It's been a long time coming but we're getting close to being able to
release UploadWizard to a broader spectrum of users.
If you are unfamiliar with the project, the idea is to greatly improve
the usability of the uploading experience. We haven't been public for a
while but we are working hard on fixing all the bugs you've reported.
You should see more regular updates from us over this month.
We're pretty sure this will be a giant improvement over the current
experience, although we're aware that there's a degree of skepticism out
there about this, and some questions about whether this will increase
copyvio or have other bad effects. This is where you all come in.
Questions we're considering:
- How best to roll this out -- it should be phased, but how exactly?
- How to monitor how this changes what gets uploaded, does it increase
copyvio, etc. Obviously if this starts to increase we want to pull back
and reassess.
We already add every image uploaded with UploadWizard to the category
"Uploaded With UploadWizard". What tools exist to survey the copyvio
rates, let's say of one category versus all categories? If this requires
coding, does this sound like a cool project to you?
--
Neil Kandalgaonkar <neilk(a)wikimedia.org>
Hi everyone,
some of you might have been aware of the Hackathon that was held in
Amsterdam in honor of Wikipedia's 10th birthday in early january.
At that event Krinkle and i hacked together a WordPress plugin that
makes it possible to easily search and include Wikimedia Commons
pictures in your blog posts. It's far from production ready, but we'd
like to give you a sneak peek and ask for your input, thoughts and of
course bugzilla tickets and patches ;)
Installation instructions and a link to the download can be found here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/PhotoCommons
Let us know what you think, and feel free to tweet and blog about it,
of course using the plugin to find a freely licensed image for your
blog post ;)
Thanks,
-- Hay / Husky
Hey there. As part of our efforts to make uploading better, I spec'ed
out a Geolocation widget. It will probably first appear in UploadWizard
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UploadWizard/Location
Your next question might be, when is UploadWizard being released for
real? We plan to be have something that can go live to many users by the
end of this month. See the other post I'm making about UploadWizard's
release.
--
Neil Kandalgaonkar <neilk(a)wikimedia.org>
SPARC and the Open Access Initiative are running an annual contest to
find the best video by students about open access (the limited
scholarly version). The best entries will win ... that epitome of
free culture ... an Apple product. Mmm.
Would there be value in having these videos on Commons?
SJ
=====================================================================
Contact:
Jennifer McLennan
(202) 296-2296 x 121
jennifer [at] arl [dot] org
OPEN UP! VIDEO CONTEST TO SHOWCASE STUDENTS’ CALL FOR OPEN ACCESS
Entries invited for the 4th Annual Sparky Awards
Washington, DC – The importance of the student stake in opening up
access to scholarly research will be highlighted in Open Up! – the
fourth installment of the annual Sparky Awards student video contest.
Calling on students to articulate their views in a two-minute video,
the contest has been embraced by campuses all over the world and has
inspired imaginative expressions of student support for the potential
of Open Access to foster creativity, innovation, and problem solving.
Open Access is free, immediate, online access to the published results
of scholarly research, combined with the rights to be able to use and
re-use them in the ways that should be possible in the digital space.
Students have been leaders in the creative re-use, remix, and mash-up
of material across the digital realm, and have a fair expectation that
scholarly research should be equally, legally accessible to help
advance their scholarship and ensure the quality of their education.
Students are uniquely positioned to advance Open Access. Through their
publishing, copyright, and policy choices, students – along with
faculty and administrators – can make Open Access to institutional
research outputs and wider access to the whole scholarly record a
reality – today.
Open Up! calls on students to let the world know they support Open
Access and to say why. This year, entries are invited to four
categories:
1. Animation – Drop into the media lab and master that illustration software!
2. Speech – Just say how it is. Skip the fancy editing and use your
120 seconds to tell campus viewers in your own eloquent words why Open
Access matters to you.
3. Remix – Mix it up. Re-use video, music, images and remix with your
own content to create your unique vision of the importance of Open
Access. Content must be re-used legally.
4. People’s Choice – The People choose! Sparky Award entries are
opened up for public vote.
Winners will receive an iPad, iPhone, or iPod and a fabulous "Sparky
Award" statuette. The award-winning videos will be announced in
conjunction with the American Library Association Annual Conference
and a Campus MovieFest Regional Finale, and will be widely publicized
by the sponsoring organizations at public events across North America
throughout the year.
