On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 3:01 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2008/12/6 Geoffrey Plourde
<geo.plrd(a)yahoo.com>om>:
You said the problem is a lack of administrators
who speak the language,
right? What about making cross appointments of administrators who complete a
12 hour online boot camp on Wikimedia Commons procedures?
The job of commons admin requires being a serious heavy-duty copyright
nerd, because that's what most of the work is. I'm not sure that can
be done in twelve hours.
Absolutely, I used to be very involved in images on enwiki, and
thought I would give commons a spin. I've never written why I didn't,
so for the hard core commons people just take this as a single data
point :)
The culture seems to be to be one of very uneven policy enforcement
(why is this public domain
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:K-21.svg ?), and many
subpopulations. enwiki images might be crazy, but the policy is
largely coherent, even if it is in flux often.
Commons, to me, seems like one group of english speaking people that
are extremely strict on copyright to the point that I feel like most
of their work is enforcing terrible lowest-common-denominator laws
from various countries, making inclusion more strict than any single
country's legal system requires, so that they be "compatible" with
them all. It seems entirely like a legal game, with laws from every
nation on earth being interpreted by the community. This can be fun
for some people, but it's not what I would call helpful really.
Alongside that group are various other subgroups that are usually less
strict, maybe they don't speak english, or they represent too large a
group of images to be mass deleted etc, which are ignored.
I dunno, I don't feel very helpful enforcing ridiculous panorama laws,
call me crazy.
Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion