories

We don't necessarily need to pre-emptively create redirects. There is a clear distinction between a link left behind after a move and a link created pre-emptively. A rule that mandates "all moves must leave a redirect behind" does not also mean "all languages must have a redirect to the English". I don't think anyone is advocating adding redirects from every French, German, Dutch (etc) word to its English equivalent.--Nilfanion (talk) 21:05, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

The case of inter-language conflicts, like Berg, is not a matter for redirection. That's a second problem relating to disambiguation, either handled by selecting one as "primary" with a hatnote "This category is about X, for other uses see ..." or creating a disambiguation cat. In case of Berg, disambiguation makes more sense as that makes it easier to give multi-lingual support. It could say in German "For the mountains known as Bergs see ...", which means any German-speakers ending up at Category:Berg don't need to read English to figure out what to do next. The "don't create a redirect when disambiguation is more appropriate" covers that.

Wikidata is a partial solution, and should be noted as such along with the other partial solutions.

I agree broken redirects, after a further rename, are a maintenance problem. However, they do not become truly broken unless the intermediate category is also broken. That shouldn't happen, it ought to be ending up as a redirect or disambiguation cat. Both of end cases are separate problems, and are bot tasks. Specifically: Category redirects to a category redirect could be identified and fixed by bot. Redirects to a dab can be reported by a special cat or a bot report, but would need human fixing (Human intervention can be avoided if temporary redirects are used as part of disambiguation process). So to answer "Who will maintain that after a rename." - bots. And to repeat, I'm not advocating the creation of hundreds of redirects, merely the non-deletion of existing ones - a very different issue.--Nilfanion (talk) 20:51, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Potential poll

The poll could consist of a list of the contentious uses for category redirects and provide for sup/opp votes on each. Consensus on each would then be determined seperately: Those that pass would be added to "appropriate", those that fail to "inappropriate" and any items with no consensus should not be added to either section.

Ideally the list of items on the poll will be fairly short, as if there's too much it will reduce participation. It should be possible to extrapolate further in any case.

Circumstances that will likely need dicussion:

1. Redirects resulting from moves. (May need breaking down further: For instance long-standing categories vs recent)
2. Redirects from one language to another (Category:Москва to Category:Moscow)
3. Redirects from alternative spellings (Category:Colours to Category:Colors)

Thoughts?--Nilfanion (talk) 10:43, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good. It may be worth drafting, with a prominent "no voting yet!" header, for people to comment on the proposed poll. Rd232 (talk) 14:10, 3 April 2013 (UTC)