User talk:Tom Gore

Welcome

It used to be that everyone arriving on Planet Wikipedia would find a welcome laid out for them. Nobody seems to be doing that now; but since I'm about to go into something else, let me at least do the courteous thing and welcome you — quite sincerely — to Wikipedia. (OK, so what follows is a bit of a critique; we were all newbies once, and you'll adjust, it's OK.) Bill 20:59, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Links in Wiki articles

Wikipedia is not a means of self-promotion....! If everyone who had pages on Venice and Rome with 20‑30 photographs inserted linnks to them, the article would be drowning in many hundreds of such links — and (official policy, see What Wikipedia is Not) Wikipedia is not a link collection, for the reasons given there.

Probably good links

Your Atget page, a good page in itself, is marginal for Wikipedia, because you don't seem to include the Atget pages, just your own rephotographs (unless I misread your site, in which case an immediate apology from me); but since there is not that much available online, it's almost certainly a valid resource. Similarly, but even more so, maybe, your page on graffiti is germane and probably large enough: that's a good link (by me, anyway: maybe others will disagree, who know more about graffiti).

Probably not good

Your Rome and Venice pages, while again fine in themselves, are just too small to be noteworthy or useful to the reader of the encyclopedia articles, and I will continue to delete them; others probably will, too. (To give an example, I myself run a very large site on Italy, with over 1000 large photographs of the country and many hundreds of pages of text, including at least 5 entire books; but because my site does not cover the country well, i.e., not generally enough — it focuses almost exclusively on Rome and Umbria — you won't find it among the links under Italy.)

Definitely not good

Your Metaphors link, on the other hand, is a blatant example of what is called "link spam": a link inserted just to get you linked from Wikipedia. On the other hand, a friendly tip, something that would improve the Metaphor article a lot, and would also immediately make your link valid for the page: since the current article does not address photographic metaphors, if you can write some convincing text explaining what they are — suddenly your link to your own Metaphors page would become perfectly germane, and a useful illustration of the article: I encourage you to write it! Best, Bill 20:59, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Reply to your e-mail (my reply was bounced by your spam filters this morning!)

Hi Tom (dreading this in fact! because by temperament I run pretty bad from almost anything controversial), and thus right off: boy do I appreciate your kind approach to me; my edits must have been really galling.

First I should point out that all the small pictures on each index page (Venice, Rome, Paris etc.) are buttons that link to large whole versions of the pictures, as do those on your web pages.

On the Atget page, for example, each linked secondary page does have the Atget original, as well as the rephotograph.

Yes, I saw your larger photos (at least Rome and Venice);

  But not Atget, for which apologies, I should have checked, I just knew I'd trip myself up!

--> You'll see my fix at the Eugène Atget page, made just this minute: with 30 original Atget's, that puts you ahead of the other site I found, of course.

 (Much more minor paren here: my own icon pictures, very few link to large versions of the photo -- they usually link to full pages or even large subsites with a fair amount of text, and often further photos. The great exceptions are the index pages "Churches of Rome" and "Churches of Umbria", where I consider such blank links a serious flaw, and have been working steadily at expanding them: on the other hand, better a photo than nothing.)

So it's not a matter of censorship, but of rational selection by consensus: if Wikipedia had no pruning mechanism, it would drown in all kinds of stuff; and as it is, it's bad enough: an incredible amount of Pokémon, third-rate commercial fantasy movies, the most minor of rock stars, etc.

In the matter of links, a sort of rule of thumb (mine, but based on WP:WIN "Wikipedia is not a directory") is that the link list shouldn't approach the length of the article. The longer the article, the more links is OK.

Now for many years I ran a huge subsite, now deleted, of LacusCurtius, called RomanSites, cataloguing "all" the ancient Roman resources out there, which made me awfully familiar with pages of captioned and uncaptioned photos: there are many hundreds, probably even thousands, of them: if 30 or 50 photos made a site Wikipedia-worthy, that link list would far exceed the length of the article. Take a look for example at these collections, some off the top of my head from previous knowledge of them, others from 5 minutes with Google:

  http://tinyurl.com/8n4gp
  58 pix in that gallery alone, and see under "Quick Jump", 83 more, including 19 from the 1800s. I've been an active member of that (noncommercial) board, but notice that I haven't inserted a link to it, despite the associated resources on Rome, just not large/good enough, that you'll find at
  http://www.slowtrav.com/italy/

  http://tinyurl.com/9m79t

Flickr's 32,000 photos of Rome (Large, but not really a resource, not linked on Wikipedia)

 http://tinyurl.com/ccdfo

108 pages of Rome photos, something like 5000 pictures. (same remark)

And more typically, hundreds of pages like this

  http://sabin.ro/gallery/album412

(109 photos)

Now I don't give most of my time to Wikipedia, so haven't put in a lot of links; if I had, Maecenas http://wings.buffalo.edu/AandL/Maecenas/general_contents.html#Italy%20-%20Rome might be among them: hundreds of photos, intelligently sorted around a theme.

My images are not documents, rather they are visual analyses and critiques.

That said, Bill, I acknowledge that you have, in fact, reduced me to words!

I sympathize enormously with your viewpoint Tom: it is to a fair extent my own as well. But the word-people do still run the world; as the saying is, a picture is worth -- 10,000 words! Especially in the age of instant photography, an uncommented, undissected picture is competing with thousands of others and nothing to winnow out the chaff.

  From a practical point, by the way, not bowing down to words badly skews the availability of your own pages: since Google, the de facto Lord of the Web, counts on text to index its pages. Look at this page for example:
  http://tinyurl.com/968nu

You're not on it; yet you should be: for that specific query, your site is better than every one of them! and similarly for other appropriate keywords. Words are how people find resources, no matter how visual we are.

You may want to poke around on Wikipedia -- if the hassles (and I know, I've been one of them myself!) don't disgust you and waste your time -- and see how you might nudge it toward the visual. Will it cost you much of your principles to insert a bit about photography or true visual images in the article "Metaphor" for example?

Best,