Hello Ingo,
Respectfully, allow me to disagree with you that images collected from WLA
are not used on Wikipedia because they are useless.
Like every other photos contributed to Commons, most WLA photos are not
used on Wikipedia articles for multiple reasons.
It's an extremely boring task for users to focus on using images uploaded
to Commons on Wikipedia articles. There are only a very few people in our
movement whose work primarily focus on use of images from WLX (WLA, WLE,
WLM) on Wikipedia articles.
Many people enjoy writing new articles, curating existing articles and
fighting vandalism than actually using images uploaded to Commons on
Wikipedia articles.
That images are not used on Wikipedia articles does not mean they are not
realistically useful for educational purpose. Wikimedia Commons is a
repository of media files that are realistically useful for educational
purpose.
Please understand "education" in its broad meaning of providing knowledge,
as either instructional and informative.
Images on Commons are often used in classroom as informative and
instructional materials. You can't possibly know what a teacher may find
useful on Commons. Teachers and re-users of images uploaded to Commons (in
most cases) don't care whether they are in use on Wikipedia articles or
not.
Journalists sometimes used images uploaded to Commons on their articles in
newspapers and in some cases, the images are not in used on Wikipedia
articles.
Thinking that such images are useless because they are not used on
Wikipedia is in fact against our core objective of providing free knowledge.
Ingo, I'd encourage you to help with using some of these images on
Wikipedia.
Regards
Isaac
On Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 10:09 PM Ingo Koll <ikoll(a)gmx.de wrote:
Dear Isa, dear Isaac, thanks for taking the trouble to
react to my lines.
As for access - this seems to be ok now. It was not a question of which
language. I understand now the tool is not designed for cleaning up. I
think the tool is helpful - well for salvaging some material. It would be
more helpful if there was a way of getting directly to category editing.
And it is not ideal that the list of categories is cut off at end of line.
If there is a way to re-sorting the display, so that the long line "Images
from Wiki Loves Africa 2019 | Images from Wiki Loves Africa 2019 in
Tanzania" would be pushed to the end to make the author- relevant
categories visible?. And as obviously there is material that looks miplaced
and of poor quality - why not include a "delete" proposal button (just
proposals..)?
I went thru a number of the images and added Swahili captions. My
impression is: some usable, a majority of unusable material.
Isa, you wrote: "competitions like Wiki Loves Africa and Wiki Loves Earth
are specifically designed to attract people into contributing to Wikipedia
in an easy and fun way." Im am a big fan of "fun and easy". Just I do not
see the contributions to wikipedia if images are unusable.
One or 2 years ago I shared here a random evaluation I had done of images
from past competitions. I saw then that the vast majority of the checked
images was not used anywhere on wikipedia. My impression was they were not
used because they were -even if sometimes beautiful- rather useless for
an encyclopedia, and that the vast majority probably will never be used for
any article. That why I started asking myself why we should spend time,
effort and money on collecting encyclopedically useless pictures.
Has anything changed in this aspect? Are images a contribution to
wikipedia just because something is uploaded unto commons?
Isaac, you wrote: "It would be counterproductive to not accept images that
are not properly described or categorized." - Please allow me to see this
the other way round. My understanding of common is as a supportive tool for
article authors. I do not find it productive to fill space with lots of
badly (even not at all) categorized or poorly (even uselessly) described
images.
Cheers
Ingo
Am 13.11.2019 um 17:08 schrieb
african-wikimedians-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org:
competitions like Wiki Loves Africa and Wiki Loves Earth are specifically designed to
attract people into contributing to Wikipedia in an easy and fun way. The more barriers,
the less fun, the fewer people, the fewer interesting and diverse pictures.
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