Category talk:Disambiguation

Questions

I've been looking at the entries in Category:Disambiguation and I have some questions. --Auntof6 (talk) 05:39, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Non-category disambiguation pages

What is the purpose of the non-category disambiguation pages (for example, Acre)? They disambiguate galleries, I know, but what is the purpose of that? There's no control over what is on gallery pages, so it doesn't seem helpful to disambiguate them. Are these non-category disambiguation pages needed? If not needed, many of them could be changed to category pages or merged into the corresponding disambiguating category. --Auntof6 (talk) 05:39, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

What is the purpose of that? — that indeed is a question that applies to most of the contents in this namespace, special cases like these disambiguation pages only making the matter more striking. Commons’ “galleries”, for the most part, either are poor-man copies of the eponym article in Wikipedia (usually of the English Wikipedia), fatally unsynchronized and including all kinds of clutter either accrued with time or remained from the original, or are attempted best-of galleries of a given category, mostly though unmaintained and showing someone’s digest from 4 or 9 years ago. The “gallery” namespace is mostly ignored (so, hurrah to Auntof6 for having this) and stuff that would have been fixed in a File: or Category: page (to mention only the main-content namespaces) is allowed to fester in what is, ironically, the “default” namespace of the project. Guidelines and cleanup are necessary. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 14:41, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Like disambiguating like?

Shouldn't the disambiguation categories disambiguate only Commons categories, and the other pages disambiguate only Commons gallery pages? Some have a mix. If we're going to mix them, why would we need both the category and non-category disambiguation? Example pages: Category:Bull Island and Adonis --Auntof6 (talk) 05:39, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Red links

Does it serve a purpose to have redlinked entries on the disambiguation categories/pages? In some cases, the disambiguation seems to have been copied from Wikipedia, and anything that doesn't exist here with the same name (as a category or gallery, as appropriate) is left as a red link. Example pages: Category:Bull Island and Alexander Mackenzie --Auntof6 (talk) 05:39, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

• There's at least some value to these, reducing the chance that someone with a photo pertaining to the redlinked subject gets confused by the category that is already there. - Jmabel ! talk 16:05, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
  • @Jmabel: You mean, someone might feel they need to choose from entries that are there and pick one even though it isn't the right one? That's a good point. --Auntof6 (talk) 03:44, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
  • @Auntof6: For example, if we had (as we probably should and don't) a Category:Oran (disambiguation). If we already had categories for the one in Algeria and the one in Scotland, but not for the one in Ireland and the several in the U.S., we might want to make red links for the missing ones so that images didn't just end up in the Scottish category on the basis that they were obviously not from Algeria. - Jmabel ! talk 05:39, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Disambiguating to Wikipedia

Do we want the disambiguation categories/pages to link to Wikipedia, such as when there is no Commons entry for a topic? Some pages do this. (I'm not talking about interwiki links that show up along the left side of the page, but links in the main part of the page.) Sometimes the link is to a Wikipedia disambiguation page (as on Category:Cerekiew), and sometimes it's to individual entries (as on Category:Carnach). --Auntof6 (talk) 05:39, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Interwiki links is a better approach. Commons is an international project and priviledging one Wikipedia among all others is unnecessary, problematic, and counterproductive. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 14:59, 23 June 2015 (UTC)