[Commons-l] All about Wikimania, future projects, licenses, etc etc

[Brianna Laugher]

On 12/08/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> The site I suggest we target is Getty images. http://www.gettyimages.com/
>
> Try their search with an image in mind, like "black child reading a book".
>
> There is no reason we can't do even better than they do.  The software
> isn't even hard, we just need to make a commitment to doing tagging
> right and doing it diligently.

Well if we had a better tool it would remove a lot of the problems we
currently have.

Tagging is flawed - some people put 'wiki', some put 'wikis', some put
'wikipedia', etc etc. And yet somehow it doesn't seem to matter. this
is puzzling. I haven't really seen a site do
intentionally-collaborative tagging, where the users actively try to
have the same understanding for the same tag. no wonder we have so
many problems with categories. ;)

There are several advantages we have over all the competitors people
have mentioned -- Google images, Flickr, Getty images:
* only free content licenses, and we actively remove copyvios. (insert
disclaimer about reliability here)
* seriously multilingual - today's POTD had captions in 19 languages,
and I think usually it is more.
* attention to detailed annotation - we kill the others when it comes
to this. especially with nature images. (I just did a search on getty
images for 'kangaroo'. most of the images look hokey and staged.)
* "encyclopedic" coverage and style, compared to flickr's
"self-absorbed" coverage and Getty image's often "staged" style
* wiki = instantly updating mistakes and improving. We can only get
better. our descriptions can only get more detailed. our translations
can only grow. Now this is cause for cheer! How will Getty get new
annotations? By paying translators. Us? We just encourage and wait.

But it doesn't matter how much great content you have, if no can find
it, you may as well not have it. Hence search is my #1 request.
Further down the list there was also a request for a rating system,
which would help to bring higher quality results higher up in search
queries.

cheers
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/