Commons-l July 2010

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

19 participants
14 discussions

Video skills and equipment
by Lars Aronsson 16 Apr '25

16 Apr '25

I just tried to watch some presentation videos from Wikimania. Some had very weak sound, some had no sound in the first minutes, some only played the first minute and then stopped. I don't think the Wikimania videos are unique in having such problems. Video is new to Commons, and the expert contributors are more familiar with still images. How can we learn to make better videos? Are there some good instructions? Perhaps a free instruction video (Wikibooks, but a video instead of a book) on how to produce good videos is what we need. In fact, the English Wikibooks has a title on "Video Production", http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video_Production but it doesn't have a clear focus (pun not intended). It starts out with discussing satellite TV and has long sections on file formats in different operating systems. There is a help page on Commons for converting video to the Ogg Theora format, but that is only the last step in a long chain. Given that video is new, how can we find and rate videos, nominate "good/featured videos", and give advice on how to improve quality? Is the Commons village pump enough for this? Commons has a separate graphics village pump. Do we also need a separate video village pump? Current digital video cameras use hard disks or memory cards, instead of tape cassettes. Many new models cost less than 300 euro (or dollars), some as little as 120 euro (memory card perhaps not included). Some have a special "Youtube mode", and I guess that kind of usage is what drives the price down. What models are good, and what should one watch out for? We can find free still photos on Flickr and copy them to Commons. Is there somewhere we can find free videos and copy them? Yes, at the Internet Archive. Somewhere else? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Wikidata
by John Vandenberg 24 Nov '10

24 Nov '10

It looks like a solution to bug 4547 is on the horizon. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4547 See also [Wikitech-l] Reasonably efficient interwiki transclusion http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/197322 This will be very useful for templates which Commons has developed, especially language related templates, however I am concerned that people are also planning on using Commons as a repo for Wikipedia infoboxes, and including the *data* on Commons rather than just the template code. e.g. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Peter17/GSoc_2010#Interest This centralisation of data makes sense on many levels, however using Commons as the host of this data will result in many edit wars moving to the Commons project, involving people from many languages. Even the infobox structure can be the cause of edit wars. I think it is undesirable to have these Wikipedia problems added to Commons existing problems. ;-) Tying Wikipedia and Commons closer together is also problematic when we consider the differing audience and scope of each project, especially in light of the recent media problems. If the core templates and data used by Wikipedia are hosted/modified on Commons, it will be more difficult to justify why Commons accepts content which isn't appropriate on Wikipedia. A centralised data wiki has been proposed previously, many times: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/historical http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata_%282%29 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiDatabank Non-WMF projects, such as freebase, dbpedia, etc., have been exploring this space. Isn't it time that we started a new project!? ;-) A wikidata project could use semantic mediawiki from the outset, and be seeded with data from dbpedia. A lot of existing & proposed projects would benefit from a centralised wikidata project. e.g. a genealogy wiki could use the relationships stored on the wikidata project. wikisource and commons could use the central data wiki for their Author and Creator details. -- John Vandenberg

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Preferred licenses
by Neil Kandalgaonkar 30 Aug '10

30 Aug '10

For the new uploader I'm working on[1], we want it to remember your previous preferences about what license to use and maybe a few other things. Here's what I'm thinking about: - We add a new preference for preferred license. - If present, this prefills the upload form with a license. - If absent, no license is prefilled. - Whatever you pick in this form overwrites the preference. That is, uploading a file has the side effect of storing a preference for the next time. I realize this doesn't capture every edge case, but the point is to get behaviour that's simple enough that most people can actually use, and experienced users can work with. Our main difficulty at this point in the upload form is going to be about explaining licenses. I don't want to ask them to do understand something else like "Do you want to keep the same license choice for next time?" before they've even finished uploading this one. If it turns out that we have to ask them about this explicitly, I'd rather leave that to the end of the process. [1] http://commons.prototype.wikimedia.org/ -- this is JUST a prototype, we're changing a lot -- Neil Kandalgaonkar |) <neilk(a)wikimedia.org>

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InstantCommons serving up non-free files
by David Gerard 26 Jul '10

26 Jul '10

This is a sorta-technical sorta-copyright issue. InstantCommons is great stuff, it spreads free content with correct attribution in a marvellous manner. But Commons contains a certain number of non-free files, specifically Wikimedia logos and so forth. I just noticed (on a wiki using InstantCommons) that these are served up through it just the same. Is there any relatively simple way to stop this happening? (Including not caring.) - d.

