Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/William-Adolphe Bouguereau gallery

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was keep.  Grue  17:18, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

William-Adolphe_Bouguereau_gallery

This existence of this article goes explicitly against

• Speedy redirect to commons:William-Adolphe Bouguereau which seems identical. -- RHaworth 08:08, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Commons page has fewer entries than the Wikipedia page; comparison should be made to update Commons page before the Wikipedia page's deletion. -- ShaneCavanaugh 20:02, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • I just brought the Commons article up to date with the WIkipedia article (excepting some images that need to be transfered to the Commons server). Could someone check this against the previous edit to make sure I didn't accidentally delete anything? -- ShaneCavanaugh 22:31, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Changing my vote to redirect as per RHaworth's recommendation --Wiccan Quagga 23:56, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Question: If the redirect is enacted should the orphaned Wikipedia images on the be deleted in the interest of saving space? --Wiccan Quagga 23:56, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Update the commons (transfer images where possible) and delete. We don't redirect across projects and galleries are very clearly not allowed. Images should not be deleted, but tagged with {{
  Nowcommons}} instead. - Mgm|^(talk) 11:19, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Keep Commons is, in my opinion, a poor place for image galleries of this type. This galery provides valuable understanding of the artist in a manner that cannot be provided in any other way. In order to understand art, one must look at art. In order to understand a complex art topic, such as the development over artists career, or the characteristics of particular artists style, one must look at a lot of art, therefore, in my mind, the information provided by this gallery is clearly encyclopedic, the only question then is how to present it. I believe Commons to be a poor choice for the following reasons.

• Unsophisticated users of Wikipedia (who, I beleive, is who we should also keep in my mind as the primary audience for everything we do here) could be confused by following a link that takes them away from the English Wikipedia without warning.
• Despite having seen many claims on Wikipedia that it is the purpose of Commons to host image galleries, I have never been able to find such a statement on Commons. In my understanding, Commons was created to allow the several Wikimedia projects to have access to the same images without having to reload them to each project. In order to assist that effort, images are sometimes organized into gallery pages, however that is merely ancillary to the main purpose. If any one is aware of where on Commons it says something to the effect of "this is the place within Wikimedia for image galleries used in support of other Wikimedia project articles", please point it out to me.
• Commons is a multilingual project. As the project develops, more anad more pages will look like this one. Sending users of an English language encyclopedia to such a page a bad idea.
• It creates an additional burden on editor interested in developing and protecting such content since it would require them to watch two projects, rather than one.

Please note that I am aware of the restriction at

WP:NOT and disagree with it and believe that this policy should be changed. Please see Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Proposal_to_modify_WP:NOT_an_image_gallery. Dsmdgold 15:26, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply

]

• Keep I've looked at this gallery and I've looked at the Commons page. The gallery article is superior. It has informative captions — in English — where the Commons page has ugly filenames. It's a beautiful, informative encyclopedic page. It's much more useful than the average "list of" article and I still vote to keep those. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 15:49, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - Wikipedia has no explicit policy against having pages in the article space that are galleries. While
  WP:NOT an indiscriminate collection of information explicitly says that Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links, images, or media files with no text to go with the articles and explicitly forbids articles that are Collections of photographs or media files with no text to go with the articles, this gallery provides encyclopediac complementation to the William-Adolphe Bouguereau
  article, and is annotated. The exact interpretation of the prohibition of collections of photographs is highly contentious at present, and according to the policy If in doubt, don't delete, a delete outcome is inappropriate. As evidence of the contentious nature of this rule observe the following past AfDs:
  • Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gallery of illuminated manuscript images - keep (this gallery and Gallery of Book of Kells pages and Gallery of Vergilius Romanus miniatures)
  • Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gallery of Socialist Realism - delete, challenged in WP:DRV
  • Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gallery of pages from the Vienna Dioscurides - keep

and other galleries that have been claimed to have encyclopediac value and which have not been taken to AfD:

• Gallery of sovereign state flags
• Gallery of Pompeii and Herculaneum
• Erotic art in Pompeii
• Gallery of Fayum mummy portraits

