Are there Maintenance Categories for profile that need biographies or pictures?

Question

I was working on some profiles today, and adding [[Category:Location, Needs More Records]] to those that needed it. (This is one of the things I do when I'm working on the different surnames from our family tree each month.) Today, the thought occurred to me to check and see if there were similar categories under Maintenance Categories with names like [[Category:Needs Narrative Biography]] or [[Category:Needs Image]] (or similar wording/intent). I couldn't find anything like either, but there may be something similar somewhere else in the category hierarchy.

I don't actually tally which profiles have narrative biographies and which need them in my studies, but sometimes, when I'm checking a profile, I come away thinking, "Somebody needs to work on that." (And, if I find a source to add, I put at least a rudimentary biography in place.) But I'm trying to get specific things done in my studies, and if I stopped to spiff up every profile I look at, I'd get a lot less of what I'm trying to do done. Still, I could add a "needs bio" category where needed if such a category existed. (There are people who like writing biographies, right?)

I do tally which profiles (for the surnames I'm studying) do and don't have any kind of an image (photo, scan of a painting or sketch, photo of a sculpture, etc.) of the person the profile is about. I know that having an image on a profile makes it a lot more interesting to people, and therefore having lots of profiles with images would help to make WikiTree that much "stickier" with visitors (who, after all, do pay for the Purina Hamster Chow by seeing ads), but it's beginning to disturb me just how few profiles actually have images on them. (Out of the 32 surnames I'm studying, I've found images on about 14.8% of the profiles I've tallied, which means that a random visitor has about a one in seven chance of hitting a profile with an image on it.)

So does anybody know whether there are categories for either topic?

Comments

I don't know if you have checked out this yet:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Profile_Improvement_Project

There are many subcategories under that. However, I don't see anything specific to photos or images.

Maintenance categories would be too severe I think because they are pointing out faults and or needs and images should probably be considered extra. However I am not part of any category project, I am just looking at what Wikitree currently has.

Answer 1

There are a lot of state specific categories in the US for what you need  [[Category:Location, Needs Biography]]  There may be for other places too but I have only been working on the US.

Answer 2

There is a already a needs biography category; https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Needs_Biography

I think that covers the need for a narrative quite well.

The Needs Image seems unnecessary to me. People add photos of family most of the time, if they have them. We dig into Wikimedia to search for copyright-free images for notables every day. It seems like it would be a time-consuming thing to try to find images for people we don't even know.

I know that the USBH has a category for their notables that need an image, but the project really does this as a group effort.

Comments

Thank you for the pointer to [[Category:Needs Biography]], Natalie. I'll have to remember to use that when I encounter empty (or nearly empty) profiles.

Answer 3

I don't know if there's any guidance around this, but on profiles I very much try to avoid images on profiles that are:

•  generic, decorative, and are just vaguely associated with a time or place (including boats, villages or buildings, coastal images) not to the specific individual
•  flags, "family crests", or other affiliative paraphernalia that aren't part of a project sticker.
• illustrative of an ethnicity or religion (like "Mi'kmaq woman")

Basically in every one of those cases, either the image should be on space pages related to the topic, and the space page should linked to the profile as part of the biography; or the image shouldn't be on WikiTree at all.

I also actively avoid images of documents that are indexed and freely available from repositories like the Canada Archives or Family Search, especially when they are under copyright, or refer to multiple unrelated people.

I (personally) would not want maintenance categories that encourage people to add low quality, generic and unspecific illustrations to profiles.

I don't know that I've read a discussion about this before though, it'd be interesting to see what other people say.

Answer 4

As Natalie said, Needs Biography category exists, with a lot of Project specific categories also bearing the title.

As for images, Some people have added images of flags of specific areas, such as for the Percheron Migration mini-project profiles, on the founder migrants from there, and some people add images as background or other, not always after consultation.  The result is haphazard.  Stickers for occupations are another item that can be added, there are a number of them in existence.  But I certainly would not create a category for ''needing images''.  We have enough maintenance to do as is without that.