On 6/20/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/20/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Yep. Look, while we're at it, some more
requests:
In-place modifications of the following types:
- increase/decrease contrast
- increase/decrease brightness
That thought of this makes me uncomfortable. Many people have
uncalibrated monitors and weird tastes in brightness and contrast,
it's hard to be objective about such changes.. please see the
Sure, but give people *some* credit. Also, all these things are
available now, they just take a while to carry out. We don't want to
prevent the 90% of times when this would be useful just to stop the
10% when it would be a pain?
miniessay on the last bullet of my commons userpage
(
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell). Such knobs would
also encourage shed painting and create an unneccessary proliferation
of additional versions.
What is "shed painting", and why would there be "additional versions"
exactly? I'm proposing either:
- parameters in [[Image: .... which would only be taken into account
when it's shown (do you mean the extra versions which would have to be
stored internally - is there a disk space problem?)
- parameters on the image page, which would be taken into account
everywhere it's used - only one version.
The current situation is the one that risks proliferating extra
versions, as you have to upload new files each time...
- rotate
arbitrary angle
I don't think this can be done without loading the entire uncompressed
image into memory which pretty much makes it a non-starter.
Is this not the case for any of the other edits? I was kind of
presuming this would be the sort of thing where the first time the tag
was encountered, the image would be rotated then cached. But I don't
know much about how it works behind the scenes.
It doesn't always play out so rosey... Sometimes
someone spends hours
getting a photograph just right (because unlike wikitext, even in the
best case 98% of the work must be done by a single photographer) and
they are proud of their work. Then along comes a self appointed
We have a name for those: Featured Pictures. The vast majority of
user-created photos are happy snaps taken fairly quickly to illustrate
the topic. If someone chooses to post-process my photos, so much the
better!
wiki-photo expert... who goofs up the image to fit his
tastes on his
uncalibrated display and insists that it's better. Perhaps the new
version is more contrasty, with over pumped saturation and
sharpness.... At first glance it's more eye catching, so other passers
Ok, again, I think your scenario where suddenly Wikipedia is overrun
with well-meaning, but tasteless editors destroying beautiful artwork
is demeaning, unkind, and just not accurate.
by support the changed version, but it's lost
it's depth, lost detail
in the shadow, or just lost it's ability to captivate for more than a
moment. Perhaps it's cropped to place the subject dead center,
Are we trying to captivate for much more than a moment? Sharp, bright,
high contrast images suit our encyclopaedic mission better.
destroying the careful balence achieved in the photo
which guides the
eye...
Yep, I would probably crop photos to leave the subject dead centre,
maximising the encyclopaedic value of the photo for a given number of
pixels. Totally against the rule of two-thirds, but we're an
encyclopaedia, not an art school.
Don't forget, the original creator can always come back and undo the
changes, perhaps leaving a note to "please" not crop his image.
We've had photographers leave in digust over this.
That sounds like a totally separate problem. It's already possble to
over-write each others' images, sounds like social solutions are
needed to that particular social problem.
So I'm a bit hesitant to suggest we provided
technical tools which may
encourage bad aspects of our behavior. But this has gone wayyyy
off-topic now. :) Once someone impliments some of this stuff we can
debate the merits of turning it on.
IMHO, debating the merits of a proposed feature is perfectly on-topic.
I think some of your objections are a bit spurious, but that doesn't
make them off-topic...:)
Steve