Talk:New Camera Page Template

This does look helpful; but there's a couple of things to consider before we can start publicizing it: We ought to use the current Template:Flickr image format which adds its own attribution and image rights fields. While the wiki text is under copyleft, we need to help protect the copyright of photos that users kindly donated to us, e.g. when their Flickr license specifies All Rights Reserved. Even for CC-licensed photos, we want to note if the license specifies {{non-commercial}} use only.

The sample photos should use the image_source URL format http://blahblahblah/in/pool-camerawiki to encourage its use--it makes the origin of the image permissions human-readable; also I believe specifying pool membership helps stop link breakage if a Flickr non-Pro account adds >200 photos after the linked one (not conclusively tested yet). One final minor note is that it's nice to run together the words in the template fields so double-clicking will select the whole field for editing.--Vox 10:56, 22 February 2011 (PST)

Good points. I've updated the New Camera Page Template with the new Template:Flickr image, so that's taken care of. I just hadn't been aware of it when I created the page and found the old template in the help forums here Camera wiki: Adding images. Perhpas that coding should be updated to reflect the new image template. And as far as your suggestion about the sample photo on the New Camera Page Template being from the camerawiki pool, it's not in the pool because it doesn't belong in the pool as it's not a camera. I saw your other suggestion about creating a "companion" camera wiki group for images such as this or from manuals. I think that's a very good idea and this blank image holder image I'm using here could be uploaded to that pool for usage here. Thanks for all the suggestions and sooner or later, we'll have everything working smoothly. This open dialogue we enjoy between members really is a benefit! HaarFager 19:49, 22 February 2011 (PST)

Excuse me, the comment about a "companion" camera wiki group was made by heritagefutures, not you. Sorry about that. But, it's still a good suggestion anyway. HaarFager 19:53, 22 February 2011 (PST)

The Flick Image template at Camera_wiki:_Adding_images#Flickr_issues is the latest one as far as I know. I edited one of the photo links to show the format we want to promote. (And there are a number of illustration in the Camera-wiki pool that are diagrams, sample photos from weird cameras, etc.) Attribution to photographer goes in its own field, not in "image text"; and you don't need to use the small tag--the template automatically shrinks that for you. I also edited the Links section, to show that we prefer external links to include both a deep link and a top-level link to the source website--that's only being polite when we're piggybacking on other people's content.--Vox 20:28, 22 February 2011 (PST)

Thanks, those look good. The image you replaced overlaps the infobox on the right, but I'm sure it's just my browser. The one I had before didn't do that, but it's probably only because I used a small image instead of a medium one. Apparently, it shows properly for most other browsers than mine. I guess I got the image coding before it was updated. I did go over and check it out again, and it looked right to me this time. Things are just changing fast around here. For the better, though! HaarFager 20:32, 22 February 2011 (PST)

We've been kind of stuck with Flickr's canned options for different images sizes: The default is 500 pixels on the long dimension; while "small" is 240 pixels on the long dimension (you just add "_m" before the ".jpg" to get that size). Sometimes the inflexible size choices make layout a problem. I usually try resizing the browser window a few ways to see if anything goes haywire. Some pages also look bad when stretched out to a widescreen 1920 pixel monitor width. --Vox 21:05, 22 February 2011 (PST)

HaarFager, can you take a look at one of the pages using the camera template infobox that also has photos and see if the photos still obscure the infobox on your browser? I (hopefully) modified the infobox to force it to the top of the Z axis. I'm hoping the infobox will now overlap the photos instead of the other way round. Steevithak 08:26, 26 February 2011 (PST)

Alternate "Camera" templates?

I have a question about this using the Template:Camera ...and I wonder whether it makes sense to use this as a "one size fits all" solution.

For example "Focus areas" is apparently intended to mean the number of autofocus points; but for manual-focus cameras some editors are filling in this field as the minimum focus distance e.g. Regula_II

Should we have a couple of alternative camera templates?

I also think it's unnecessary to have the word "focus" be a wiki link, especially as the page doesn't exist.--Vox 07:48, 26 February 2011 (PST)

I agree, the infobox used here is the old camera template that was created back in 2006. Looks like even back then they proposed breaking it into two templates, one with specs for film cameras and one for specs for digital cameras. From what I can piece together of the history, Rebollo_fr then created specific infoboxes for some of his Japanese camera types and ignored the Camera template. I think long term, it would be ideal to have an infobox that was specific at least at the camera type level (e.g. SLR, Rangerfinder, etc). That would fit better with what Rebollo_fr did and would give us more specific technical fields for the type of camera we're trying to describe. Steevithak 08:15, 26 February 2011 (PST)