This discussion of one or several categories is now closed. Please do not make any edits to this archive.
The current name causes this category to be filled up with individual photographs, and obviously this category shouldn't substitute for topic categories. Suggesting, therefore, that this be renamed to Category:Photographs by topic and tagged with {{CatCat}}. Nyttend (talk) 14:29, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- That makes a lot of sense to me. Although we may need Category:Photographs by camera type, or color palate, or whatever as well. Either way, this surely shouldn't have individual photos in it.– Quadell (talk) 15:27, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
 Delete Most of files on Commons are photographs. This category is useless as such (or should be at a very top level, root of many categories, or a hidden category). Jack ma (talk) 16:41, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- Nyttend, you're right but it would be a hell of a ride to manage that. 1st this cat is linked from Main Page and almost any of its translated versions, 2nd it is linked or redirected from elsewhere like from Photograph or {{Information Art of Life}}, 3rd it is probably moving target of some bots, 4th we got a similar problem at Category:Photography and Category:Images the purpose of whose is mostly misunderstood too. Your suggested {{CatCat}} is a good idea I think. --Achim (talk) 17:06, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- To manage what, the renaming? I'm not sure why it would be hard; WhatLinksHere would show us the pages that need to have links their changed, and relevant bot operators could be contacted. Nyttend (talk) 19:01, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- Right, but have a look at Category:Photo for example. The redir-target will change to Photographs by topic and a bot like RussBot will move the content there. Because of people will always add to Photo our newly Photographs by topic will some weeks or months later contain hundreds of images, so I suspect we won't get an advantage. --Achim (talk) 21:00, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- Now I see what you mean. Is there a way to tag the redirect so that the bot (or a different bot?) would just dump the category instead of moving the contents to a redirect? Or could we suggest that the bot habitually dump redirected categories when their targets are tagged with {{CatCat}}? Nyttend (talk) 23:59, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- There is no such tag now, but I suppose one could be added to the bot code if needed. But, why not just delete the undesired redirects (Category:Photo and Category:Photographs) after completing the renaming? --R'n'B (talk) 00:30, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- I am very happy to see this discussion finally taking place. There are millions of photographs in Wikimedia and potentially all of them would fit into this category. And if one goes through the photographs filed here, you can find that many of them have no other tag, i.e. they are useless, because they cannot be found. Top categories like this one should be completely blocked and categorizing files into it should be disabled by the system. I would really appreciate, if the admins could take up this suggestion! Simisa (talk) 18:46, 20 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- Could the redirect categories be changed to point to Category:Media needing categories? Or maybe a bot could move any files found into the current day's subcat of media needing categories? Of course, that might be a problem if there were other valid categories. Maybe Category:Media needing category review would be better. Whatever the case, are we getting to a consensus yet? --Auntof6 (talk) 10:53, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- The category may be "useless" for files, but where else would you put subcategories like Photographs by century or Hand-colored photographs? They don't fit in Photographs by topic … --El Grafo (talk) 09:20, 25 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- Thought about it, and per El Grafo I also say
 Keep tagged {{CatCat}}. --Achim (talk) 19:18, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Achim55, are you opposing all changes except the addition of CatCat, or are you agreeing with me and rejecting the delete vote by Jack ma? When the nominator says "rename" and someone else says "delete", a mere "keep" doesn't have a single clear meaning. To El Grafo, I say that "hand-colored" and "by century" are topics, or themes, or whatever other really broad descriptor you want. I'm trying to find a title that will include all of the current contents while excluding individual images, since individual images belong on high-level topic categories (e.g. "Houses", "United States", "Black-and-white") or their subcategories. Nyttend (talk) 02:31, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Nyttend, I'm wavering. Imagine the Category:Photographs were renamed and deleted, then it will appear at Special:WantedCategories as soon as any file has been dropped there (even deleted categories can contain files). I'm sure we won't have to wait for a long time until someone says "Oh, a missing cat, let's create it." --Achim (talk) 20:01, 8 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- It can always be deleted as a recreation of deleted content; see COM:GCSD #4. If this happens repeatedly, we could always protect it. Part of the issue is that people use it because it exists (if you can see that a category doesn't exist, you're less likely to use it, even if you're not aware that it formerly existed and got deleted), so deleting the title itself will reduce the number of photos getting put into it. Moreover, if you're familiar with Special:WantedCategories, you're probably familiar with the idea that you shouldn't recreate pages that were deleted because they had bad names, so any recreations would likely be by new users. Finally, part of the problem is that images in this category aren't getting noticed by YaCBot when it goes around tagging uncategorised images, because they're currently in a category; if we delete the category, images put into it should still be considered uncategorised by the bot. Nyttend (talk) 01:59, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- “[…]my point was merely to make it obvious that this was meant to be only a meta-category, excluding individual images.” → thanks for clarifying this, Nyttend. That's a totally reasonable idea. Here are some thoughts on that:
- We have loads of similar meta categories with the same problem. The usual way to deal with this is to put {{CatCat}} or {{MetaCat}} on them and clean them up every once in a while. I know that arguing with “that's how we've always did it” is often considered bad style (in German we'd probably call that a Totschlagargument). But I think with categories we should try to be as consistent as possible. If we're going to implement new ways of identifying meta-categories, I'd like to hear some more opinions first.
