[Commons-l] Friendliness & Lack of User Recognition

[Paul Houle]

  On 2/23/2011 10:04 AM, Eusebius wrote:
> Now that's constructive.
> I would love to see something like that on Commons. But surely this is
> not the first time this is suggested, and this has been rejected for a
> reason?
>
     Commons has a different purpose than Flickr.

     On Flickr I feel free to post pictures of my son,  my woodstove and 
the dollhouse village that's down the road from my house.  A few percent 
of my pictures are photos of notable named entities that would be 
suitable for Wikimedia Commons,  but the rest aren't.  I upload my 
photos to Flickr because it's easy for me.

     For me,  a big part of Web 3.0 is about 'union communities' that 
combine CC content from different communities.  I've got a 'machine' 
(Ok,  people + software system) that,  if you put money in on one side,  
it locates named entity images in Flickr,  unscrambles the metadata egg 
and captures and tags images with very high precision.  Based on a naive 
scaling,  if you put 10% of Wikipedia's 2011 budget into it,  it could 
harvest more images than are already in Commons.  The quality of images 
is better than you find in Commons,  however,  you'd find that you just 
can't find images for all the topics in Wikipedia that are CC in Flickr.

     Many of the best contributors to Wikipedia Commons are great 
Pokemon collectors but lousy photographers.  I can think of people 
who've traveled all over England and other countries photographing 
things but I want to scream at them...  "Clean your goddamn lens!"  
People in Flickr are more serious about photography (probably own a 
DSLR,  have something better than the kit lens,  and keep it clean) but 
they're not so interested in "catching them all."

     If you wanted to encourage a 'game mechanic' in Commons,  I think 
you'd want to make it first of all a friendly competition to 'catch them 
all' and secondarily a competition to get better quality photographs.  I 
think the ideal Commons photographer would be a person who's interested 
in some specific category (say going to concerts and snapping pictures 
of musicians or taking pictures of birds.)  To support this there's a 
need for tools that make it clear where the holes are,  both in the 
sense of "We don't have any pictures of X" or "We'd like to get better 
pictures of X".

     Another big trouble with Commons,  IMHO,  is that the majority of 
contributors have empty user pages.  To take an example,

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Billy_Hathorn

     has taken at least 1,717 pictures (for which my system could 
unscramble the metadata egg) used in en.wikipedia but has a blank User 
page.  Here's a guy who's made a major contribution to Commons,  but 
he's got no recognition,  we aren't told anything about what he likes to 
photograph,  the fact that he's a real MVP,  where he lives,  what he 
looks like,  what his social media id's are,  what kind of gear he 
uses,  nothing.  Now sure,  he (or any of us) could put something on his 
User page,  but he hasn't.

      On a site like Flickr,  you've got a photostream which gets filled 
out automatically so you automatically get some recognition for the hard 
work you're doing.  Here you've got a guy who should be getting a lot of 
credit and he's not.