User talk:Mini-mitch

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"Unused" images (continued)
What is it with both you and Skittles? Today, you've both archived pages while you were in the middle of conversation with me, leading to an edit conflict because of archiving. You could've at least left the open discussion thread on the new page so the conversation flow wasn't interrupted.

But anyway, yeah, let's make it a full week. So on Sunday, you delete the old and markup the new. Or if you'd like, I can take care of deletion with the bot, which'll be quicker. 18:29:48 Fri 15 Apr 2011
 * full week, if you would, please. Sunday to Sunday.  In fact, why not just let me delete them, since it'll literally take me 30 seconds, where it might take you several minutes.   18:41:50 Fri 15 Apr 2011

Duplicates: things to consider
On the matter of duplicates, please be careful. A cropped image isn't a duplicate. For instance, you called file:Cleanup.jpg and file:Cleanup2.jpg duplicates, and that's not true. There are good technical reasons why an editor might want Cleanup2 versus Cleanup. And, likewise, there are times where you want the widescreen dimensions of Cleanup. Also, you can tell from the colour balance that they aren't the same pic. They might have been taken from the same instant of Spearhead, but they're not the same.

Note the completely different orientation of the pics. I did the second version precisely because I needed something "longer", so that it would slide neatly down the left side of a template. You'll see me doing this sort of thing all the time, because there are occasions it's important to try to get an image to fit a precise space. (See, for instance, the remarkably difficult file:TenThin.jpg and file:TenThinner.jpg.) You're going to find, I think, that we're going to get "thinner" versions of a lot of images, now that we can put pics in navboxes and the standard width for navbox pics is 85px. That width means that we cannot use images as they are; we have to specifically manufacture them. Same thing is true with top-of-page images like File:Update200px.jpg. That pic comes from another one at full widescreen dimensions. But it had to be cut down to fit 200px. This means that there are two reasonably similar pics on the site, with perhaps even the same basic orientation, but for two totally different purposes.

Transparency
Another thing to remember is the importance of transparency.

Same pic, right? Not at all. The one on the left has McDaid's original background, whereas the one on the right is a transparency. Useful to have both; sometimes you need a transparent version of an image, sometimes you don't.

"File links" can be wrong
With pages in the file namespace, a link on the file page is only displayed when it's normally referenced. That is, if you put the actual picture on a page, it shows up under "File links". If you just link to the name, it doesn't. For instance, compare file:McDaidSketch.jpg with. What you find is that there's one more link under "What Links Here" than there is under "File links". "File links" does not report instances where you link to the name of a file; it only reports places where the image is on display.

In other words, it's possible to have a file apparently having no links, when in fact there are links to it. In this case, the non-image-generating link is rather important, because it's a part of the copyright explanation for file:ComicStub.png.

Moral of the lesson is that only "What Links Here" gives an accurate report of whether there are any links to the file.

Summary
"Duplicate" means exact duplicate (or something so close to exact as to make no odds). The two pairs of pictures are just the tip of the iceberg of similar versions that should be allowed to remain on the site. Check the dimensions, check the colour balance, check the "What Links Here" before even proposing deletion. We should be getting rid of true duplicates (as listed at Tardis:duplicate images). But we should exercise extreme caution when getting rid different versions of the same image. 18:29:48 Fri 15 Apr 2011