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The space below Wikidata Infoboxes on Commons category pages should be used for displaying subcategories (columns)
Closed, DeclinedPublicFeature

Description

Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where):
Depending on how wide the screen is, adding a Wikidata Infobox to a category page on Wikimedia Commons makes the page only show one column of subcategories instead of two. The space below the Wikidata Infobox is not used for subcategory columns so it reduces the number of displayed columns by one.

Use case(s) (list the steps that you performed to discover that problem, and describe the actual underlying problem which you want to solve. Do not describe only a solution):
See the screenshot below for how Category:Videos of science looks like with an without WD infobox on my side:

A_Wikimedia_Commons_category_page_with_Wikidata_infobox_vs_with_collapsed_box.png (1×2 px, 600 KB)

Benefits (why should this be implemented?):
Hiding a column and not using the space does not make sense. Having more subcategories displayed makes it easier to glance over them, to find a relevant subcategory, makes it more overseeable, and so on and also prevents the files contained in the category to be buried far down. The screenshot should be fairly self-explanatory.

Additional info:
I previously proposed enabling collapsing essentially empty WD infoboxes as a workaround until a better solution is developed since that would make the column show up again and could easily be displayed with the click of a button. However, it seems like this has been / would be rejected and using the space below the infobox (with some CSS) would most likely be better anyway. A later alternative could be to move the WD infobox to the bottom of the left panel and out of the category page altogether.

Event Timeline

Tacsipacsi subscribed.

I fear this isn’t possible (but I’d be happy to be proven wrong!): the subcategories use CSS columns, and in my experience elements with columns never wrap floated elements that are outside of the columns element. (I couldn’t find any standard or anything else supporting this, though, it’s just my experience.{{citation needed}})

Well I feared that something like that is used so it's not so simple to change this in the code which is why I first went to the talk page of the infobox to propose alternatives. However, none of these seem to get implemented or be easier to implement plus changing this in the code would be the proper (instead of workaround) way.

Quite simply a solution could be/involve to not use CSS columns like flexbox. It's at mw-category-columns. However there are also multiple ways this could be solved in the code: one could also integrate the infobox better / in a different way so for example it's added to the left panel. I think it may only need some CSS trickery to get the infobox into some kind of row in the column and things displayed beneath it.

to get the infobox into some kind of row in the column

The infobox is semantically not a list item, so putting it into columns would be wrong (even more for folks who do not rely on eyesight but on audio output).

Declining for now. Please reopen if this is technically possible while still semantically correct.