Hello!
I'd like to notify you about a project just launched on fr.wikipedia.org.
We put in place a partnership with a first printer to distribute
posters of commons' pictures and diagrams (when displayed on
fr.wikipedia.org).
There is a link, now visible by everyone, on image pages that proposes
"Obtenir un poster de cette image" e.g. "Get a poster of this image".
This links opens a menu proposing several (but currently still only
one) printers. When you click on "Order with WikiPosters" (name of the
first printer), you are redirected on the printer website that
proposes sizes of posters. The poster is sent within 24h. The poster
is delivered with a page containing licence and author info (if GFDL
only, it is also provided).
The first printer is established in France and already donated 500€ to
the Foundation, 500€ to Wikimedia France and will keep giving 1.50€
per poster to Wikimedia France. Giving to Wikimedia France allows the
printer to deduce in France 60% of the donation.
The project page:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Impression/en (translation in English)
An example... (only English and French user-languages display the menu)
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Whole_world_-_land_and_oceans_12000.jpg
Best regards,
Plyd
Hi there,
since I'm, subscribed via digest I have no mail to reply, so here some
random ideas (rough brainstorming) about the issues mentioned in the
thread 'Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening':
* We need to have at least one (leading) person per language to
translate the messages. They should be contactable via email as well.
Maybe coordinated by a mailing-list. Wasn't there one?
* We could "use" the translation power of the folks at betawiki
(http://translatewiki.net/ )
* I tried to launch a mentoring programme some months ago, but with no
success: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Mentoring
* Maybe we could include SOME contact people directly in the templates.
* What about something like ambassadors?
These are just some spontaneous ideas, I wanted to share. Maybe you have
some to say about some of them ...
Best regards,
Flo
There have been a number of discussion on the English Wikipedia lately
(sparked, of course, by the Virgin Killer image controversy) on the
propriety of various images and the need for retaining them on Wikipedia.
This is a problem that has a long history on Wikipedia, and a number of
controls are in place - limited ability to post explicit images on new
articles, some filtering of newly uploaded images to delete those that are
obviously duplicative, exhibitionist, etc. Many comments we've had in the
last few days concerned the legality of various images, particularly where
consent is not demonstrated or verifiable. I've commented [1] that the
legality issue shouldn't be a major concern for English Wikipedia editors,
because the Foundation itself ought to have limited liability and the
individual uploaders have primary culpability for any illegal images.
But I still think that there is a community issue here, and I wonder if
someone can fill in the details on how we currently deal with it. How well
is the Commons guideline COM:PEOPLE enforced with respect to sexual images?
Do the many projects with separate image databases generally have similar
guidelines? Does anyone know how well they are enforced? In a discussion
this past weekend someone else and I were discussing examples of problem
images, where the person in an explicit photograph is of questionable age.
I realized after a quick survey on Commons of image origins that many of the
explicit images are sourced to a single Flickr account. The license of the
images was verified closer to the time of upload, but since then the Flickr
account has been deactivated. We have no knowledge of the consent of the
photographed models, nor any mechanism for verifying their age, and many if
not most of the images are unused on Wikipedia projects (which is true, I
suspect, for many sexually explicit photographs in general). The whole
category of images [3] was previously put up for deletion [2] but the
discussion was closed in favor of individual image reviews, which I
understand mostly closed as keep.
I don't think the Foundation itself can or should do anything about this
issue in most cases, but I think the topic deserves some wider discussion
and reconsideration - not necessarily as a response to the IWF debacle, but
taking that as an opportunity to get a wider audience.
Of note is Jimmy's recommendation to the en.wp community (I assume, since it
was posted there) for this sort of reconsideration. [4]
Nathan
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&curid=98706…
[2]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Peter_Klashorst…
[3] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Peter_Klashorst
[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&curid=98706…
--
Your donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation
today: http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
On the subject of making more accessible to other languages, perhaps
(forgive me if this has been said before), the introduction of a new
magic word, say {{LOCALLANGUAGE}} that gives the language code of what
the current interface language is would be useful. So by default it'd
be en, but if you set your preference to display in spanish, it'd be
es, or if you viewed something with ?uselang=fr , it'd be fr, etc.
