On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 10:06 PM, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote: Actually, we might want to do this in a bit of a more structured way. Rather than having random people contact their local chapter for that kind of stuff, we could try and have the right people make a "roadmap" of what needs to be achieved, for what purpose etc. Then the chapters (and the Foundation if they wish) could get together and say, ok, this is what resources we can allocate to this, and we'd have a job description made for a roadmap that makes sense and take the best person for the job. I am pretty sure indeed, that improving commons in that kind of way is something that is "easy to sell" to the general public and most importantly, a huge step forward for the mission. /me dreams of a really usable Commons ;) Cheers, Delphine -- @notafish NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails will get lost. Intercultural musings: Ceci n'est pas une endive - http://blog.notanendive.org Photos with simple eyes: notaphoto - http://photo.notafish.org

Hi, In fact, there are so many improvements to do: - first IP should have their interface localised at any time, may be by cookies or browser setting language, I know it's not easy and so one... (there is a bug on bugzilla somewhere) - allow categories to be localised, I know it's not obvious, I know it's difficult for mediawiki and so one, but currently Commons is not easy for non English speakers. (evergreen in many village pumps on Commons) - add tag system, why not, it could be useful for search. Tag system could be developed like a label one. The first common point are the keywords. These three points could help to make a better Commons Florian Farge aka Otourly Sur lesprojets wikimédiens et l'Association française,sur OxyRadio, OSM, et sur MOVIM Socio di Wikimedia Italia ________________________________ De : Maarten Dammers <maarten(a)mdammers.nl> À : commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Envoyé le : Ven 29 octobre 2010, 18h 34min 05s Objet : Re: [Commons-l] Use labels in Commons and increase coverage Hi guys, So we're having the tags discussion again? Pops up every once in a while. Tags is a step backwards compared to categories. With tags there is a relation between an object (a photo) and a word. No way of telling what the relation is, what language the tag is, no relations between tags etc etc. So just a word and no more metadata, but it is very easy for the user. On the other side we have semantic web (yes, I said the S word!). That's like an utopia we'll never reach. Categories are somewhere in between. There's a relation between an object and a category, we don't know what that relation is. There are relations between categories, also we don't know what these relations are. Would be nice if we could use all the information of the current category system to build a better new system. Imho the most important problem of our current system is intersections. Category:Churches gets too crowded so we intersect it with locations (I even wrote a bot to do that). This "hides" a lot of images. We want to add atomic things, let's call them labels. So I want to add the label "church" and the label "Amsterdam" and have some clever software figure out the intersection. Between these labels you can define relations again (maybe even specify more than a relation?) and you can add translations. For the simple user the label should just work like a tag (click, added Amsterdam & Church), but the more advanced user could add more information like translations, relations with other labels, link to Wikipedia articles etc etc making it a powerful system. Maarten _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

On 29 October 2010 17:55, Krinkle <krinklemail(a)gmail.com> wrote: Indeed. Remember that the audience for this is not people interested in ontological structure - they already have the category tree. It's for the casual user to type in a few words they're thinking of. Think something like Getty Images. "Commons is sorta like Getty Images except it's all free and the search sucks." - d.

this will improve information retrieval. Now we have the technical metadata, we need more metadata on the document, we definitely need to improve the descriptive metadata of the represented object. For example, if I have a scan of a public domain book I need both to describe the scan itself and the book. If we would have the possibility of using the Keywords in the DC as tags, in a user-friendly way, we could have both old categories and tags useful for searching. It always go in the direction of Dublin Core (I bet this a recurring discussion too...), and it solves problem of Wikisources too (I'm sorry I repeat myself, but I a cause worth of it ;-)) Aubrey

2010/10/29 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> I'm not talking about eliminate the tags/labels, I'm talking about adding (other) proper metadata to our resources, if possible following standards. Tags are an important part of it, but not all. I mean, we can have both the better usage and more reliability. I don't think that ignoring completely the history and results of librarianship as a science/discipline is a good idea, nor it is see the tags (of DC, for that matter) as a silver bullet. I'm not an expert, but all the digital libraries and repositories I know focus a lot (maybe too much) on metadata, because they guarantee retrievability (not talking about museums here, mainly libraries and collection of texts). We can crowdsource both more traditional metadata and loose but useful tags: why we have to have just one? Moreover, in the short term you are proably right, and the labels/tags will serve as the main way for findig resources. But in the middle/long term you will lose information, and digital preservation absolutely *needs* metadata. How will you know about a picture if you just have a bunch of useful tags about its content but not the source, creator, publisher, whatever? Finally, a proper metadata management system (harvesting, disseminating, ecc.) is just a way to *speak* with GLAMs and other projects, like Europeana. Why not go in that direction? Aubrey