Board Thread:Policies/@comment-1038387-20180506105530

I've been meaning to do this sooner, but forgot (and went on a holiday).

On April 20, there was a Town Hall, as part of Wikia's Community Connect. Basically, there's presentations by staff that you can watch on a live stream. This one was called "Evolution", and it was about the general changes and shifts in how people view content. Many of the bigger wikis were made 10 years ago, and a lot has changed. We are no exception.

While it did inspire me to remove some of the category clutter like the alphabet navigation (nobody uses that), the main thing I picked up was.... galleries. Galleries are, in a sense, dead weight. When Google indexes a page, it looks at text, and (our) galleries have no text. SEO-wise, they're trash. That's not saying they're trash wiki-wise, but it may need some rethinking. A high trash-to-content ratio harms SEO. Currently, we're about 10.000 galleries on 104.000 pages (of which about 1.000 are cover galleries).

What is a gallery, and what is a gallery not? Ideally, a gallery is meant to display different looks a character has had over the years, costume variations, power-related changes in appearance, and appearance without costume. With some variation, that also applies to items, locations, teams, etc. It is not a page with all images with the subject on them, even the ones where they're with others and the image itself doesn't clarify who is who. That's what the category is for.

Galleries with just one image are pointless. There are plenty of them on Special:Shortpages. They don't add anything SEO wise or wiki-wise, they just inflate the page count. But plenty of other galleries do the same. Like....

Bruce Wayne (New Earth)/Gallery.

This will probably break Billy's heart, but this is a horrid page for SEO and Wiki. It's unnavigable, the images are so small they don't actually show anything, and most images aren't even informative. Sorry, but what could this image add that the other 5 images of Batman from that same comic couldn't?

So, there are a couple of thoughts and suggestions I have listed, and I welcome yours. Keep in mind, this is just spitballing, and I don't necessarily agree with all of them.


 * Just for clarification: this discussion does not concern cover galleries


 * Get rid of the numbering system, instead use a more descriptive title. Better for SEO, bad for the look of source.
 * Keeping the numbers, but use captions (~140 characters), if space allows with source.
 * Trimming. May be necessary, to avoid repetition of captions.
 * Limiting. There's no optimal length for galleries, but I doubt we'd still have people's attention after 200 images. Or even 100. Or 50. Or 10. There is no optimal length, but I reckon somewhere between 4 and 50? This doesn't necessarily involve trimming, because....
 * Subcategorization. 800 images of Batman spanning 30 years is something we should be able to split up, with section headers that tick SEO marks. Batman in the 80s. Batman in No Man's Land. Batman in Infinite Crisis. Batman and Robin. Downside is this leaves an inconsistent mess across different galleries.
 * Switching to new galleries. Hey, I said I was spitballing, don't kill me ;P
 * Image tabbers. Much like we already have on cover galleries. Images with every different code name plus civvies. Though on some people like Hal Jordan that's going to be a large tabber. And these look TERRIBLE on mobile. Galleries are better than Tabbers.
 * Have a small gallery or slideshow in the article, above the history. I'm not sure how this will look with both the main image and if there's a video on top. Content would be pushed way down, especially since covers tend to be portrait. With TV and movie screenshots could work, but that's not our primary source of images.
 * Not do anything. Everything is perfect. I know this because it's true and we always did it this way and I dismiss all these fancy numbers and SEO bs because they don't say what I want them to say.
 * Alternatively, come up with decent ideas and then... not do anything, because we've got to change 10.000 pages and we're not smart enough to bot it.

So, thoughts? 