Are folks aware of the difficulties there have been with the uploading
of Geograph photos to the commons? I would encourage serious study of
the history of this effort, and the strong objections there have been,
before going ahead with this.
I've not been involved in the discussions, but my personal experience of
the early Geograph uploads is that it effectively destroyed the reasonably
good categorisation of user uploaded photos, by overwhelming existing
categories with poorly categorised, and often poor quality photos,
many of which are unlikely to be of use on any project using commons.
I personally sorted out the categorisation of many hundred geograph
photos dumped in the top level of my city's categorisation, which made
it unusable for practical purposes. It took many hours to sort this out,
moving to the appropriate sub-category for a pile of mostly not very good
photos, many really for not-so-nearby villages that should not have been
dumped in the city category.
This problem was addressed after a while by not automatically trying
to categorise within the normal hierarchy, but creating an alternative
Geograph grid-square hierarchy, that users are I believe supposed
to manually recategorise, but I think little of that has been done.
There are I think currently over 800,000 geograph photos, possibly well
over a million, in the Geograph categories awaiting an initial ordinary
category or category review:
needing category review: 589387
needing categories by date: 806653
needing categories by grid square: 50,949 subcats, unknown number of photos
Also most of the geolocation on Geograph photos is fairly inaccurate,
which is easy to see of you fire up Google Earth with the WikiCommons
layer enabled. Before these arrived most of the photos near my city had
accurate geolocation, but not any more because of the Geograph images.
(Though this will improve with new photos as GPS enabled cameras become
common.)
I was pretty fed-up with it, though I did not enter the discussions on
Commons about this, which lead to the upload effort being abandoned.
Just because there are millions of licence compatible photos out there,
I see no compelling reason to load them all into commons if that reduces
the average quality and utility. What I think we want is tools to very
easily upload individual images/files when a commons user sees a good
quality one on compatible sites that s/he wants to use.
A more minor issue is that the Geograph upload project only uploaded
640x480 versions into commons, when Geograph in many case has higher
resolution originals.
I haven't studied this issue in depth, and am only reporting my experience
with the Geograph upload. Here are some starting points for looking at
the old discussions about this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Batch_uploading/Geograph#Indefini…
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Blo…
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Batch_uploading/Geograph#Problem_…
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Arc…
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_Geograph_British…
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Geograph_Britain_and_Ireland
Richard
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Richard Wendland richard(a)wendland.org.uk