👁 Image Fig. 1: Example of an excessively large gallery. This is on a 1440p screen zoomed out to 60%.
The galleriesonanumberofpages are excessively large (examples linked). In more than a handful of occasions, and in especially the case of mob pages, these appear to have added "just because", with no impression of any kind of thought whether an image actually serves a purpose on the page or not. This I believe is to the detriment of the page as a whole, especially considering a reader has to weed through such gallery to get to actually useful material again, such as the See also header or even simply the references. This hasn't always been the case; speaking for myself I started to notice this increase in gallery images from about 2020-onwards. I believe galleries should be rationalized to manageable proportions of at most about five images each and the rare exception (an example of a proper gallery is that of polished diorite; just one which doesn't really fit in the article but still contributes to the article). This forces only the most important images to be chosen; the remainder can be put on a gallery subpage or simply live in a category. The former is easily done, however, it's the latter I think there's more to be gained in terms of properly categorizing images.
Currently, there's no image categorization at all, save from licensing and image "type". This results in, predictably, "megacategories". Try finding anything in that - no, you can't. Take for example Category:Screenshots. Sure, there's some subcategorization, but the category itself still contains 4446 images as of writing. Ideally, that category should only contain other categories, as each screenshot can be placed in a more delimited category. By introducing a more finely-grained category structure, there's also an opportunity to link to that category to link to more images. The same approach is used on Wikimedia Commons. An example of such a fine-grained category is commons:Category:2024 Atlantic hurricane season, with subcategories per storm and some of these categories additionally subdivided, which creates an actually useful, linkable and searchable category opposed to our megacategories. To stay with the zombie page, the category structure could be as such (as categories have to have a unique name, I've added "zombie" to each):
Zombie
Zombie renders
Zombie jockeys
Armed zombies
Zombie screenshots
Mojang screenshots of zombies
Development images of zombies
Zombies breaking doors
Zombie textures
Zombie sprites
Zombies in other media
Zombies in official media
Merchandise of zombies
Above the gallery (or even below the infobox) a link to the zombie category can then be placed, perhaps akin to the box at the bottom of several pages on Wikipedia. Additionally, where more than one category is appropriate for an image (e.g. where a zombie breaks a door) the image can be added to multiple categories or a dedicated category part of two category trees.
👁 Image Fig. 2: The same gallery as above, with irrelevant images crossed out, some with accompanying (occasionally snarky, I admit) comments.
As for the rationale behind it, the English Wikipedia notes "A gallery is not a tool to shoehorn images into an article, and a gallery consisting of an indiscriminate collection of images of the article subject should generally either be improved in accordance with the below paragraphs or moved to Wikimedia Commons." They go short of outright banning galleries, but it does introduce a strict set of guidelines which a gallery needs to meet. And although we aren't Wikipedia, with pages like those linked in the first sentence I see where this guideline comes from; if it weren't inappropriate to link to our wiki from Wikipedia other than its Minecraft page as external resource, there could absolutely be a link to our wiki on how not to make galleries. Although the gallery images show the subject, not every image of the subject is of equal value and importance. The current situation would be akin to placing a fork or a shoe in a museum and calling that "art". I would remove 86 of the 89 images in the gallery for not being relevant (see figure 2). An additional two of the 86 can find a place within the article itself. For the remaining 84 images they can find their place in their respective category or categories, organized and all. The part where I noted "each of these can be (part of) a dedicated article", they can be linked to from the zombie page by a page such as "Zombies in merchandise". DarkShadowTNT (talk) 19:29, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
👁 Image Strong support Yes! I agree! Everything DarkShadow said, I agree with. To start with the particular points I agree with, I agree with the concise galleries and the granular categories. We really do need better categories, no joke about that. Also the big galleries and categories are a problem on mobile, because the images are all vertically aligned. This supports Dark's point about finding good stuff. I do argue, however, that galleries too small are also a problem, because someone might look to the gallery for images. I still agree with most points here though. -~-Nerdyguy2000TalkEdits23:27, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
I also agree with Harri, MCBP7, and 3A per their reasoning. I honestly think what Dark is suggesting is a bit drastic. The others however, i believe are right. Not to say Dark doesn't have a point though. -~-Nerdyguy2000TalkEdits23:17, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
👁 Image Support trimming galleries - The proposed categories solution is well thought out and makes sense. Images can be categorized as they are removed from pages, which makes this a more manageable task than just saying "categorize all 4,000 screenshots first". Mudscape👁 Image talk23:36, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
If this proposal passes, do you think that maybe you can adjust the wording of the image policy so that images solely on relevant category pages do not get deleted? Or something like that anyway.Drour1234 (talk) 00:08, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
👁 Image Weak Support with suggestions - The only problem with this is the statement in the policy that says that any image not on a page will be deleted. However, this issue can easily be solved by adjusting the wording of that statement in the policy so that images that are not on pages can be put on category pages without being concerned about them getting deleted. Gallery subpages would also be good to have in addition to everything else you mentioned.Drour1234 (talk) 00:05, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
👁 Image Strong oppose removing most images from galleries. A lot of galleries do need cleanup though, and especially screenshots can sometimes be very irrelevant, but most of the time not. I'll explain for every type of image in a gallery why it should be there.