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Re: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l] Discussion Questions for Potentially-Objectionable Content
by David Gerard 22 Jul '10

22 Jul '10

On 22 July 2010 12:59, R M Harris <rmharris(a)sympatico.ca> wrote: > I’ve posted a series of questions for discussion on the Meta page that hosts > the study (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_C….) Please feel free to visit the page and contribute to the > discussion. Looking at the contributors so far, I'm not sure that discussion is recoverable to any form of usefulness. - d.

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Questions for Discussion around Potentially-Objectionable Content
by R M Harris 22 Jul '10

22 Jul '10

Hello. It’s Robert Harris once again. It’s been just over a month since I began working on the study commissioned by the Wikimedia Board on Potentially Objectionable Content on WMF projects. During that time, I’ve spoken to many people inside and outside Wikimedia, but the time has come, I think, to actively begin a discussion within the communities about some of the questions which I've encountered, specifically around Commons and images within Commons. To that end, I’ve posted a series of questions for discussion on the Meta page that hosts the study (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_C….) Please feel free to visit the page and contribute to the discussion. And please post the link, if you might, anywhere within the projects where you think it might be relevant. I look forward to the comments of any of you who wish to join the discussion. I, of course, am specially interested in what members of Commons think about these things.

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[TODAY] Office Hour for Thursday, July 22, featuring Sue Gardner
by Cary Bass 20 Jul '10

20 Jul '10

(Note: This announcement is also an update to James Owen's prior email announcing Sue would be doing office hours this Friday. The date has been moved up to Thursday. The time remains the same.) On Thursday, July 22, the Wikimedia Office Hour will be hosted by Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Office Hour is from 2230 to 2330 UTC (3:30 PM to 4:30 AM PDT). If you do not have an IRC client, there are two ways you can come chat using a web browser: First is using the Wikizine chat gateway at <http://chatwikizine.memebot.com/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi>. Type a nickname, select irc.freenode.net from the top menu and #wikimedia-office from the following menu, then login to join. Also, you can access Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing wikimedia-office as the channel. You may be prompted to click through a security warning, which you can click to accept. Please feel free to forward (and translate!) this email to any other relevant email lists you happen to be on. -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Auto Reply: Re: [Wikisource-l] Dublin Core and TEI
by laszlo.gal＠oracle.com 16 Jul '10

16 Jul '10

Hi, Thank you for your mail. I'm out of the office till 18th July 2010 with no email access. In the case of any urgent matter please text me on my mobile (see Aria). I'll respond your mail when I return. Thank you, Laszlo

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Dublin Core and TEI
by John Vandenberg 16 Jul '10

16 Jul '10

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Aubrey <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com> wrote: >... > > The issue of metadata is nontheless serious, because it's one of the most > important flaws of Wikisource: not applying standards (i.e Dublin Core) and not > having a proper tools for export/import and harvest metadata is still make us > amateurs, at least for "real" digital libraries (who focus mainly on the > metadata stuff, and sometimes provide either texts or images (it is really rare > to have both)). This is also a problem with Wikimedia Commons. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Dublin_Core > The Perseus project is an *amazing* project, but I regard them far more ahead > than us. The PP is actually a Virtual Research Environment, with tools for > scholars and researcher for studying texts, (concordances and similar stuff). I agree. I would go further; PP will always be far more advanced than a mediawiki system. They store their data in TEI format, which is an extremely rich standard. Wikisource can incorporate some of the TEI concepts by using templates, but I doubt we could ever be a leader in this area, nor do I think we want to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Encoding_Initiative > It happens that I just finished my Master thesis about collaborative digital > libraries for scholars (in the Italian context), and the outcome is quite clear: > researcher do want collaborative tools in DLs, but wiki system are > to simple and (right now) too naive to really help scholars in their work (and > there's a lot of other issues I'm not going to explain here). > > I would love to have PP people involved in collaboration with Wikisource, just > don't know if this is possible. I agree. PP and Wikisource are too different, and have very little to gain from the other. PP wants to improve/increase collaboration & community, but not at the expense of loosing the quality of their metadata. Wikisource wants to improve quality and metadata, but not at the expense of the ability to collaboration and our simple editing interface. Again, interoperability is the first step towards useful 'collaboration'. i.e. Wikisource needs to export TEI. Then we could feed our poorly annotated/described sources into PP, where the academic community would then add the metadata. TEI export would also be useful for wiktionary. > Just one more thing: why this awesome thread has not been linked to the > source-l? Probably that would have been the best place to discuss. ;-) -- John Vandenberg

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Auto Reply: Re: [Wikisource-l] Dublin Core and TEI
by laszlo.gal＠oracle.com 16 Jul '10

16 Jul '10

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Commons-l July 2010