On 04/07/07, Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/3/07, Barcex barcexwiki@gmail.com wrote:
I Agree on this point, and think that the real problems why Commons is not so successful are not related to its name but to the MediaWiki software (as is now) that is very good to write encyclopedias but awful to implement an image bank. The concept of "wiki" (easy edit with full history of changes) is very useful for our needs, but the implementation with MediaWiki is far from being good.
Barcex
This issue has come up multiple times, but without much result. What specific features does Commons need to have? A list of this might be interesting, because their are very likely users who are willing to implement those kind of things, either as an extension, javascript hack or external service.
Well part of the point is that we need certain functionality as native MediaWiki functionality. - Check-usage - CommonsTicker - image-focused search engine - User Gallery - much-enchanced newimages patrol - Deletion work queue - Wikimedia image transfer tool
You won't be surprised to notice that all of these tools exist as external tools on the Toolserver. The first three in particular NEED to be native MW. It is ridiculous that every time the toolserver falls over, Commons deletions go back to the dark ages (a couple of years ago) where literally admins deleted stuff blind, with no idea about who it would affect and no way to find that information out.
- Flickr transfer tool
(OH WAIT WE HAVE THAT BUT YOU NEED MAGIC SKILLS TO GET EXTENSIONS ENABLED)
If you want to know what functionality Commons needs, look at what our external tools do and what our bots do.
- category moving/renaming - image renaming (well, bots don't do this, and it's promised to be coming soon)
If you want to know about what functionality Commons needs, dream about what might be possible.
- Might it ever be possible we could sort categories by date added to category? - Might it ever be possible we could 'auto-collapse' subcategories of a category with one click? - Might it ever be possible we could union/intersect categories? (also promised at one time, not sure what the status is now) - Might it ever be possible we could have properly multilingual category names? - Might it ever be possible we could search on strutured metadata fields like date or author? - Might it ever be possible we'd be able to rate images two ways, for both general quality, and for 'copyright believablity' (for want of a better phrase)? And from there, be able to easily find and view unrated images, poorly rated images and highly rated images? - Might it ever be possible that Commons was as easy to use as Flickr?
This bug http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3712 also has some more thoughts/ranting from me on the subject.
Commons: Bugs is as Uber Halogen said, a good start; Commons:Tools is another one.
cheers Brianna