That way the templates could change with the userinterface language.
You put {{some template about your image hitting the bit-bucket}} on a
talk page and the spanish people would see it in spanish, the chinese
people in chinese, etc.
-bawolff
I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986, I speak English,
I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on the
English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on
Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on
Wikisource. I don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying
that I'm not a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on
Commons is full of deletion requests. I occasionally contribute a
lot to Commons, but in between I might be away for a few months,
often long enough for deletions to go through.
The idea that I might be a stable, long time contributor, well
versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to
take legal responsibility for what I have uploaded, hasn't
occurred to the people posting these deletion requests. Instead,
images are deleted 7 days after the warning is posted. This is
completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal
veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals.
Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous. Sometimes the
conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was
perfectly legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished
for this. In the last year or two, the community culture on
Commons has made this kind of drive-by-deletion-request something
normal. When I pointed out to another user that she needed to
explain why some images should be deleted, *I* was told to behave.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LA2
The Swedish Wikipedia is among those that no longer allows image
uploads, because everything should go on Commons. This means we
are recruiting Swedish newcomers to join Commons and upload their
images there. These are not programmers. They don't always speak
English. They might be afraid of technology, and think that
anything that goes wrong is their fault. (Yes, this includes
women and older people.) Still, we want them to contribute
because they might have unique pictures to share. Typically, if
they are helped to set up a user account, the user interface at
Commons will be set to Swedish.
One person who is not a newcomer, but a computer user pioneer in
his field since the 1980s, is Sven Rosborn, archaeologist and
manager of the viking museum at Foteviken in southern Sweden. He
has contributed dozens of his own photos and maps. He was a
speaker at the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks
ago. He does speak English, only perhaps not as eagerly as I. He
is not a programmer. His user talk page is also full of deletion
requests. Two months after the fact, he enters and anwers in
Swedish that these are his own self-made images and maps. But
then the result of the request is already "the media was deleted".
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sven_Rosborn
Both myself and Sven are people who don't give up easily on
Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons. We could take a lot of
mistreatment. But what about the real newcomers?
With the current behaviour of the Wikimedia Commons community, I
find it pointless to try to recruit new contributors. It would be
like pouring water into a bucket with a hole. This hole needs to
mended first. So, how do we do that?
How do others manage to recruit newcomers to Wikimedia Commons?
Are there any success stories in public outreach on Commons?
If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia and has the
Swedish language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then
why should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in
English? Some of these template messages have links to
translations in other languages, but that is an awkward solution.
Will the requestor be able to read the user's answer in Swedish?
Shouldn't it be possible to assign Swedish speaking admins to
patroll contributions by Swedish speaking newcomers? That's how
it would work if all images were uploaded directly to the Swedish
Wikipedia. And the reason we moved images to Commons is not
because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English messages
or admins who fail to speak Swedish.
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers
can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are
patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images
can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other
way around. Even though this would require software development,
this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community
on Commons.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
You said the problem is a lack of administrators who speak the language, right? What about making cross appointments of administrators who complete a 12 hour online boot camp on Wikimedia Commons procedures?
________________________________
From: Patricia Rodrigues <snooze210904(a)yahoo.se>
To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2008 12:02:00 PM
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
A specific project to improve communication between communities and
usability of Wikimedia Commons, you mean? I've been kicking that idea
in the back of my head for some months now. We could ask users across
WMF projects what difficulties they usually find on Commons and ask
them to suggest what Commons could improve to help them. I just opened
such a discussion on pt.wp Village pump...
Maybe what we are needing is feedback. Or are we having feedback but not listening to it?
