[Commons-l] Principles of organisation - who do we serve?

Fri Nov 10 09:19:30 UTC 2006

On 10/11/06, bawolff <bawolff+wn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's some of my thoughts, as someone who you would call a  contributor:
>
> Contributors who make a mistake: Often time someone comes from some
> random wiki (most likely wikipedia en) and uploads an image. They make
> a mistake - no source, no license, unclear licensing terms etc. The
> image is perfectly usable by commons, but no one knows it. They get a
> deletion notice on their commons talk page - which is quite useless,
> as they're not coming back there for at least a year,  if they ever
> come back. However if a message was left at their home wiki, the image
> would be saved.  However its totally unrealistic for CM's to track
> them down against everything listed at [[special:sitematrix]]. perhaps
> a bot is needed or something like that, but I think it would go a long
> way to having more contributors trust commons.

Waiting... for.. SingleUserLogin...
:/

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_login_specifications says "a
final push to implement this is underway"... in mid-July.
Well. I personally feel that getting information out of developers is
like wringing water from a stone, and I have no feeling that any of
the problems of Commons are anything like a priority, ever, for the
developers. Look at the single most useful tool on Commons -
CheckUsage. Is it part of MediaWiki? No. Or the extremely useful, but
not so important, Gallery tool. Is it part of MediaWiki? No. Or how
about CommonsTicker? Also no.

There is talk recently about "rewriting the whole backend for images",
which might allow image renaming/moving... or it might be something
like SUL, and I look forward to hearing about it in 2009.
The category limitations are probably the most restrictive, for simple
day to day requirements. (Most images don't need to be renamed.) Our
mulitlingual support is ultimately pretty poor, when we have to
require categories to be in English because category redirects don't
work, or there is no way to alias a category. Let alone
plural/singular, capitalisation, common name/Latin name for species is
still a big problem.

> Default search: yes, something, anything/random monkeys picking
> results. Improvement is vastly needed in this area. Any thoughts on a
> keyword based system based on semantic mediawiki? (assuming I read the
> page on semantic mediawiki right). That way, I think you could do much
> better searching - I think you could do combo searches with it - all
> yellow things + alll bird things = all yellow birds.

There are two problems.
One is the technical thing of how we index descriptive information about files.
The second is how we encourage/enforce people to actually DO this.
Contributors (and I say this in my capital C meaning) are typically
focused on their page at hand in another wiki. So to them it is
immediately obvious what the purpose of this file is, and how it is
useful. They're not at all concerned about making sure other people
will be able to use it, first and foremost by being able to *find* it.
People often make comments, when they see their Gallery for the first
time, like "Oh, that's wrong, I /know/ that file's not an orphan."
They know because they inserted it in a Wikipedia article elsewhere.
It is still an orphan on Commons, which is precisely the problem for
anyone else who the file might be relevant to.

cheers,
Brianna