On 08/08/07, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[offtopic] I am going to do a lightning talk about
Commons on
Wikimedia Conference Netherlands in October. I will have a quick talk
about most of the things pfctdayelise mentioned, but I wonder if you
folks have some ideas about some specific things I should mention? (We
do have a bad reputation at the Dutch wikis, you know...)
Well, when you take questions, it's likely this will come up. Please
just reiterate that we Commoners are human and can make mistakes, but
we will also try to fix them when we can; we want to improve
relationships between Commons & other wikis because it's really
important to us, so please keep talking to us; we can't change past
mistakes, only try and learn from them; the actions of one Common
users are not necessarily representative of Commons (just in the same
way the actions of one nl.wp user are not necessarily representative
of nl.wp).
Just listening to people's complaints is very important. Don't brush
them off. If people get upset, it means we didn't handle it well, even
if we were right. ***Being right is not enough.*** I really believe
this. I think it's quite powerful if we can just listen to people's
complaints, and say, "I accept that you're upset and we didn't handle
this well enough, and I'm sorry. What do you think we can do to
improve similar situations in the future?" Try not to get into the
specifics about who was right and who was wrong and the specifics.
We can (and IMO should) write help pages and interface messages
specifically for people from particular wikis. So we could have
Special:Upload?uselang=usersfromnlwp - if they think that could be a
helpful thing.
I would mention the tools like Checkusage, Commonsticker, CommonSense.
Make sure the Dutch interface for Commons is all good.
I hope this talk goes well. I was so impressed by the Dutch at
Wikimania. They were some of my favourite people. :) Please report
back when you've done it.
==POTY07==
I will post separately about this. But I think we should start getting
into gear or at least thinking about things. I think we should close
submissions by the end of Nov, hold two weeks of voting, and use the
results to make calendar/s. I also think we should have 12-15
different categories of voting and more or less use those as the
calendar pictures.
Absolutely. We should start with the preparations somewhere around
October. Last year's edition was a great succes, but it also was a
great mess. I hope we can make this year's better :)
Please participate at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2007/Preparat…
I now think
that instead of asking/wishing for the board to promote
us, we need to force them to have to talk about us by creating the
interest ourselves. I really think this project could create some
serious interest. And maybe if enough proceeds go to the WMF, then we
can demand with a little more conviction that they should be earmarked
for Commons-specific development. :)
Hmm. Do we have a Commons tshirt? I want one.
No. And no stickers. Please contact a chapter and hassle them to
produce these. And then send me some. :)
cheers
Brianna
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/