--- Charles Stewart 15:59, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The dogged mantra of "if in doubt, do not delete" does not mean "if one editor disagrees with a policy no editor may apply it". You can say keep, but your doubt about the policy does not render others unable to be quite sure of it. -Splash^talk 16:14, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Policy is something there is consensus for - or at least 70% support. I don't think a rule prohibiting quality image galleries like this one would gain that kind of support if put to a poll. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 16:18, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've quoted that phrase precisely three times in my 16 months here at WP: it's hardly a dogged mantra of mine. Following the links I provided, and following the discussion on the WP:NOT talk page will show that there is considerable uncertainty about both how to interpret this rule, and whether the rule is, as currently phrased, a good rule. If three people are sure that rule should be interpreted one way, and three quite sure it shoould be interpreated in another incompatible way, does that make it a clear-cut rule? --- Charles Stewart 16:22, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete from this project, and do whatever is needed on commons The JPS 16:13, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep or merge with William-Adolphe Bouguereau. This is indeed an informative gallery which can become even better with a commentary on the painter's style through his career. -- Ranveig 17:18, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, "In order to understand art, one must look at art.", as per Dsmdgold and Charles Stewart. linas 17:21, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Transwiki to Commons per
  did you read this?) 17:42, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Complete the transwiki to Commons and delete it here. Clearly belongs there more. The way to improve our sister projects is not to try to duplicate their mission here. —
  Cryptic (talk) 18:47, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Comment I do not understand today's transwiki votes. All but the six fair use images have been copied across to commons yesterday, there would be nothing to transwiki. People should compare the two galleries to make an informed judgement before voting. --- Charles Stewart 18:52, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  Comment - What I wrote was not true. There are PD images still to bring over. Sorry. --- Charles Stewart 18:55, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - This is an excellent addition to the page on William-Adolphe Bouguereau. He was a very famous artist and an annotated gallery of his works makes perfect sense to me.  The Steve  19:42, 13 December 2005 (UTC) (UTC)[reply]
• Transwiki to Commons and delete. I see no encyclopedic discussion (or dicussion of any sort) for any of these images. --Carnildo 19:33, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Commons is a repository of media. This is an encyclopedia. Commons is akin to a project page, with an interface optimized for dispersing media to all of the wikimedia projects. Unlike Wikipedia, it isn't an end product. An encyclopedia needs galleries to efficiently communicate knowledge about art. — David Remahl 20:15, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Adding my vote -- reasons for keeping have already been more eloquently expressed than I could manage...So just saying -- KEEP. --Nemonoman 20:29, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Does not defy NOT, useful addition to the Wikipedia. --Oldak Quill 20:43, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• redirect as per RHaworth, this is what Commons is for. User:Zoe|^(talk) 21:38, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Where, on Commons, does it say that? Dsmdgold 00:11, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly, from the welcome message on Commons Main Page:

The Wikimedia Commons is a project that provides a central repository for free images, music, sound & video clips and, possibly, texts and spoken texts, used in pages of any Wikimedia project