- Whether a Category:Photographs exists or not, people will add it to their uploads. Probably less if it doesn't, but still … An existing Category marked as requiring permanent diffusion through {{CatCat}} will be recognized and cleaned by more people than a non-existing Category. Think of it as a Honeypot.
- In case this whole discussion results in renaming Category:Photographs to something that screams "Meta Category", I don't think Category:Photographs by topic would be a good name for that. I must confess, though, that I don't really have hard arguments against that. It just feels totally wrong and/or confusing to me (see below). Maybe something like Category:Photographs (meta category)? But that would be totally against Commons:Meta category, which demands something like X by Y.
- All in all, I'd say: Keep, add {{CatCat}} and otherwise just leave it as it is. --El Grafo (talk) 16:16, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- PS: Lots of those files that currently go to Category:Photographs would probably just end up in Category:Photography instead, because people would pick the next best thing the auto-complete function(s) offer them. Maybe someone could write a bot that monitors file additions to categories like this and leaves a friendly message on the uploaders' talk pages asking them to look for better categories? --El Grafo (talk) 17:14, 12 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Keep This category is something like a melting pot of Category:صور, Category:Foto, Category:Fotos and others. When new users load up files, they often give them categories like this because they don't know better, and someone else has to clean up. But that's OK.--ProfessorX (talk) 16:44, 13 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Rename to something like "Photographs by characteristic". Use {{Catcat}} or {{Photographs}}, but not {{Metacat}}. "By subject" certainly doesn't fit. Whatever is done, I would do to all the geographic subcategories (cities, continent, country, region, etc.) -- any category with a name like "Photographs of <place>". Maybe then we could clean these out once and for all. --Auntof6 (talk) 04:09, 9 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Given this recent nomination, I've tagged some of the sub-categories that are more likely to be problematic with the current name pattern including Category:Photographs by topic, Category:Photographs by country, Category:Photographs by city, and Category:Photographs by continent. I think Auntof6's suggestion of Category:Photographs by characteristic would make it clearer that these are mean to be category-categories. - Themightyquill (talk) 07:56, 2 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- "By characteristic" is easily better than my original suggestion. Nyttend (talk) 20:58, 9 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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- Hola, Allforrous. Gracias para su respuesto. Trataré de responder en español. Cuando uno dice "keep" o "delete" aquí, necesitamos saber sus razones. El número de "keeps" y "deletes" no es lo importante. Lo importante es las razones. Si usted quiere explicar sus razones en español, yo las traduciré lo mejor que puedo para los otros usuarios. Siento mucho si mi español tiene errores: hay bastante tiempo que no lo he hablado. --Auntof6 (talk) 10:11, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment. Files often get added to this category by a bot that recategorizes them from redirects. If we do rename anything, we will need to address whatever redirects point to the categories being changed. --Auntof6 (talk) 17:01, 17 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
 Comment I understand the rationale of this CfD. Nonetheless I would suggest that "Photographs" be the mother cat only for specific children metacategories (i.e. class of photograps: valued photographs, panoramic photographs, photographs by author, photographs by city). Shortly, for topic related to the attributes of a photograph rather than for the subject pictured in the photograph itself. -- SERGIO (aka the Blackcat) 16:48, 15 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- The fact that it exists at all is the source of the problem. A person uploading a photograph sees the category and thinks "I'm uploading a photograph, so it must go there!" Changing what is allowed in it won't help if the category name stays as it is. --Auntof6 (talk) 10:20, 3 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
At the risk of repeating things, how about this:
With this method, files that get incorrectly put into Category:Photographs will end up in a more appropriate place. I've been trying to keep this category cleaned out (along with Category:Images and maybe one or two others) and it would be nice to have this taken care of. -- ~~
I figure this depends on WCs definition of "wikt:photography/w:Photography." If the definition includes all images, be they film photos that were common until about 10 years ago, and today's digital/electronic types, then this category is pretty redundant, at least most of its sub-cats, as, what, +95%?, of the media here are of either film or electronic type. Category:Photographs by film and Category:Photographic films seem to be about cameras and actual film than how the images were made in regards to whether they are film or electronic. If, however, the definition is film only—my preference—then the subcats would be good.199.7.156.129 10:35, 14 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- Putting photographs in the Category:Photographs is very unspecific but it isn't "incorrect", since all files should be categorized by their media types. --MB-one (talk) 18:39, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- That's kind of the point: it's not technically incorrect if you look only at the category name, but it causes issues so we're discussing how to deal with the kinds of issues it