Forum:New category galleries

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. - 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)
 * The canine agrees wholeheartedly. -- Renegade54 17:23, December 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * Can we have this turned off already, or do we need more people? - 23:02, December 22, 2010 (UTC)


 * Request to turn this off has been sent now. -- Cid Highwind 15:29, January 11, 2011 (UTC)


 * ...and it has been turned off now. No more pancakes! -- Cid Highwind 09:37, January 13, 2011 (UTC)


 * Excellent. - 10:30, January 13, 2011 (UTC)

Read more
I've asked Wikia to have the "Read more" module disabled due to some of the issues we've encountered here on MA. An excerpt from my email is as follows:


 * #1 The module seems to have had very little testing, and has exhibited a number of odd and unusual bugs (some of which are the same as the new Category Gallery module). These bugs include:
 * No obvious way to remove categories from being checked for articles to use
 * When no image is found/available/used, the text ignores templates, uses headers as if they are normal text, and has other format issues, in addition to often being apparently random sentence fragments
 * Some times, the related articles chosen have nothing whatsoever in common, and the text used is from the page itself. This occurred on our page at LaserDisc -- the "X-Ray" and "Meteorology" articles are not in the same category, and the text used is the opening text from the page itself.
 * #2 There is no documentation for this module and for how to interact with it (if that is even possible). I read through the blog mentioned above, and gleaned some information about how it works, but only by reading 100+ comments (where the information was found) and listening in on #wikia when Toughpigs discussed the module the other day.
 * #3 We, on Memory Alpha already have "see also" and "related topics" sections on a large number of our articles, and on these pages, the "read more" module is duplicated effort and not required. We do have some pages where the module would be useful and a good idea, but there needs to be some system where editors can choose to say "use it on this page" or "don't use it on this page".


 * We plan to keep an eye on the progress of this module on both other wikis and the community site, and if these bugs and issues can be resolved, we would be more than happy to look at having this module reactivated.

I'll update when we get a reply on this issue. -- sulfur 17:51, December 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * Disabled "Read More" module and Sulfur's bugs were filed. --daNASCAT (Help Forum) (blog) 16:25, December 9, 2010 (UTC)


 * I've followed this discussion since the beginning, hoping every day that this new stupidity will be disabled soon and I've just noticed now that it was disabled on MA-en, but not on MA-fr (probably not on the other interwikis). Could someone do something ? - From Cardassia with pain 21:20, December 15, 2010 (UTC)

Either send an email to Special:Contact or contact daNASCAT on his talk page. Each interwiki has to deal with things on their own, and some may choose to use the galleries. -- sulfur 21:33, December 15, 2010 (UTC)