The key words are central repository. The use of the media contained in that repository should take place in the individual Wikimedia projects. OK, we arrange all the William-Adolphe Bouguereau images on commons with annotations to suit en.wikipedia. Great if you are French, German, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese or any other non English speaker .... in short a recipe for anarchy and disaster. The use of the images must be the responsibility of each project separately. --Cactus.man ✍ 09:51, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. Encyclopedic content is useful. Images properly categorized (perhaps in a an ordered series) serve to build a case in an article. --Ancheta Wis 22:40, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Because commons is a multi-lingual site, all those image captions could rightly be changed to french, chinese or whatever language, which would not help people wanting to see the info in english. Or to think about it another way, what if the German wikipedia wanted a gallery on Bouguereau, and they had to have a commons gallery with all the captions written in English. ---- Astrokey44|talk 22:46, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Useful addition to the Bouguereau article. Could of course be made more useful with more annotations, but we can't have everything. I understand the point about duplication with Commons, but it is not clear to me that Commons will present the material ideally for our (the English Wikipedia's) purposes, as their purpose is different. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 22:51, 13 December 2005 (UTC) (via edit conflict)[reply]
• Delete, duplicated on Commons whose mission it fits perfectly. Cross-fertilization of other WIkimedia projects is a good thing. Not every last bit of information must be absolutely contained with en.wikipedia; the Foundation would not have made the other projects if that were the case.
  WP:NOT an image gallery remains policy. -Splash^talk 23:26, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Keep, useful supplement of William-Adolphe Bouguereau article, allowing annotations in English (Commons is multilingual).--Patrick 00:05, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep A fine collection of work, sequenced and titled. Definitely encyclopedic. Denni ☯ 00:45, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment According to the Commons FAQ, it is inappropriate to put galleries in the main namespace, but they may be put in user space. Where the idea comes from that Commons is a good place for galleries, I do not know. --- Charles Stewart 00:49, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is a gross misinterpretation. The only place in that document that mentions userspace galleries is in the section "How do I best make a gallery of my own pictures?" (emphasis mine). —
    Cryptic (talk) 15:02, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    • Where does the Commons policy/guidelines talk about housing and maintaining galleries outside userspace? Commons appears to have no editing policies about galleries in the shared space, which is to say that it is not a suitable place for galleries whose quality one wishes to maintain. --- Charles Stewart 15:20, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • I find, at a very brief glance,
        Cryptic (talk) 16:03, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply
        ]
        • There are indeed many galleries/articles on Commons even if they don't have a clearcut policy on when to use them. One of the discussions you link to uses the Linx gallery as an example. That article starts with these words: "de: - Linz ist die Landeshauptstadt des österreichischen Bundeslandes Oberösterreich". Or take the Köln gallery. The multilingual information is very nice on Commons but it is in many cases unnecessarily distracting and cumbersome when compared with English language galleries on the English Wikipedia. - Haukur 16:16, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
          • The way to fix that is not to fork the project here. —
            Cryptic (talk) 16:23, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply
            ]
            • The purporse of commons is not to house galleries whose purpose is to illustrate wikipedia articles. Commons is not broken and does not need to be fixed. Haukurth's point is merely to show how unsuited Commons is for a purpose other that that for which it was intended. --- Charles Stewart 16:30, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • Cryptic: Thanks for those links, some were useful to me. I had conceded that galleries outside user space were allowed on Commons: I am sorry if that was unclear. The second point I made is that Commons has no editing policies for maintaining the quality of galleries in this shared space: unsurprisingly since it is not an encylopaedia. The point of galleries on Commons, according to the links you give, is parallel to the point of lists here on Wikipedia: they are a flexible alternative to categories. --- Charles Stewart 16:28, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete, pointless duplication of content between projects.--
  nixie 04:09, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Keep This collection of images is encyclopedic in itself. Additionally, adding a lot of additional text would make it more difficult to process visually and cherry-picking a few images and including them in an article would make them less informative by taking them out of visual context. Crypticfirefly 04:47, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per nixie and provide a link to commons gallery from William-Adolphe Bouguereau. --Gurubrahma 05:58, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep Entirely encyclopaedic and beautifully complements the main article without overwhelming the page. Commons is the wrong place for encyclopaedic use of content, it is a central repository. Read the welcome message on the main page if you have any doubts as to its intended function. All appropriate galleries should be kept. Cactus.man ✍ 09:35, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. Now that we've established that there's significant support for keeping quality galleries like this one I think we should develop some pretty restrictive guidelines on what kinds of galleries are acceptable. A blanket "keep galleries" policy could lead to a lot of bad articles. Galleries of the type "Gallery of Artist X" are generally a good thing when there is a significant number of works and some intelligent captions. "Gallery of vaguely related stuff I like" should be out. - Haukur 10:12, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  Oh! And we can have featured galleries like featured lists. We're going to have so much gallery fun! ;-) Haukur 10:21, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong keep. Looks like a photographic list to me. Ashibaka tock 01:45, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. This kind of stuff belongs at Commons. Wikipedia is not an image gallery. Sjakkalle (Check!) 11:45, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Well-organized supplement to article. Commons welcomes a copy, where annotations can be in multiple languages, but English Wikipedia needs its own gallery in English. Fg2 05:39, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep useful in art history to show the full development and change of the artist's work over time. I also suggest people take a look at [this] policy proposal to allow for visual list articles / galleries in Wikipedia. --ShaunMacPherson 07:31, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. Sure there's a lot of gallery webpages out there, but maybe the world needs a special Wiki just for galleries... -Wiccan Quagga 21:13, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.