Renders of all appearences of the mob or block. It's useful to have all different types of a mob or block in a one-eye view, and it makes it easy to see the differences between them. There are also links in the infoboxes to view all renders, and just because they are not all included in the infobox, they don't make the article look too big or unreadable. Also, mob and block renders don't make galleries disruptively big, as there are often only 2-4 renders and in special cases up to 10-15. For galleries that contain very much renders, we can simply make the section collapsible, like in Spawn Egg.
Mojang screenshots. Mojang screenshots are all official content that is in some kind of way part of Minecraft, and isn't this wiki for documenting everything that is officially related to Minecraft? Furthermore, Mojang screenshots bypass our guidelines on screenshots: they can contain players or player-created structures, but they are all related to the article and show the player how Mojang looks at this feature.
Screenshots. Screenshots are intended to show how a feature looks in-game. This is the only way a player will view it, players don't see renders or texture files in-game. In my opinion, a screenshots section in a gallery should contain images from all types of appearences of the feature in-game. For example, the zombie gallery should contain a screenshot of a zombie siege, a zombie monster room, zombies in trial chambers, just zombies at night, zombies attacking villagers or iron golems, and zombies burning in the sunlight.
Texture files. Texture files are also part of the feature described in an article, and it just doesn't make the gallery too big.
In other media. Same as Mojang screenshots: it is official content that should be included somewhere on the wike, and what is a better place than the article about the feature itself? As long as it's official, of course, and it shouldn't contain more than 10-20 images.
Galleries are used to store all relevant images about the article in one place as an easy overview, so they aren't randomly scattered throughout the article or even absent. People use the galleries to find out how a feature visually looks in-game, or how it used to look or looks in other media.
Some images do need to be included in the description section or just anywhere outside the gallery, but that needs to be balanced so the article doesn't mainly contain images, and the gallery is still the main collection of these images. I think most pages already do a very good job at this.
I do still think that most galleries now are incomplete and messy. Certain features don't need to have so much images in the gallery (such as odd generation of pillager outposts), and some descriptions are incorrect or need style cleanup. About making galleries a subpage: 👁 Image Support for big galleries, but there aren't a lot of pages that need this.
I think the Pig gallery is an example of a proper and complete gallery, although the In other media section may need it's own subpage.
About categories: 👁 Image Strong Support further subcategorizing the screenshots category, but not into categories that are smaller than the galleries itself. I think a subcategory should contain 15-150 images, depending on what it is exactly used for. I don't think users should mainly use the categories itself for finding images about a topic; that's just what galleries are used for. MinecraftBedrockPlayer7 (talk) (contribs) 👁 Image 13:07, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
Galleries would not be useless. They would just have their own subpages in addition to further specification in categories.Drour1234 (talk) 14:24, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
Overall 👁 Image Oppose the proposed methods, but 👁 Image Support doing something about this issue.
12 categories is quite an absurd amount for even just zombies, let alone the other 99.99% of features in the game. I don't think I'd like to make categories so specific that they all only have five or so files on average, there's a balance to be had here. I would strongly support having image categories for (almost) every feature in the game, but in my scenario they would include any image and just be a single category.
Replacing galleries with categories just sounds very messy to me. You cannot organise a category without creating a subcategory, so while a gallery simply has subsections that you scroll through, every "subsection" on a category is a new page load. That is really bad for readers in my opinion. If we want to wipe galleries clean from main pages, we should just make dedicated gallery pages. Also an immensely large amount of the wiki's files would become "unused" if categories functioned as galleries, because the files wouldn't be on any real page. - Harristic / Talk👁 Image 15:24, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
👁 Image Oppose per MinecraftBedrockPlayer7 & Harristic.
What even is the purpose of galleries? It’s to put images related to the article. If it’s related to the article, it should be there. If it’s not related to the article, it shouldn’t be there.
I’m just going to go through the image of the Zombie gallery.
"Already in article" - This provides a clearer list of the renders of the mob / subject of the article. For articles with subjects with too many renders, we usually put them in the gallery, see Spawn Egg#Gallery.
"Put one in article, or combine armor + weapon" - The point of the renders is to show how the mob looks like with those armor sets, and with weapons. There is no reason to merge them together.
"Irrelevant" / "Duplicate" / etc. - Those are just images of zombies in the game. No reason to remove them, I see no problem with them.
Textures - THEY ARE THERE SO THAT PEOPLE CAN COPY THEM AND USE THEM FOR THEIR OWN PURPOSES. THEY EXIST THERE NOT JUST AS USELESS FILLER SPACE. THEY ARE THERE FOR A REASON.
I 👁 Image support the idea that we need to make some organizational changes of galleries/categories, but I am 👁 Image oppose many of your ideas:
I think we should remove some "useless" images from galleries (such as old images with little relevance), but not remove almost the entire gallery;
The image categories do need to be better organized (such as Category:Menu screenshots), but not a creation of a bunch of categories with 5 images each;
This wasn't suggested here, but I think it's important to improve file and category descriptions, as many have little or no description.
