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Commons:Categories for discussion/2025/02/Category:SVG by subject

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Category:SVG by subject

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We had the discussion about SVG diagrams here, and several people agreed that it makes sense to abolish those subcategories that declare topical differences between files based on file formats, when there are in fact no such topical differences.

What is the idea?. The current situation is that we have a sprawling category double-structure that reaches far far down, even into e.g. Category:SVG flags of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands and holds those SVG files seperate from the "regular" files with flags of that territory. In my opinion, Category:SVG files should become a hidden category that is assigned and maintained by bots, based on the topical categories of a file. With topical categories, I mean that we should stop making a difference between "normal" boilers and SVG boilers. This means to upmerge the SVG boilers to be included among all boilers, but add a hidden category:SVG diagrams, maintained by a bot. In the end, we would have a comparably limited number of SVG topical categories, and they would be hidden in the background.

To what level would do we have to cut down? I think this is very much open for debate. I am against a radical upmerging of everything and slapping "SVG file" as a hidden category on it (that would be Level 0). Instead, we should for sure keep the different types of images separate: "SVG maps", "SVG diagrams", "SVG icons", "SVG logos", "SVG flags", "SVG illustrations", "SVG cartoons", etc. This is what I would call Level 1. We could also be a bit more generous and allow "SVG flags of France", "SVG logos of France", "SVG maps of France", or "SVG technical diagrams". This is what I would call 'Level 2. But once we have distinguished an SVG file based on type and country, we would stop subdividing by even more qualifiers - e.g. "SVG logos of political parties of France"; . The current way however goes down to Level 3 and below: This parallel structure should be upmerged into the regular category tree.

To break it down on a few examples: Category:SVG linguistic maps of the world is unnecessary: Those would be "Linguistic maps of the world" (topical category) and "SVG maps" (L1) or "SVG maps of the world" (L2). Also, Category:Bosnian-language SVG logos goes too far. Those should be "Bosnian-language logos", "SVG logos" (L1) or "SVG logos of Bosnia and Herzegovina" (L2) and also "Bosnian-language SVG". The first of those would contain all SVG logos from that country with no further subcategories; the second would contain all SVG using that language (logos, cartoons, maps, diagrams...). Another example would be Category:SVG Ancient Egypt. That category itself is level 1 and okay. In it, we currently go down as far as Level 3, differentiating that it is an SVG file (L0), that it's Ancient Egypt by topic (L1), that it's an art-style based illustration of... (L2) and which kind of object is illustrated, e.g. an animal or a deity (L3).

Why would this move be helpful? My point is that L3, L4 and so on are excessive: people neglect to assign all the proper parent categories (point), and when the regular topical category is eventually further split up, the SVG branch is either forgotten or the splitting results in a very small category of just a few files, in same cases just a single one. Doing all this manually adds to the randomness of the category tree - in fact, many people uploading SVG files don't even assign them to the SVG categories. The non-editing users of Commons potentially ignore the SVG content and will use inferior raster graphics since they didn't see the SVG subcategory (speaking from experience), if they browse by category. And if they don't browse that way, then it makes no difference if we have or don't have an SVG subdivision.

Precedence: I did a quick archive dive on the topic, and found that the problems I argued for have been seen by others before: this led to the abolishment of PNG-subcategorization at least in one case, been brought up on the AN in in March 2020 after a discussion in January 2020 and been briefly discussed on the village pump in the same month. Nobody objected to the idea presented, yet I don't think anything has moved since then. If this has been adressed elsewhere (including potentially the original discussion why SVG graphics should be split up that much), I'd be glad to learn more.

Other options? Issues that I haven't adressed? I'm again glad to learn more. This is not a super urgent topic and I am certain that we will find examples where my suggested approach fails. That would mean exceptions, or a different approach. Instead of blind activism, we should do this right.

Notification: Since this debate on a meta-category has such large-scale consequences, I will first ping the participants of the precedent discussions: @Estopedist1, Themightyquill, Ainali, Rob984, Gone Postal, Timeshifter, Omphalographer, Sbb1413, Prototyperspective, and Taylor 49: .
If I forgot somebody, please add them here. If you're not interested on this topic please also give notice or delete yourself from the ping list. If we can hammer out a preliminary consensus, I'll gladly post a notice in the village pump so that we don't exclude other people who are interested. --Enyavar (talk) 01:22, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply

