Today I attended yet another workshop where a brave
volunteer tried to explain the usefulness of
Wikimedia Commons to teachers/scientists. During
the following exercise, a very computer literate
senior geneticist tried to access
wikimedia.org
and landed on the Wikimedia Foundation website.
After this mistake was corrected, she soon found
category:genetics, but from there couldn't find
anything about DNA. Category:DNA exists, but is
hidden some levels down. The immediate subcategories
to Genetics are not the obvious ones to a geneticist.
People who are very excited and want to learn,
constantly run into these stupid mistakes.
Can we please get rid of the name Wikimedia?
The M-and-P confusion is among the very worst.
Call it "Wikipedia Foundation". Rename Commons
to be "Wikipedia Pictures". These two simple
changes would save sooooooooooo much time.
Yes, I know Wikimedia is more than just Wikipedia,
that it also covers Wikisource, Wikibooks and
all the other side projects. I also know that
Commons is more than just pictures. I've been
with Wikipedia since May 2001. But the everyday
struggle of having to explain M-and-P is taking
all the fun out of it. Is it really worth that?
Now, the second part. Finding pictures in Commons
is really hard. It seems that categories and textual
descriptions are added by the uploader, and rarely
modified or enhanced by others. Finding a map of bird
migration paths across Europe might be easy, but
finding a plain and simple map of Europe is hard.
Images that appear directly in top categories (such
as Category:Maps of Europe) are a very random mix,
and not the most useful generic maps of Europe.
The "next 200" navigation is a total disaster,
that not a single newcomer understands. Anything
that is beyond the first 200 (e.g. subcategories
that start with M-Z) are not found.
Is there any topic category on Commons that is
actively maintained for easy searching, i.e.
where subcategories are well defined and where
new images are systematically monitored and
recategorized with enhanced descriptions? If I
could find such an example, perhaps it could
provide inspiration for other topics where a
specialist with some extra time (or a grant
application) could improve the actual usefulness
of Commons.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se