[Foundation-l] [Slashdot] Why the Photos On Wikipedia Are So Bad

[Samuel Klein]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 8:03 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:

> Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
> > it to Commons, or make it insufficiently; 2) why they do not make it ot
> > the articles. I tried to make the point in the recent thread on the
> > purpose of Commons, but somehow it did not draw enough attention.
> > Realistically, if somebody uploaded a good picture (not necessarily of a
> > person, it could also be a landscape, a PD piece of art or smth else),
> and
> > if this somebody is an active editor of only one Wikipedia, this picture
> > has very little chance to make it to other Wikipedia articles, except may
> > be for the ones which are created after the file has been uploaded.
>
> There are tools such as http://toolserver.org/~magnus/fist.php<http://toolserver.org/%7Emagnus/fist.php>that
> address this, perhaps they could be more advertised.
>

That's a great idea.  Having a prominent link to "recently uploaded images"
(I'm thinking of something like [[Special:NewFiles]] that shows more than 50
entries on a page with rc-style metadata, combined from the local wiki +
commons) next to "recent changes" on wikipedia would make quite a difference
-- we currently have an extra barrier to entry for people who want to get
involved with media.

Is this sort of change being considered by the usability project?

SJ