Discussion

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@Sbb1413: I don't understand. What exactly does the template do? Can you show it in use somewhere? --Timeshifter (talk) 18:30, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
@Timeshifter: The template follows the simple algorithm below:
  • If 'country' exists then
    • If 'type' exists then add category "SVG 'type' of 'country'".
    • Else add category "SVG 'country'".
  • If 'type' exists then
    • If 'country' exists then add category "SVG 'type' of 'country'".
    • Else add category "SVG 'type'".
  • If 'lang' exists then add category "'lang'-language SVG".
Basically, the proposed template will categorize images according to Enyavar's proposal. For example, if you have a Bengali-language SVG map of India, you would add the proposed template there as {{SVG file|country=India|type=map|lang=Bengali}}, thus categorizing the map under Category:SVG maps of India and Category:Bengali-language SVG. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs • uploads) 19:01, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
@Sbb1413: Does the template have to be added to each file page? --Timeshifter (talk) 19:14, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
@Timeshifter: Ideally yes, but manual categorization can also be a valid alternative. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs • uploads) 19:19, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=maps
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=US+maps
Amazon sorts by featured, price, rating, newest, and best sellers. Commons dropdown menu could sort by SVG, PNG, JPG, etc.. This function would probably need to be added in the Mediawiki software for the Commons. Here is Special:Search for SVG maps in Category:Choropleth maps of the United States (copy and paste into browser):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=50&offset=0&ns6=1&search=deepcat%3A%22Choropleth+maps+of+the+United+States%22+filemime%3Aimage%2Fsvg%2Bxml&advancedSearch-current={%22fields%22:{%22filetype%22:%22image/svg+xml%22,%22deepcategory%22:[%22Choropleth%20maps%20of%20the%20United%20States%22]}}
Is there a way to limit it to just one category, and not the subcategories too?
Or maybe the number of levels down can be chosen in the dropdown menu too. --Timeshifter (talk) 18:22, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
 Comment I oppose a hardcoded numeric limit such as Level 2 exactly for the reason that the number of files there can range from ZERO to thousands, as Category:SVG maps of India demonstrates. I support to hide the "SVG branch" and copy all files into the chief topic categories. As I wrote in other RFC, there are 2 catches:
  • categories for language-neutral SVG:s and multilanguage SVG:s should remain, since it is NOT visibile on the extension or anywhere whether a SVG file maybe is language-neutral or multilanguage or not
  • there are other non-subject features possibly worth categorization (videos without sound, animated GIF:s PNG:s WEBP:s, ...)
The other "more radical" proposal to drop the SVG cat:s altogehter is interesting as it circumvents the "Level 2" issue. But still there are or will be language-neutral SVG:s and multilanguage SVG:s (if not for maps of India, then for biological structures and other stuff). If the SVG categories are dropped altogehter, then Category:Multilingual SVG mathematics will be directly subcat of Category:Mathematics. IMHO keeping multilanguage SVG:s easy to find is crucial. Last but not least, I strongly oppose vague categories such as charts, illustartions, images, graphs, diagrams, drawings etc. Diagrams related to chemistry should be under chemistry (directly or via subcat), and diagrams related to music should be under music (directly or via subcat). There is absolutely no reason to mix chemistry images with musical images claiming than both are diagrams. Taylor 49 (talk) 18:04, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
Language-neutral SVG:s and multilanguage SVG:s can be indicated in the file title. Then those 2 sorting options could be added to the dropdown menu I previously mentioned. --Timeshifter (talk) 18:26, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
 Strong support Language-neutral SVG:s and multilanguage SVG:s indicated in the file title -- but this needs and policy and renaming many files. The "dropdown menu" is currently far from available. Taylor 49 (talk) 18:58, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
Yes, the dropdown menu would require someone requesting it at Wikimedia Phabricator. --Timeshifter (talk) 19:12, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
@Timeshifter and Taylor 49: Instead of language-neutral, monolingual and multilingual SVG categories or file titles, I suggest having categories like Category:Language-neutral images, Category:Images by language and Category:Multilingual images, although they can also contain photos (cf. Category:Language-neutral signs, Category:Signs by language and Category:Multilingual signs). Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs • uploads) 19:14, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
@Sbb1413: Those categories would end up with images for many topics. A dropdown menu on every category page would be much more useful. --Timeshifter (talk) 19:25, 13 February 2025 (UTC)reply
@Sbb1413: I do not principally oppose "Cat:Multilingual images", but there are issues:
  • Only SVG allows lang switching. So how to handle SVG:s and PNG:s with multiple languages visible at same time?
  • "Cat:Language-neutral images" will end up with gazillions of photos, since photos are typically lang-neutral, whereas diagrams typically have a language.
This idea is NOT ready to be commissioned. Taylor 49 (talk) 21:01, 8 September 2025 (UTC)reply
I appreciate all the points mentioned above, not least Omphalographer important concerns about the creation of hidden hierarchy of SVG categories. On the other hands, I don't really see the point in grouping SVG files into very broad categories that will contain barely related images. My preference would be to eliminate SVG and other file format categories entirely and replace them with some kind of technical solution to filter (or at least sort) images by format within topical categories. I'd prefer not to take any half-measures until that can be arranged - the status quo, bad as it is, is better than nothing. -- Themightyquill (talk) 09:10, 20 February 2025 (UTC)reply
Right, what did actually come from that policy discussion on Wikimedia a few weeks ago? The one where the Foundation wanted to decide the fate of Commons? Cannot fibd the links anymore in the pump, so this seems to be lost in the ether, but that kind of filter would be an appreciated tool. --Enyavar (talk) 03:13, 22 February 2025 (UTC)reply
  •  Support These categories are totally pointless and just cause problems. If the file format matters that much then it should be something people can filter for in search results. Having hundreds of thousands of super granular "files by file type" categories that are essentially meaningless isn't a good way to do it though. --Adamant1 (talk) 03:15, 12 June 2025 (UTC)reply
  •  Comment neutral, but I do want to point out the one downside I see for getting rid of these: right now, when you carve out an SVG category for something like a type of signs, it leaves the main category as mostly photos. If we bring the SVGs back into the main category, it becomes harder to find images of these signs "caught in the wild." - Jmabel ! talk 17:34, 21 August 2025 (UTC)reply
    Good point. I've looked at this issue with graphics/maps/diagrams in my sight. These are almost by definition not "photographs in the wild". With street signs, I would propose a distinction similar to flags: There are Flags of Jordan by type of image, which is currently divided into Photographs of the national flag of Jordan vs. the common graphic formats PNG, SVG, GIF and JPG. These four should in my opinion get moved into "Graphics of the..." . And signs should get the same treatment. --Enyavar (talk) 19:14, 21 August 2025 (UTC)reply
    For topics about symbols like signs or flags, the main category should be reserved for images of the symbol itself, and "photographs of [the symbol]" should be a subcategory. Subcategorizing further based on the file type of the image (like the JPEG/GIF/PNG/etc categories you pointed out for flags) is much less useful; I'm tempted to open a separate CFD about merging all those flag categories. Omphalographer (talk) 19:37, 21 August 2025 (UTC)reply
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