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@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@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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