The Sparky Awards are an opportunity for faculty to enhance classes,
as well as for libraries to promote services -- including media
services or information commons, where students can edit video, browse
media, work collaboratively, and develop a good understanding of
copyright. Libraries everywhere are encouraged to host local
installments of the contest.
Entries in the international Sparky Awards competition are now being
accepted and must be received by 12:00AM Eastern time on May 27, 2011.
To be eligible, videos must be freely available on the Internet and
available for use under a Creative Commons License.
The Sparky Awards are organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and
Academic Resources Coalition) and co-sponsored by: the Association of
College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries,
Campus MovieFest, the Center for Social Media, the New Media
Consortium (NMC), the Open Video Alliance, Penn Libraries, the Right
to Research Coalition, Students for Free Culture, the Student PIRGs,
and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
For full details, visit the Sparky Awards Web site at
http://www.sparkyawards.org.
# # #
THE SPARKY AWARDS are organized and sponsored by SPARC (Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an alliance of academic
libraries and research institutions working to build on the
opportunities created by the networked digital environment to advance
the conduct of scholarship. Membership in SPARC is open to libraries
of all sizes. For more information, visit http://www.arl.org/sparc.
_______________________________________________
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FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
--
Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
Food for thought.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michel Vuijlsteke <wikipedia(a)zog.org>
Date: 22 February 2011 16:29
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On 22 February 2011 14:14, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod(a)mccme.ru> wrote:
>
> > We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
> > 1) we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content
> > priority #1, people #2), or
> > 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority
> #1,
> > content #2).
> >
> > So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is
> time
> > we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will
> be
> > creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia
> > will
> > inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the
> > largest and the best...
> >
> > Renata
>
> To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you
> better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over disputed
> content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with disputed
> notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload rules.
> But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of
> course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got any
> templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007),
> except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the
> article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other editors
> concerning the articles I have written.
>
I don't think it has to be as obviously annoying as slathering templates all
over pages or wikilawyering the newbies away -- it's often much more subtle
how content/data seems to be considered more important than people.
One interaction I encountered recently is typical. Michiel Hendryckx, one of
Belgium's best-known photographers, started uploading fairly
high-resolution, good quality images to Wikipedia (well, Commons) on 3 July
2010. Stuff like this 1983 Chet Baker portrait:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chet675.jpg
The first message on his talk page was a request to confirm his identity
(which he did).
The second message was a complaint by Nikbot (no valid license for one
particular image). A couple of hours later, at 10:51 on 4 July, the next
message is from CategorizationBot, asking Hendryckx to add categories to his
images.
The third message, not six hours later, was this:
*Please categorize our images !!!*
You already have been asked by a bot to categorize your images. Therefore I
don't understand why you keep on uploading images without categories.
Uploading images without categorizing them doesn't make sense. Only
categorized images can be found!
I'm pretty sure the user in question meant really well, but *this* is what
that focusing on content over people means to me. It's in the small things,
the interactions that experienced Wikipedians take in their stride, but that
can end up scaring people away.
It's like the last message on Hendryckx' talk page, dated 1 February 2011: a
notification that one if this images is listed at commons:deletion requests,
and to "please do not take the deletion request personally... thank you!".
Follow the link to the discussion (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Van_istend…):
turns out the requester couldn't see the image. His/her first action was to
nominate the image for deletion. Took about three hours for someone to
confirm that no, the image works perfectly fine for them, and about five
hours for the original person to close the deletion request ("thanks").
Again: content over people. No personal interaction with the photographer,
no message on the photographer's talk page after the deletion request was
closed, nothing. The last interaction Hendryckx had on Commons -- on 19
February, almost three weeks after the deletion request was closed -- was a
baffled question (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Deletion_requests/File:Van_i…),
asking what on Earth is wrong with the image, and that he'd like to at least
know why it needed to be deleted.
Again, I'm sure the user in question meant really well again, but here too:
content over people. Drive-by templating, shoot first, don't ask questions,
don't even provide feedback, trust people will read every last word in the
templates, etc.
Michel Vuijlsteke
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