A tool for creating year and month categories on Commons
Problem: Many photographs are uploaded to Wikimedia commons which can be assigned a date and a place by being sorted into a category such as "$month $year in $place". With the increasing number of such uploads of pictures from more recent years and from more places, it becomes necessary to create new categories accordingly. Doing this by hand is somewhat tedious work and prone to errors, so that some tool to simplify this task appears desirable. Also, some of these category names are rather long, so that an editor could benefit from appropriate category redirects. For instance, the category "$month $year in $borough" would redirect to "$month $year in the Metropolitan Borough of $borough" where applicable (uniqueness needs to be observed), and an editor should be able to set up such redirects just as easily as the correct categories.
Proposed solution: A tool be created in which an editor only needs to enter the place name and the year, and which then creates the category tree as needed in accordance with the existing structure.
Oppose Since Commons supports structured data, which records the time and place of creation of a photograph, I question the utility of year and month categories in general, and by extension tools to work with them. I think it would be much more useful to implement whatever purpose these categories fulfill through structured data instead. Silver hr (talk) 18:51, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: There are instances when the strutured data or the EXIF data do not record the correct date of a photograph, e.g. if it has been scanned from a paper print or when the camera clock was off. --Schlosser67 (talk) 06:17, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Commons is not only about photographs. Dates apply to paintings, buildings, etc. And SDC does not replace the category system, in the least. - DarwinAhoy!00:57, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The type of file doesn't matter; metadata for all types of files can be recorded in a structured way. As for the connection between structured data and categories: categories are basically a poor man's ontology. A category simply denotes a class of an instance; it has no further functionality. Proper ontologies, like Wikidata is becoming, enable one to model data in a standard way (such as with OWL or RDFS) using classes, properties, and constraints, which makes it possible to record data about something in a much more precise way, and to perform semantic queries. Wikibase is the software that both Wikidata and SDC use, and the point of SDC is the same as for Wikidata: record data in a much more precise way by capturing all the semantic relations, which in turn enables semantic querying. That can't be done with categories. Silver hr (talk) 20:04, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose I have a similar objection as Silver hr as I question the value of these categories. I have probably categorized thousands of files on WikiCommons and I just can't see what useful purpose categorizing by month and year in a certain place will have. Perhaps if just by year, some may find it useful. So if this proposal is accepted, what is to stop the next proposal by hour and minute? Probably most would agree that's just too extreme but I find month and year in a specific place already over-categorization. I think it would be far better to have a query tool that can search for photos by month and year in a particular place and not add this unnecessary categorization. RedWolf (talk) 22:09, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]