Forum:New category galleries

Forums → Ten Forward → New category galleries (reply • watch)

Recently Wikia added a new "Category Gallery" module that tied in with a "Read More..." module. This gallery module displays up to 8 "images" linking to "related" articles in the category. The image is the first image on the page that is linked using the "thumb" type, unless this image is used on several articles or is smaller than a certain size. As such, we've had some odd cases show up, such as on "Klingons", such as "Worf" showing a poor image of two characters in poor quality (neither of whom are Worf himself) and "B'Elanna Torres" showing a picture of pancakes (wtf?).

In addition to this, when no images are on the page, the little display shows a few random bits of a phrase from the article, rendered as an image.

According to sannse, we can choose to ask Wikia (assuming that we have community support and consensus) to remove this module. One thing we may want to do in its place is do something similar ourselves on the category pages, since the basic concept is not terrible, but the execution is very poor. Thoughts? -- sulfur 21:19, December 6, 2010 (UTC)

I agree that the concept is a good one but not being executed well. The "text-as-image" thing, I could do without. If the issues we are having with it cannot be worked out I would support some sort of replacement for it that we make ourselves.--31dot 21:31, December 6, 2010 (UTC)

I agree - the concept isn't bad (and having a good algorithm to automatically choose articles and images would be much better than doing the same manually). The problem is that the execution is not only "poor", but borderline broken. On other wikis, I've seen galleries with just one item (because the category only contains that one page), galleries where no item has an image (just gibberish text for all 8 items), or where the choice of items or images is insane in some other way (for example our "pancake case"). We should ask to have this feature disabled for now, but should periodically check how it behaves on other wikis, to eventually have it enabled again at a later point. -- Cid Highwind 21:32, December 6, 2010 (UTC)

I'm with Cid on this one, it needs to be turned off, at least for now. If wikia can go long enough without releasing some other poorly planed and broken feature long enough to get this one working, then by all means it can be turned back on then, but I doubt they can actually go that long without screwing the pooch. - Archduk3 08:39, December 7, 2010 (UTC)

Turn it off, please! I can say with confidence that the canine is thoroughly disgusted with having been violated repeatedly and without warning. -- Renegade54 17:28, December 7, 2010 (UTC)

Unless someone objects, I'd like to extend this discussion to the other new feature, the automated "Read more" sections. These are now added to all pages, and suggest three more articles to read, based on the number of categories shared between them and the current article. Problems with this are: (a) the choice of articles is most often not interesting or too related; (b) we already have a manual "Related topics" section which this feature would duplicate; and (c), this feature shares the image&text problems with the "Category Galleries" feature. -- Cid Highwind 13:58, December 8, 2010 (UTC)