Patrícia
--- On Sat, 6/12/08, Michael Maggs <Michael(a)Maggs.name> wrote:
From: Michael Maggs <Michael(a)Maggs.name>
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
To: snooze210904(a)yahoo.se, "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:23 PM
This is indeed a problem, and over the last few years it is my impression that
non English speakers have become less comfortable on Commons. Even such
important pages as Commons Scope still only have two translations (and part of a
third) three months after the August re-write went live. Most non-English
speakers cannot even tell what Commons is for!
Our admins are not I think normally aggressive, but they are (perfectly
properly) rigorous in deleting
copyvios.
Without local-language explanation,
what can to an English speaker appear an obvious deletion can, I am sure, seem
like an agressive act to the uploader.
As Patricia says, there is no magic bullet and the need is to build up a
committed group of users who pro-actively translate pages, templates and so on,
and who can help our non-English users with upload issues. This will take time
and will require sustained effort.
Would there be interest in setting up a Commons Project to attempt to address
this in a systematic way?
Michael
--- On Sat, 6/12/08, Michael Maggs <Michael(a)Maggs.name> wrote:
From: Michael Maggs <Michael(a)Maggs.name>
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
To: snooze210904(a)yahoo.se, "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:23 PM
This is indeed a problem, and over the last few years it is my impression that
non English speakers have become less comfortable on Commons. Even such
important pages as Commons Scope still only have two translations (and part of a
third) three months after the August re-write went live. Most non-English
speakers cannot even tell what Commons is for!
Our admins are not I think normally aggressive, but they are (perfectly
properly) rigorous in deleting copyvios. Without local-language explanation,
what can to an English speaker appear an obvious deletion can, I am sure, seem
like an agressive act to the uploader.
As Patricia says, there is no magic bullet and the need is to build up a
committed group of users who pro-actively translate pages, templates and so on,
and who can help our non-English
users
with upload issues. This will take time
and will require sustained effort.
Would there be interest in setting up a Commons Project to attempt to address
this in a systematic way?
Michael
Patricia Rodrigues wrote:
> Lars,
>
> Thank you very much for your e-mail. I'm afraid I don't have any
good answers for you - your concern about how to treat people from other
communities is a big concern for many people, including myself. I'm afraid I
don't have a magic bullet for your problem, but I find the idea of allowing
local uploads and then have some sort of automatic forwarding to Commons when
things are locally checked a very good one.
> There is a striking lack of support for non-English speakers. As you might
know, pt.wikipedia also disabled local uploads and the problem you mentioned for
sv.wp also stands for pt.wp. I found lately several instances where pt users
were
perhaps not
dealt with in the best manner mainly because of lack of
communication. There was in most cases no attempt to fetch a Commons
"regular" speaking Portuguese to help. We have a list of
administrators by language that is perhaps not being put to use. In any case,
it's not covering all languages. If Swedes are in general good English
speakers/writers and you find problems, imagine what it is to deal with (mainly)
portuguese and brazillians that in most cases have about zero knowledge of
English.
> No, Commons is far from being good as a multilingual project. I
wouldn't recommend disabling local uploads nowadays. Resolving the problems
you mentioned requires more communication skills, which we are lacking right
now. Our warnings are too scary and many of our admins too aggressive. I'm
not sure what we could do to improve the current state of things, but something
must change.
> Cheers,
>
Patrícia
>
> --- On *Sat, 6/12/08, Lars Aronsson /<lars(a)aronsson.se>/* wrote:
>
> From: Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se>
> Subject: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
> To: commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:30 AM
>
> I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986, I speak
English, I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on
the English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on
Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on Wikisource. I
don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying that I'm not
a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on Commons is full of
deletion requests. I occasionally contribute a lot to Commons, but in
between I might be away for a few months, often long enough for deletions
to
go through.