causes. As for all images being categorized by media type: first, I don't think "photograph" is a media type on Commons. Media types are things like jpeg, ogg, etc. Second, the overwhelming majority of files here are photographs (the notable exceptions being audio, video, and computer-generated media), so requiring every photograph to be in a photograph category would be a burden on both users and the system. --Auntof6 (talk) 20:30, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- User:Auntof6: What you are listing are file types, not media types. In general, what I meant is, e.g. Template:Photographs suggests, that photographs, unlike other media types shouldn't be categorized as such and that doesn't make any sense to me. --MB-one (talk) 08:50, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- OK, I see the distinction. Nevertheless, not all photographs are in photograph categories. "Photographs" is a de facto default for media type, so files only go in those categories if there's a sort of meta-reason for it. The photographs categories are only for photographs that share some characteristic (such as being black and white, being panoramics, or something else), and they only hold other categories. If you look at Category:Photographs of Norway, for example, you'll see that it has the template {{Photographs}}, which explains this. Then if you look at File:Norges geografiske midtpunkt vinterstid.jpg, you'll see that there's no photographs category. I know this isn't intuitive: it makes sense that a category called "Photographs" could contain any and all photographs, but that isn't what the photographs categories were intended for. Whoever set up the naming scheme may not have thought it out as well as they might have, hence this discussion. --Auntof6 (talk) 09:34, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- I think, we have a consensus, what the status quo is. What we haven't even really discussed yet, is if it should stay that way or rather be changed and if so in which direction. --MB-one (talk) 13:33, 24 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- @Auntof6: AFAIK, {{Photographs}} was implemented without any discussion or consensus. If I'm wrong about this, please direct me to the relevant discussion. --MB-one (talk) 12:42, 2 October 2017 (UTC)I[reply]
- I wouldn't know, that was before my time here. --Auntof6 (talk) 15:21, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- Just how many people here are actively moving the images in this category away from it? Because I just discovered it yesterday, and I started replacing them since then. ----DanTD (talk) 05:52, 11 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- I remove files from the category now and then when I think of it. If you mean that you are putting files into the category, then please stop. The box at the top of the category explains that it should contain only subcategories. --Auntof6 (talk) 06:00, 11 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- @Auntof6: There is no consensus for that. Category:Photographs (and selected subcategories) should get {{CatCat}}, {{Photographs}} is really superfluous. --MB-one (talk) 13:25, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- No consensus for removing files from a category that shouldn't contain files? I think that comes under general maintenance. In any case, {{Photographs}} includes all the functionality of {{CatCat}}, plus an explanation of the use of "photographs" categories specifically. Adding {{CatCat}} would be redundant. --Auntof6 (talk) 17:48, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Sorry, I meant {{Categorise}} not {{CatCat}}. The point is, {{Photographs}} and the respective policy was implemented unilaterally without any discussion. --MB-one (talk) 18:30, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@MB-one: Please stop using this discussion as a basis for changing the text on Template:Photographs. This discussion is still in progress (long-standing though it may be) and we should not yet be making changes based in it. You say the template "was implemented unilaterally without any discussion". However, it was done so long ago that it has become standard practice and should not be changed based on an objection to something about its beginning. Changing the wording on the template as you did affects hundreds of categories in a way that negates their intended purpose, so please stop. -- Auntof6 ( talk) 21:44, 30 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Exactly, the discussion is still in progress. This template was made before any discussion and is implying the existence of a rule that has never been discussed. Long-standing practice is not an argument here. Once we have a consensus here, the template can be changed accordingly, but for now it has to be changed to a neutral wording. --MB-one (talk) 21:51, 30 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- The template was made in 2010. This discussion is not about the template or whether it should have been made: this discussion started after the use of that template was well established, whether or not you agree that it should have been established. I have no objection to changing the wording as long as it still says that the categories it's used on should contain only other categories. --Auntof6 (talk) 22:00, 30 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Exactly, the discussion started later and is still going on. That means, we can't enforce any special rule, that hasn't been agreed on. So the general rule stands, which is not, what the template suggests. --MB-one (talk) 16:29, 22 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
 Not done: closing stale discussion that leans toward keeping status quo. As a top level category, frequent clean-up and diffusion will continuously need to be done. --P 1 9 9 ✉ 15:45, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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