Project:Navigation Galleries

ProjectInfoBox Galleries for Visual Wiki Navigation
Status:	ongoing (restart of Project:Multi-Photo Imagemaps with a much more practical approach)
Release Date:	2019
Initiator:	Lukas
Team:	who else would like to help?
Materials Used:	photos
Tools Used:	cameras, e.g. DSLR
Software Used:	MediaWiki, Python
Approx. Cost:	0 €

Let's try to improve visual navigation through this wiki, but in a much easier way than originally tried with Project:Multi-Photo Imagemaps!

Imagemaps of multiple photos did solve some problems, but are still too hard to modify for anyone really doing it - you'd have to download the original GIMP files, add a new photo (or better several ones so it would still look okay), upload everything again, overhaul the embedding code, ...blah.

Instead, let's use the photos we already have (e.g. in InfoBoxes) in automatable "Navigation Galleries"!

There's a template for easy linking to this page: just insert {{NavGal}} on any relevant page.

Manual Assembly

We already had a few such navigation galleries before "opening" this project, e.g. disambiguation pages or Lukas' project overview.

It's definitely possible and not too difficult to make the galleries by hand in slowly evolving cases like these!

Simply use the gallery syntax and make sure you include a link to the page you want to direct readers to, so they don't just see the page with photo information:

<gallery mode=packed-hover heights=150 caption="optional 'headline' - enter what you want">
File:example1.JPG|link=[[Example Tool]]|here's room for a photo-specific caption...
File:example2.JPG|link=[[Different Example Tool]]|...and here you put the next photo's caption!
</gallery>

The exact formatting here is just an example of course, whatever works will surely be appreciated by the next page visitor!

Advantages of the manual approach are mainly A) ease of use (requires nothing but a wiki account) and B) the flexibility to assemble the gallery out of any photos and captions you like.

Pages in Need

Here are some of our pages where such a gallery would be nice (feel free to add more):

• Category:Engineered Woods
• Category:Bits - especially highlighting differences between different drill bits and end mills
• Category:Joinery - demo pieces or sketches of various woodworking joints - not much content yet
• Material:Crimps - much easier to go by picture than (interchangeably used) names - page doesn't exist yet
• Pliers
• perhaps the projects on your user page?
• <what else?>

Automated Assembly

Lukas started to develop a script (using Martin's "wikicrawler" for our QR code printouts as a starting point) that automatically goes through certain wiki pages and gives out the wiki code for a large navigation gallery when you run it.

A first example is the "Project:" namespace, which is quickly filling up with awesome members' projects that were unfortunately not very visible before generating such a gallery on the Projects page. In general, many namespaces or categories could benefit from such a possibility!

(Planned) Features

• project gallerizer
  • filtering of insufficient pages (no ProjectInfoBox, default image, no image) ✔
  • alphabetical gallery generation ✔
  • randomized gallery generation ✔
  • "recently updated" gallery generation
  • topic-based gallery generation, e.g. "woodworking projects"
• (later) equipment gallerizer
  • e.g. all power tools

The current code can be found on GitHub: comakingspace/Navigation-Galleries.

Further information & discussion in issue #96!