Commons:Deletion requests/Category:Location not applicable
This category is not useful. If it's in use, we have all peoples, cars, maps and ogg files in it. GeorgHH 19:58, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
- The category has three primary uses:
- To combat geocoding related vandalism: Enwikipedia's geographic data is finally being put to use, w:Google Earth now includes it as an overlay. But we have discovered that it is highly vulnerable to sneaky vandalism. For example, A not so sneaky example is putting a coordinates of the United States White House on Penis. This sort of vandalism is hard to detect because a helpful addition doesn't look different from vandalism. This category helps us detect vandalism by marking media which should never be geocoded by anyone. (I have a bot that can detect the addition of geocoding to any page which has ever had this category).
- To assist in searching in the somewhat near future: We will eventually have searches which allow boolean operations. By including or excluding objects in this category a searching user can focus their search on objects without fixed locations or only include such objects. It is true that it will have many types of files in it, but it does split the space of all files into two groups... as such it is useful, especially once the regular user interface allowed it to be combined with other categories.
- Most importantly, this category aids in finding images which need to be geocoded. Before I had this category if I made a list of non-geocoded images of mine I would get a mixture of images which need to be geocoded and images which should not ever be geocoded. With this category I can tag the things which should not be geocoded once and then the next time I look for things which need geocoding, I can exclude those objects and only see the new images that need geocoding. An image on commons has three possible primary geocoding related states: "Geocoded", "Should not be geocoded", and "undetermined". Without an additional mechanism like this category we can not tell the latter two states apart in an automated fashion.
These reasons were explained on the category page, but I hope that I've stated them more clearly now. --Gmaxwell 20:27, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
- No comments to convince me otherwise.. so Keep. Perhaps I should have someone other than me close this? :) --Gmaxwell 03:07, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
Delete We shouldn't have categories that are the default or expected situation. Just like Category:Images should probably be empty (damn CommonSense...). If it at all necessary to mark items that should never be geocoded, it would be better to do it through an "invisible" means like inclusion of a template that doesn't display anything, then use Whatlinkshere on the template. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 07:52, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
- I just did a random sample of 30 images and I would say that 15 should be geocoded. 50/50 selectivity is pretty good. Converting it into a template would make it inaccessable from search tools. A bad idea. Today, I can now search for my images which need to be geocoded: like this. Please don't take that away from me. --Gmaxwell 08:03, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
- That's a pretty inexact way of searching for your images, if you mean images you uploaded. Note CatScan has an option to filter things by template used (or not!: "inverse"). I am sure Duesentrieb could be talked into adding that to a tool such as Gallery. For that matter, your Gallery already tells you which "tags" (templates) are used on each image. Templates are far from "inaccessible". I don't feel like this is a good way to use categories, but it does feel like a good way to use templates. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 08:23, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
- This application is entirely not what templates are for, which is adding repetitive human readable content for display. If we're going to abuse foolinks we could just as well insert text linking to a page, or even an interwiki. It's an abuse none the less. Please don't be confused about the purpose of categories just because our current category pages are far from ideal. Categories are opaque human and machine readable tags that classify media so we can find it. Category:Location not applicable is a classification and although it is somewhat unusual, it is still a useful one. --Gmaxwell 08:49, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
- Also, if the category intersection tool proves so humungously useful, we can easily add a category to a template in the future, to utilise it. So using a template now doesn't preclude using categories as well in the future. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 08:26, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
- It's still not equal, ... one can't figure out what cats are in use from the wikitext dump without a full parser and all the templates, it's pretty miserable. Templates = trash for machine readability. Obviously I could just scan for the template, but it's ugly to introduce yet another tagging system and ugly to have to special case every possible weird tagging system we use. I also don't see how one is supposed to find these empty template system tags, unless we start putting empty templates in the empty templates and make up a whole parallel hierarchy of 'invisible categories' out of templates. Then of course we'll have to update our search tools to work equally with templates and categories? .. and all that just so we can, effectively, have a second category namespace which lacks user transparency (doesn't appear to do anything at all on the image page), and has less powerful built in browsing.
- Quite frankly I don't see any benefit to using an empty template rather than a category to tag things, it's just confusing ... and for what purpose? To me it seems like your suggestion is more painting the shed (or laying ones thumbprint as some say?) than a material improvement. --Gmaxwell 08:49, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
- That's a pretty inexact way of searching for your images, if you mean images you uploaded. Note CatScan has an option to filter things by template used (or not!: "inverse"). I am sure Duesentrieb could be talked into adding that to a tool such as Gallery. For that matter, your Gallery already tells you which "tags" (templates) are used on each image. Templates are far from "inaccessible". I don't feel like this is a good way to use categories, but it does feel like a good way to use templates. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 08:23, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
- I feel certain that there is a way to easily determine which templates are used on a page - MW already does it (the list appears below the edit box). Oh yes, there is... ([1]) And going the other way around (from template to pages that use the template), we have Whatlinkshere. Why I am hesitant to use categories, is for two reasons: one is that it increases the number of "meta" categories that give some property of the file, instead of describing its content. "Meta" categories make it much harder for tools like OrphanImages to work accurately. An image which is only in Category:Location not applicable is actually still an orphan, despite appearances otherwise. The second is related, that it is just more screen clutter, and makes it harder to notice that an image doesn't have any valid categories.
- (Actually, it would be quite cool if we could have a second category namespace, just for "meta" categories. Do you think it's possible? :)) I am not 100% against categories. But I think we need more input from others, maybe. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 09:03, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
- You can tell were a template is used, but only if you are on the active site (via templatelinks table) or if you have a full wikitext parser. The use of templates for licensing is what forces Google earth to screen scrape wikipedia rather than using our dumps. I pointed out in my reply that the non-machine readability is only in issue outside of mediawiki itself.
- In this case it is not at all a meta category, it describes the content: "This an image of something which doesn't have a fixed earth space location".
- Further, we can easily adjust the orphanimages tool to ignore some categories. Already the existence of any license template adds a category and thus makes an image non-orphaned from the perspective of categories.
- As far as clutter goes, .. not having a good category should only be an issue on an image which has very few categories, which shouldn't be one which is suffering from clutter. --Gmaxwell 01:15, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
- Keep. With respect, I disagree with pfctdayelise; the "default circumstance" is that the image has not yet been geocoded, but should be if possible. This template is used to indicate that the image has been evaluated and determined to be inapplicable for geocoding. Which is what Greg said above. Kelly Martin 01:21, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
kept --ALE! ¿…? 11:56, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
Reason for the new deletion request: Today we have 1.600 images inside: cars, peoples, maps, coat of arms, numbers, flags, animals, ogg files and so on. So this category is never useful, I think, its a bad joke. Geograv (talk) 20:25, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
- Delete, really useless --Niteshift (talk) 20:52, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
- Delete Which cat is going to come next? Category:Image without date or Category:Image without French description?--Leit (talk) 10:33, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
- You mean Category:Date not applicable and Category:Image not needing a French description, don't you? ;-) --Slomox (talk) 16:33, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
Kept per reasoning of Para. -- Cecil (talk) 06:59, 28 November 2008 (UTC)