Commons:Categories for discussion/2025/07/Category:Museum of Pop Culture (2002)

Category:Museum of Pop Culture (2002)

Ought to be Category:Museum of Popular Culture in 2002. The parenthesization like this in category names is would imply that these were different buildings of the same name dating from these various years, clearly not the case here.Similarly for other similarly named categories for different years. Jmabel ! talk 06:46, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Further, it is not clear that this breakdown by year is particularly useful, especially since it would seem that the events of those years (the only thing that was really different from year to year) are not currently included in these categories. - Jmabel ! talk 06:50, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also relates to:

- Jmabel ! talk 06:56, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Review

It appears that the effort was designed to move images of the building into a separate category. Eliminating the categories involved would return over 100 images into the uncategorized list. There are already categories to separate out events, collections, and exhibits. The Category:Museum of Pop Culture has several images that need to be placed into these categories. That still leaves the 100+ images of the building.

A quick look at other museums in Washington shows that most do not include images of the building or very few, less than 20.
The Category:Museum of Flight, Seattle has only ten images of the main building, but it does have Category:Boeing Building No. 105, and Category:Museum of Flight Restoration Center, Everett which are museum buildings outside of the main building.
The Category:Westport Maritime Museum includes categories for the exhibit rooms and exhibits outside the main building, but no building specific categories.
The Category:Seattle Art Museum had a prior discussion over the older campus which has Category:Seattle Asian Art Museum and Category:Seattle Art Museum (Volunteer Park) to separate the change in the building from the general museum to a specific category of artwork. Still there is no separate category for the current 19 images of the current building. Actually, work to move images into Category:Collections of the Seattle Art Museum needs to be done from the main category and in the collections category.
Standard practices seem to be that the structures themselves are not separated out. For most this is not a problem. The only example for Seattle is Category:Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park (Seattle), where the museum is housed in a historic structure, Category:Cadillac Hotel which gets its own category.

Here, the Category:Museum of Pop Culture is a striking architectural design and there are over 100 images. During its lifetime, the building has had several names: Experience Music Project, Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (or EMP|SFM), and EMP Museum until settling on the current Museum of Popular Culture. Checking w:List of works by Frank Gehry the designer, the only name given is the Museum of Pop Culture. The Wikipedia article referenced the w:Category:Guggenheim Museum Bilbao as being similar, so I did a quick check. It has Category:Collections of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Category:Interior of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Category:Guggenheim Museum Bilbao at night. Again, no category of the exterior of the building. The Category:Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has 603 images uncategorized. More than half of these images are the exterior of the building. That's 300 or more images.

An option is needed for when the museum building is of interest with a volume of images that make the primary category unwieldly. A check of Category:Museums in Washington (state) suggest that this may be the only case of 100+ museums that doesn't already have a solution. Suggestion:

Museum categories should use categories base on "collections", "exhibits" or "events" to manage images in a meaningful way. See Category:Interiors of museums in Washington (state)
Museum ships already use the name of the ship, separate from any building-based museum. See Category:Columbia River Maritime Museum in Oregon as an example.
Museums in historic structure use the name of the historic structure for the building. See Category:Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park (Seattle).
Museums which have an uncategorized list of images in large numbers, for me that's 200 plus or soon to exceed 200, use an exterior category. Note, I did not find any such categories for museum, but for historic structures, it has been done, Category:Exterior of the Meeker Mansion.Chris Light (talk) 23:27, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed solution

Move all the affected images into a new Category:Exterior of the Museum of Pop Culture and eliminate the annual categories. If and when this category becomes unwieldly, consideration can be given to sub-categories based on decades, centuries, facades or whatever those editors wish to use.Chris Light (talk) 23:26, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly. - Jmabel ! talk 01:14, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]