There are many different elements to comment on.
Le 13/11/2019 à 23:14, Ingo Koll a écrit :
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.
Ingo, I think it was very probably an issue with the tools.wmflabs.
For some reasons, it is often "not working so well". In which cases, the
tools hosted there show 404 or 405. It is unrelated to the tool.
When you see such errors, better wait... and try again later.
Unfortunately nothing we can do.
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..)?
All good proposals. But... It is probably good to explain that the tool
is a pilot tool to support the Structured Data effort on Wikimedia
Commons. It is not a tool to "do lot's of stuff on Commons directly from
an app".
I agree it would be cool to a certain extent :) But this was not the
goal of the tool.
There were three different ideas in our minds when we started discussing
this tool in Cap Town in summer 2018.
One idea from the WMF Structured Data team was to run several pilot
projects to help adoption of structured data by community members. So
their goal was outreach... community involvement... promotion of
structured data etc.
One idea was to improve the description of images uploaded during the
Wiki Loves Africa contest. Initially, we thought the tool would be only
for WLA. Then we realize it could be for... all categories on Wikimedia
Commons
One idea was to provide a tool that would allow running small contests,
and that would be as simple to organize as possible. Practically
speaking, to run a little challenge, all you need is to set up a
campaign (takes litteraly 3 mn), then to advertise it (might take more
time), then to plan a gift for winners. And that's it !!!
Being a lazy person for example, I absolutely wanted that at the end of
a challenge, there would be participation data available in cvs format,
so that I could download and tweek data as much as I could to analyse
participation. But I also wanted a visual "report", with all relevant
information (name of participants, figures, licence, credits...) so that
the program leader could simply do a screenshot at the end and
taaaadaaaaa..... report done !!!!
Example for WikiIndaba campaign :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Results_ISA_Campaign_WikiIndaba.png
Those were the three goals in our mind all along.
Could the tool do other things ? Of course it could. But the more
complete, the more complex.
In particular, we did NOT want to make categories updatable because the
goal in our mind is to somewhat run away from categories to embrace
structured data. So allowing category editing... would actually go
against our goals :)
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?
I remember we had this discussion over time. This is irrelevant to the
ISA tool itself. It touches to the role of Wikimedia Commons. Is
Wikimedia Commons a place to host media, that could be used (or not) by
anyone, in any types of circonstances ? Or is that a service to Wikipedia ?
If you see Commons as being primarily a resource to illustrate
Wikipedia, then yes, Commons is full of crap.
If you see Commons as a more general resource, there is still a lot of
crap, but also interesting things that are irrelevant to Wikipedia. But
still interesting for others and for other uses.
Note that the discussion is irrelevant to Wiki Loves X to a large
extent. Please also note that Wiki Loves Africa has actually a fairly
good reuse rate generally. But beyond this...
Let me tell you what *I* see as very important in Commons and in
structured data. That makes me... feel hot all around.
Sometimes... I want to prepare a conference. And I want a picture. And
this picture... I want it to represent a boat. And I want the picture to
also feature a woman. And I want the picture to be mostly in blue
shades. And I want the picture to be geographically in Africa. And last,
I want the picture to be of good quality. How on earth do I find this
picture RIGHT NOW ? I can not. For sure, I can go to a category... and
start looking, looking, looking... and I could spend hours just looking
for such an image. And eventually find something that could do. Perhaps.
So what if I want to have 10 such images, filling up those conditions I
request, so that I can actually choose for my favorite ? Will I go
manually through every single image on Commons ?
How could I find those when those images when they are only described by
categories, which are only string based text. It is impossible. I can
not find manually those images. And I can not really ask a machine to
search that for me either.
Now, if I drop string based categories, and instead describe images with
structured data, such as describing with items from WikiData (as is
being done with depicts in the ISA tool)... then... I can do queries !!!
I can actually ask to a machine to look for images that represent a
boat, a women, in blue, in good quality and located in Africa. And the
machine will give me the answer. And that... is magic. Do you understand
what I mean ?
And if what makes your heart tick is ONLY Wikipedia... consider... how
will you illustrate an article about... say... fishing. You want a GOOD
image to illustrate fishing, but only fishing at night. How do you look
for such an image ? You go to
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fishing ? 1448 images to
look at. Good luck !
Consider... if you could do a query... that would select for your own
service "All the featured images related to fishing at night". Then
maybe you will get 10 images. You select the best. You illustrate the
article. Done !
In such cases... better have a big pool of images than a small one.
This is what structured data will ultimately allow you to do... it will
HELP you find the BEST and the RELEVANT. In French, we would say
"trouver une aiguille dans une botte de foin".
Cheers
Florence
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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