Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Categories/Structure of Categories

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Random proposal ►◄ Categories  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Structure of Categories

  • Who would benefit: All people that use Commons. Categorizer, people who look for images and so on.
  • Proposed solution:
    • first: a flexible number of files per category site. two possibilities: Buttons with different possible sizes; e.g. 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000. Or, what I would like more, a field with a free definition for every user (and category site). So I could - if I would, choose 222 files per size for example.
    • second: sortable categories. Not only per alphabet, also for time. So that you can see in bigger categories, which imges are new, which one older. Or by size. Or by media.
  • More comments: I think, it's the fourth try for this. But it will be once more too usefull for Wikimedians so it once more will be ignored at the end.

Discussion

  • All of this is great, I especially want to see sortability in categories. Toasted Meter (talk) 02:27, 4 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Agree, ability to sort by date of addition to the category would be extremely useful, particularly to see e.g. new additions to Category:Unidentified Angiosperms, a huge category where long-placed files that no-one can identify make it hard to find new additions. - MPF (talk) 10:37, 4 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • And sorting by filesize, too - 5 megabyte pics are generally better than 50 kilobyte pics, so while sorting by quality is probably impossible, sorting by size will at least tend to put better pics toward the top. Sorting by having / not having geocoding would also be useful. - MPF (talk) 14:53, 4 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • The current sorting of photos into categories using HotCat still require around 2-3 seconds of delay. If I were to do categorizations of hundreds of uncategorized photos, it will add up to hours of extra waiting time :( Categorizations with HotCat should be executed/processed instantaneously (a split of a second) Chongkian (talk) 10:34, 5 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Yes. Being able to sort by creator / date of media / date depicted from the information template would also be nice. It would be nice to think that functionality for sorting categories by this kind of information could be added quite quickly once these become available as structured data statements (together with filtering on the values of other structured data statements, eg license-type). However, there seems to be a party view amongst at least some of the structured data team that the structured data service is going to bury the category system (and perhaps even that the extent to which it does so should be a metric for the success of structured data, see eg last line of summary of phab:T177357). I personally don't think that will happen, in fact I think the structured data is likely to strengthen the category system, by making it possible to make categories more systematically comprehensive, and more possible to add richer functionality to category views (eg the sorts of sorts I've mentioned above). But it may take the dev team some time to realise this, and until that time I fear resources be directed away from it. Nevertheless I strongly support this proposal, and it very much has my +1. Jheald (talk) 20:29, 5 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Regarding sorting of categories, please see this proposal. --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:40, 7 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Thanks for proposing it – I had it on my list of wishes too. :) I think this could be a bit similar to filemanger like Windows Explorer, Nautilus, Dolphin, etc than users would be comfortable in using it. -- MichaelSchoenitzer (talk) 23:46, 7 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • That is a great idea. Apart from mentioned above I would like to have possibility, esp. in categories with plants and landscapes, to sort pics according to calendar (from January to December). There is user who sort pics in this way in plant categories manually... Kenraiz (talk) 11:07, 10 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • @Marcus Cyron: Just to set realistic expectations, part #1 of your request should be doable, but sorting is a bit more challenging. The categorylinks tables are HUGE, so it's only realistically possible to sort on data that is directly stored in that table and indexed. In other words, it's not impossible, but will be difficult (as it might require some database changes). Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 14 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    • @Ryan Kaldari (WMF): - I am completely a DAU (the english term seems to be "Luser") - I just can say in my own unstructured words what I would like to have. All the other things are on yout site ;). If it works - fine! If not - sad. If it need a longer time - OK! :) Marcus Cyron (talk) 23:50, 14 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • The DB limitations on sorting are mostly due to using a relational database; if categorylinks would be stored in something like ElasticSearch the problem would go away. I realize that's a bit beyond the scope of what Community Tech can handle; OTOH at some point it will have to be tackled anyway, beacuse we want to replace link tables with a more scalable and flexible dependency engine, and at that point list generation would probably have to be decoupled from dependency tracking. --Tgr (talk) 06:02, 25 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Voting

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