The foundation mailing list recently discussed "Like"-buttons for
articles, to improve community building and attract new editors.
I thought about improving Commons for the less-techie community. So I
looked at Flickr, and the "community" part on image pages consists
mainly of comments and favourites counter.
Commons can have comments (say that quickly three times in a row!) on
file talk pages, but I've rarely seen "oh, I like this" as a comment
there. Nothing wrong with that, Commons has a more "serious" aspect to
it...
But what if, in addition to the usual Wikimedian ways, there were easy
"favs" and "comment" functions in Commons? Right under the image
description? Have a look (you need to be logged in for the full
flavour):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sanger_Institute_and_Hinxton_Hall,_C…
Beneath "Licensing", there is now "Comments and favourites", with a
few test comments of mine. I've also added this as a "favourite" of
mine, being my own image and all ;-)
If you are logged in, you can add one-line comments (with wiki
syntax), and set/remove the file as a personal favourite. These
actions are stored and logged in two ways: On the talk page on the
file, wrapped in templates, and on your user subpages:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/My_file_comments
and
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/My_favourite_files
respectively.
For the technically inclined, script is here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:FileComments.js
There could be plenty to do in terms of development: Editing/removing
comments (comment author and admins only?), fancy comment input
dialog, a "Log in or Sign up to comment" link for anons, etc.
So: Comments? ;-)
M.