>
> The idea that I might be a stable, long time contributor, well
versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to take legal
responsibility for what I have
> uploaded, hasn't occurred to the people posting these
deletion requests. Instead, images are deleted 7 days after the warning is
posted. This is completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal
veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals.
>
> Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous. Sometimes the
conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was perfectly
legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished for this. In
the last year or two, the community culture on Commons has made this kind of
drive-by-deletion-request something normal. When I pointed out to another
user that she needed
to explain why some
images should be deleted, *I* was
told to behave.
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LA2
>
>
> The Swedish Wikipedia is among those that no longer allows image
uploads, because everything should go on Commons. This means we
> are recruiting Swedish newcomers to join Commons and upload their
images there. These are not programmers. They don't always speak
English. They might be afraid of technology, and think that anything that
goes wrong is their fault. (Yes, this includes women and older people.)
Still, we want them to contribute because they might have unique pictures to
share. Typically, if they are helped to set up a user account, the user
interface at Commons will be set to Swedish.
>
> One person
who is not a newcomer, but a computer user pioneer in
his field since the 1980s, is Sven Rosborn,
archaeologist and manager of the
viking museum at Foteviken in southern Sweden. He has contributed dozens of
his own photos and maps. He was a speaker at the Wikipedia Academy
conference in Sweden some weeks ago. He does speak English, only perhaps not
as eagerly as I. He is not a programmer. His user talk page
> is also full of deletion requests. Two months after the fact, he
enters and anwers in Swedish that these are his own self-made images and
maps. But then the result of the request is already "the media was
deleted".
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sven_Rosborn
>
>
> Both myself and Sven are people who don't give up easily on
Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons. We could take a lot of mistreatment.
But what about the real newcomers?
>
> With the current behaviour of the Wikimedia Commons
community, I
find it pointless to try to recruit new contributors. It would be like
pouring water into a bucket with a hole.. This hole needs to mended first.
So, how do we do that?
>
> How do others manage to recruit newcomers to Wikimedia Commons?
> Are there any success stories in public outreach on Commons?
>
>
> If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia and has the
Swedish
> language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then why
should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in English?
Some of these template messages have links to translations in other
languages, but that is an awkward solution. Will the
requestor be able to
read the user's answer in Swedish? Shouldn't it be possible to
assign Swedish speaking admins to patroll contributions by Swedish speaking
newcomers? That's how
it would work if all images were uploaded
directly to the Swedish Wikipedia. And the reason we moved images to
Commons is not because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English
messages or admins who fail to speak Swedish.
>
> Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers
can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by
Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically
forwarded to Commons,
> instead of the other way around. Even though this would require
software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the
admin community on Commons.
>
>
> --
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson..se)
> Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
>
Commons-l@lists..wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
Did someone on Commons really try to pull such crap?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: teun spaans <teun.spaans(a)gmail.com>
Date: 2008/12/8
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cite: <i>Adding to this, a culture of deletionism and arrogance has
infested Wikimedia Commons in the last year or two. </i>
I think on the whole i can agree with this. And it is not limited to
copyright violations. Commons has turned celf-centered more and more over
the past years.
Out of disgust over its bad organization, i have limited my presence on
commons as much as possible. But one of the last times I logged on, there
was a poll or vote which looked like it was designed to limit voting to hard
code commonists: volunteers had to do at least 20-50 edits a month to be
able to vote. I think it is ridiculous that a small bunch of hard core
volunteers try to lock out those of who are actually contributing the media.
Luckily it was stopped, but mainly on technical grounds, not because it is
ethically incorrect to lock contributors out.
(But may be I am prejudiced, once an enthousiastic supporter of commons, i
nowadays avoid it as much as possible in wiki contexts - which forces me to
use it regularly, much to my charin).
A good question is of cource: why are flickr, webshots and picassa so much
more popular than commons? And: can we create a free alternative that can
compete with them?
