| This page is presently
inactive
and retained primarily for
historical interest
.
|
NOTE:
This proposal supersedes
Commons:License meta-tags
, which was abandoned for technical reasons like
bugzilla:5527
.
Tag categories
are categories that are used to mark and organize templates. The idea is to have an easy way to find all available tags for a given purpose (licensing, deletion, etc), and to make it easy to find out the purpose of a template. A small, well known set of categories can also be used by tools to determine which templates are license tags, deletion tags, and so forth. This page describes an
experimental
guideline for categorizing templates used for licenses, maintenance, etc. Comments are welcome on the talk page.
Templates should be categorized to mark a basic property of the template (like being a license tag); The category should only apply to the tag itself, not to the pages it is used on - i.e. the tag category would be used with
<noinclude>
. Generally, there can be any number of categories for tags, but there should be a very limited number of "well known" categories that can be used by external tools and MediaWiki extensions. Ideally, those categories should exist on several wikis, using identical category names. To keep things simple, such "well known" tag categories should not be nested (i.e. they should not have subcategories).
NOTE: some bold people may soon start to apply tag categories to templates. This should be done carefully, step by step, to give people to opportunity to comment. Suggestions are welcome on the talk page!
Generally, organizing templates in categories makes it easier to maintain an overview of what's available. This is useful for maintenance work on the commons, but also helps people from other wikis to find the templates they need.
A major advantage of having a small, well known set of tag categories is the fact that this makes it easy for external tools and MediaWiki extensions to know what a template is for.
Using a set of well known tag categories, automated tools can simply look for images that do not have a template categorized as a license tag. That way, the tool only needs to know the category, which would very rarely change. The database query is also much simpler, and probably faster, this way.
A future use of this is a
media search
page currently under development, that will allow users to search for images by category, resolution, file size, etc, and also by the usage conditions imposed by the license. This would not be feasible without using tag categories as described above.
In addition to the set of
well known
categories above, it would be a good idea to organize
all
templates into categories. Those categories should follow the same general schema as the well known ones, but they can be changed and added without having to think about effects on Wikimedia extensions, external tools, etc.
- Note:
This list is far from complete. Please see
Category:Commons templates
for an overview of template categories.
Major categories:
- Category:Internationalization templates
: for templates used for internationalization, like
{{En}}
or
{{Unknown/lang}}
- Category:Infobox templates
: for templates that create an infobox, like
{{Information}}
, etc
- Category:Helper templates
: for templates that are used to build templates: for example
{{Qif}}
- Category:Link templates
: for templates that create a link, like
{{W}}
or
{{IRC}}
- Category:Maintenance templates
: for templates related to Commons maintenance (not media clean up), e.g.
{{Merge}}
or
{{Todo}}
- Category:Marker templates
: for templates that represent an attribute, like
{{Featured picture}}
or
{{Guideline}}
- Category:Media cleanup templates
: for templates used to mark files as requiring some type of cleanup or editing
{{Cleanup}}
- Category:User templates
: for templates that are used on user pages to give information about the skills of the user: for example, Babel language templates,
{{User admin}}
, technical skills templates and a generic
{{Userbox}}
template
- Category:Message templates
: for templates that are used on user talk pages to inform them about an event related to their recent actions on Commons, or various policy issues, like
{{Welcome}}
or
{{Please link images}}
templates
Note that the tag categories should
always
be in
<noinclude>
tags, so they don't apply to the pages the tags are used on. Special care must be taken to make sure new license tags get the correct categories.