Wikimedia France and the Wikimedia Foundation are currently
considering the idea of a multimedia-focused workshop and planning
event to take place in October 2009. Rather than an open community
conference like Wikimania, this would be a workshop targeting skilled
practitioners who want to help transform our approach to rich media
throughout the Wikimedia universe.
This event will most likely happen in France, as Wikimedia France will
be providing logistical support and most of the funding, with a goal
to ensure that the most relevant people can be present at the event.
One of the key objective of this meeting would be to help inform the
recently funded Multimedia Usability Project to improve the usability
of Wikimedia Commons. This meeting should help to immerse the project
team in the complex world of multimedia in Wikimedia projects today.
It should also help to start building a core group of volunteers as
well as chapter support for the project.
Beyond the Multimedia Usability Project, we're hoping that useful
practical discussions will lead to outcomes positively driving
approaches to sharing and collaborating multimedia in the Wikimedia
universe forward.
We're thinking of a three-day event with a group of 30 people total,
who could receive travel scholarships if they don't have any other
organizational funding support. The meeting could potentially be
divided into three tracks: technology, content partnerships, and
community practices. Participants would be a combination of people
directly invited because of their known high value contributions, and
people applying or being nominated.
We're currently envisioning that the tracks could be structured as follows:
* Technology track: This would include hammering out specs and code
for key technological improvements deemed necessary for rich media in
WMF projects in areas such as upload usability and workflow, search
and tagging (including multilingual search), permissions workflow,
deletion workflow, and so forth. It could also address next-generation
technologies such as video editing tools, as well as operational
issues associated with large scale content delivery.
* Content partnerships track: This would look at best practices, and
could perhaps be used to hammer out a "content partnerships manual"
for working with institutions as in the case of the German archive
partnerships. It could also be used to prioritize partnership
opportunities.
* Community practices track: Here we would discuss constructive ways
for the Commons and local project communities to interact, existing
deletion and arbitration practices, legal issues with different types
of media, and other day-to-day issues that Commons community members
deal with.
Ideally the outputs of the process would also feed into the Wikimedia
Foundation strategy planning process. This workshop is not designed to
address "content creation" questions, i.e., how to shoot a good photo,
how to restore an image, etc. It's intended to identify practical
solutions and approaches for challenges in the above three areas.
Please give us your feedback
* Does this basic division make sense? Might another track setup be
more helpful?
* In the above tracks, which other issues should be addressed? Which
issues should be avoided?
* Any other comments and suggestions welcome.
Also, if you'd like to participate in such an event, or if you want to
nominate someone else to do so, feel free to send us an initial note.
We may decide to not hold the event, or to alter its shape, but a
provisional expression of interest will help us plan. Currently we're
holding October 9-11 as the dates.
Please leave comments on the talk page here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Usability_Project_Meeting_October…
Or if you want to express interest privately, please e-mail both me
and Delphine Ménard:
erik(a)wikimedia.org
delphine.menard(a)wikimedia.fr
Thanks!
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>From a post this morning to the freeculture-discuss list:
> Is there a database or search engine for Free culture in the US? Are
> there some kinds of awards like grammys or emmys or oscars for
> creative commons stuff? Where do artists go in the US to promote their
> CC art if they are interested in sharing it?
Commons is not there for people to 'promote their CC art', but is
there interest in making the results of the commons media contests
more public and formal? Is it worth putting more pomp and energy into
media contests at annual events like Wikimania, to help spread the
word?
SJ
I've recently come across the following website that publishes a large number of old photographs held in local council archives in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire:
http://tinyurl.com/nydpcj
Many of the pictures are still in-copyright and have been released for private use only. However, many are pre-1923 and hence copyright expired, such as:
http://tinyurl.com/npay5t
Would it be copyright-compliant for someone, particularly someone based in the US, to upload these photos to Commons based on the principles of PD-ART?
Andrew
Hi all,
In the past few years I have been creating some Flickr related tools. These are:
* FlickreviewR: A bot that reviews the licenses from images uploaded from Flickr
* FlickreviewR human reviewer: A bot that re-reviews reviews by humans
* Flickr upload bot: A web interface that allows easy access
FlickreviewR has over 110k edits and with Flickr upload bot over 12k
uploads have been performed. Unfortunately I have not always been able
to care of those bots decently.
Therefore I would like to propose to add maintainers to those bots;
preferably as a stable toolserver project on stable.toolserver.org.
Who would be interested in maintaining these bots?
The bots are written in Python and use the mwclient library to edit
and upload, which I also wrote. I will also give commit access to
mwclient on SourceForge to maintainers.
The FlickreviewR bots' code are in relatively good shape, reasonably
ok documented and can be easily understood I believe.
The Flickr upload bot however has horrible code. It was basically my
first large webapp and I had some strange design ideas by then. I have
attempted rewriting it, but have not had the time yet.
Feel free to forward this mail to other people who might be interested
in co-maintaining.
Regards,
Bryan
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Hi all,
this is a tool announcement for my second version of CommonsHelper.
You can find it at
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/commonshelper2.php
My original CommonsHelper has been a true workhorse, shoveling over a
quarter of a million files to Commons from other Wikimedia projects.
But, it had some troubles that I could not seem to fix, caused by its
inability to always parse wikitext correctly. So, I rewrote the entire
thing from scratch.
Some items on the new version:
* Only English interface so far. I'll add support in the next few days.
* WikiSense/CheckUsage auto-categorization is offline due to
toolserver database troubles
* All categories, templates, and their "translations" to their Commons
counterparts, as well as "good" and "bad" lists, are now user
configurable through meta.wikipedia.
* The engine now uses my wiki2xml tool to parse the original wikitext,
then alters the XML tree, and finally collapsed the tree back into
wikitext.
* Code is much cleaner now, and uses classes, so it (or some of its
components) might be used in other tools or even in MediaWiki at some
point in the future
* When not using TUSC direct upload, one can now edit the new wikitext
before uploading
If you transfer files from other wikimedia projects, please give the
new version a try, and report bugs to me. As this is a complete
rewrite, it might lack lots of nice details that you were used to from
the old version, and I'll try to add them again where needed.
Cheers,
Magnus