Commons:Tag categories

For tags in relation to edit summaries, see Wikipedia:Tags.

This page is presently inactive and retained primarily for historical interest. See Commons:WikiProject Templates/Category scheme for a more current category scheme.

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!

Rationale

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.

License tag categories

• Category:License tags: for generic licenses tags (and don't fit in one of the sub-categories), like {{PD-user}}
  • Category:Custom license tags: for customized licenses pertaining to a specific source or author, like {{Mildenhall}}
    • Category:User custom license tags: for user-specific license tags. Note: These should all be contained in the user namespace.
  • Category:License tags attribution: for all licenses that require attribution, like {{Cc-by-4.0}}
  • Category:License tags share-alike: for all licenses that require share-alike of derivative work, like {{Cc-by-sa-4.0}}
  • Category:License tags full-text: for all licenses that require to distribute the license text along with the work, like {{GFDL}}
  • Category:License tags non-free: for all licenses that have "non-free" requirements, like {{CopyrightByWikimedia}}. Such tags may exist for exceptional cases, like Wikimedia logos.
  • Category:CC license tags: for all CC licenses
  • Category:GFDL license tags: for all GFDL licenses
  • Category:PD-EUGov license tags: for all European Union public domain licenses
  • Category:PD-exUSSR-exempt license tags: for all exUSSR-exempt licenses
  • Category:PD-USGov license tags: for all US government public domain licenses
  • Category:Arab license tags: for all Arab public domain licenses
  • Category:Currency license tags: for licenses related to currency
• Category:Restriction tags: for tags that indicate a usage restriction independent of copyright and license, like {{Nazi symbol}}.
• Category:Problem tags: for all tags indicating a problem, including requests for deletion, like {{Unknown}}, {{No source}}, {{Delete}}, etc
• Category:License-related tags: for any tags that contains license information but must be accompanied by a license tag

More tag categories

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

Examples

• {{GFDL}} would be categorized under Category:License tags and Category:License tags attribution and Category:License tags share-alike and Category:License tags full-text
• {{Cc-by-sa-2.5}} would be categorized under Category:License tags and Category:License tags attribution and Category:License tags share-alike
• {{PD}} would be categorized under Category:License tags and Category:Deprecated templates
• {{PD-old}} would be categorized under Category:License tags
• {{Insignia}} would be categorized under Category:Restriction tags
• {{No source since}} would be categorized under Category:Problem tags
• {{Fair use}} would be categorized under Category:Problem tags

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.