Sometimes i wonder if some wikia like organization could do a better
service, with a wider scope of images - if i would try to upload my holiday
pix on commons they would speedily get deleted as "not encyclopedic". But
while some are not encyclopedic, many would qualify for free usage, such as
cities, panoramas, and even some people pix.
I wish you health and happiness,
Teun Spaans
On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 11:31 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
> Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
>
> > That might be a hell of a incentive to change. Before we talk
> > about getting out the torches, I think we should see if we can
> > make Commons functional. The incentive of being shuttered makes
> > it more relevant to those who are in denial. I have made two
> > suggestions on improvements. One is a training program with
> > specific handling, i.e. no more we delete in 7 days, a different
> > template that is more collegial. The second is to cross appoint
> > administrators from underrepresented projects who agree to
> > undergo a boot camp program. Thoughts?
>
> Maybe we are too fast to discuss solutions now, when we should
> first discuss the problem. I brought this up on commons-l before
> it spread to foundation-l. With the risk of making myself a
> target for "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read), here's the problem
> that I see:
>
> Wikipedia in many languages is at a stage where the basic articles
> are written (apple is a fruit, Paris is the capital of France) and
> we need to recruit more people who know more areas, both academics
> and people who lived through the politics of the 1960s. This
> includes events such as Wikipedia Academy and also courses for the
> elderly. We can't hope that these people are skilled in PHP
> programming or fluent in English, as many people are on this list.
> Some might be able to write good text, but not used to wiki
> markup, and completely disabled in wiki template design. Perhaps
> they should stick to scanning and uploading their old photos from
> the 1970s.
>
> We still have all kinds of vandalism on Wikipedia. If patrolling
> is efficient and finds and reverts 95% of vandalism, it might also
> spill over to falsely "fighting" 1% of beginner contributions.
> We're scaring serious people away by our own mistake. This is
> where we need to improve. It's like having a zero tolerance on
> crime, without becoming a brutal fascist state. Within each
> (small/medium) language of Wikipedia, this is quite easy. We all
> speak the same language and we know each other.
>
> But as soon as it comes to image uploading, an area where the
> elderly have decades of photos to contribute, we're sending our
> beginners off to Wikimedia Commons. Even if the menues and most
> templates are localized in every major language, this is not true
> of the admin community there. If a beginner fails to fill out all
> details of free licensing, their user talk page will receive an
> image deletion request in English. Even if there is a translated
> version of that notification, the user's explanation in a local
> language might not be understood by the admins. If the user has
> good credentials that are easily verified (retired schoolteacher,
> museum manager, ...) and has built a solid reputation in the local
> language Wikipedia, a Commons admin from another language might
> not fully understand this.
>
> Adding to this, a culture of deletionism and arrogance has
> infested Wikimedia Commons in the last year or two. So many
> copyright violations and half-free images are deleted, that little
> attention is paid to the individual contributors. The focus is on
> the image, not on the user. This system is also an open target for
> abuse. Sometimes deletions are requested anonymously or without
> substantial reasons, but this is not preceived as a problem. Only
> copyright violations are preceived as a problem. Wikimedia
> Commons might have a shortage of admins and other problems, that
> need to be sorted out. But that's not my main issue.
>
> My main issue is this: If we invest in recruiting newcomers and in
> fostering our local admin community to receive and greet
> newcomers, how can we get the best value from that investment?
> Sending our beginners away to Wikimedia Commons and a whole new
> set of foreign language admins doesn't seem optimal. That's like
> pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
>
> Either we should send newcomers and admins in pairs to Commons,
> somehow stating that this new user account is a Swedish speaker
> and that Swedish speaking admins can take care of any issues, or
> we should allow local uploads again, so the newcomers can stay
> within the Swedish Wikipedia. After images have been patrolled
> locally, they can be forwarded to Commons by a system of bots, and
> only the bot operators would have to deal with the international
> admin community at Wikimedia Commons.
>
>
> --
> Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
> Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
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