User talk:Tuvalkin

‎Footpaths vs. railways: repl.
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Revision as of 14:55, 19 March 2013
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:I think they should have remained, as railways is the largest, and therefore (by default) the "master" category. (However, maybe the WBANK icons should be redrawn to match WASSER…) [[User:Useddenim|Useddenim]] ([[User talk:Useddenim|talk]]) 10:58, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
 
:I think they should have remained, as railways is the largest, and therefore (by default) the "master" category. (However, maybe the WBANK icons should be redrawn to match WASSER…) [[User:Useddenim|Useddenim]] ([[User talk:Useddenim|talk]]) 10:58, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
 
::You should consult the developers of various "long-distant walks in the UK" etc. on that. They may practice a different philosophy ;) [[User:YLSS|YLSS]] ([[User talk:YLSS|talk]]) 12:02, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
 
::You should consult the developers of various "long-distant walks in the UK" etc. on that. They may practice a different philosophy ;) [[User:YLSS|YLSS]] ([[User talk:YLSS|talk]]) 12:02, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
 
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I think that in Commons we should focus on the essence of these images, and not so much on their specific usages. What we have here is a vast family of “icons” (they are not really icons, but no gain in questioning '''that''' now) which have one thing in common — their filenames start with "BSicon_" and therefore they are usable with a specific set of templates (which are not developed centrally, but that’s another matter we should address some day). As I see it, our job is to ensure that
 
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#Those icons are categorized and otherwise displayed in a way that users can easily pick what they need to build their own diagramas in wikipedia.
 
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#There is a set of logical naming conventions so that a casual user can figure out how to name a newly introduced icon, analogous to others already in place.
 
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#All icons share certain geometric and topological (and even esthetic) features that allow them to be used together seamlessly.
 
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What we should not care about in Commons is the semantics of that usage. People are using these icons and the templates mostly for railways, yes, but, just like there is the footpaths and the canals, there’s the ancient roman highways in wp:la,, several buslines and road network and, who knows, pipelines or flow charts — and many diagrammatic uses that should be transparent to us.
 
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So, I agree that it should be using things like "set_f" ASAP, centralizing all 008000 green icons, regardless of their intended use — even if we’ll be primarily thinking about rail (note that things like OBJ or WBANK could be used for railways, too, and there is even a suggestion in wp:en that LOCK could be used to identify rack railways in diagrams.) So, yes, I disagree of your reversions.
 
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I hope soon we’ll be able set straight the whole matter of categorization of BSicons — which for now, thanks mostly to the autistic and quirky habits of Axpde, is running afoul of several Common’s categorization guidelines. (I tried to go against that by adding connections to external categories, such as [[:Category:Orange icons]] in [[:Category:Icons for railway descriptions/set orange]] — we’ll see how long that lasts unchallenged.) The main problem, as was once briefly touched by DePiep (yet another cool customer), is that the trunk of the tree category is [[:Category:Icons for railway descriptions]], instead of [[:Category:BSicon]]. Also there should be multiple concurrent tree category topologies, as is done for any image in commons. Having slashed category names, by the way, is a mixed blessing, and maybe we’d be better off without those.
 
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All this, of course, should discussed centrally. -- [[User:Tuvalkin|Tuválkin]] [[User talk:Tuvalkin|✉]] 14:55, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Tuvalkin&diff=92871299&oldid=92864966