On 08/08/07, Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com wrote:
[offtopic] I am going to do a lightning talk about Commons on Wikimedia Conference Netherlands in October. I will have a quick talk about most of the things pfctdayelise mentioned, but I wonder if you folks have some ideas about some specific things I should mention? (We do have a bad reputation at the Dutch wikis, you know...)
Well, when you take questions, it's likely this will come up. Please just reiterate that we Commoners are human and can make mistakes, but we will also try to fix them when we can; we want to improve relationships between Commons & other wikis because it's really important to us, so please keep talking to us; we can't change past mistakes, only try and learn from them; the actions of one Common users are not necessarily representative of Commons (just in the same way the actions of one nl.wp user are not necessarily representative of nl.wp).
Just listening to people's complaints is very important. Don't brush them off. If people get upset, it means we didn't handle it well, even if we were right. ***Being right is not enough.*** I really believe this. I think it's quite powerful if we can just listen to people's complaints, and say, "I accept that you're upset and we didn't handle this well enough, and I'm sorry. What do you think we can do to improve similar situations in the future?" Try not to get into the specifics about who was right and who was wrong and the specifics.
We can (and IMO should) write help pages and interface messages specifically for people from particular wikis. So we could have Special:Upload?uselang=usersfromnlwp - if they think that could be a helpful thing.
I would mention the tools like Checkusage, Commonsticker, CommonSense. Make sure the Dutch interface for Commons is all good.
I hope this talk goes well. I was so impressed by the Dutch at Wikimania. They were some of my favourite people. :) Please report back when you've done it.
==POTY07== I will post separately about this. But I think we should start getting into gear or at least thinking about things. I think we should close submissions by the end of Nov, hold two weeks of voting, and use the results to make calendar/s. I also think we should have 12-15 different categories of voting and more or less use those as the calendar pictures.
Absolutely. We should start with the preparations somewhere around October. Last year's edition was a great succes, but it also was a great mess. I hope we can make this year's better :)
Please participate at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2007/Preparati...
I now think that instead of asking/wishing for the board to promote us, we need to force them to have to talk about us by creating the interest ourselves. I really think this project could create some serious interest. And maybe if enough proceeds go to the WMF, then we can demand with a little more conviction that they should be earmarked for Commons-specific development. :)
Hmm. Do we have a Commons tshirt? I want one.
No. And no stickers. Please contact a chapter and hassle them to produce these. And then send me some. :)
cheers Brianna