A specific project to improve communication between communities and usability of Wikimedia Commons, you mean? I've been kicking that idea in the back of my head for some months now. We could ask users across WMF projects what difficulties they usually find on Commons and ask them to suggest what Commons could improve to help them. I just opened such a discussion on pt.wp Village pump...
Maybe what we are needing is feedback. Or are we having feedback but not listening to it?

Patrícia

--- On Sat, 6/12/08, Michael Maggs <Michael@Maggs.name> wrote:

From: Michael Maggs <Michael@Maggs.name>
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
To: snooze210904@yahoo.se, "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" <commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:23 PM

This is indeed a problem, and over the last few years it is my impression that
non English speakers have become less comfortable on Commons.  Even such
important pages as Commons Scope still only have two translations (and part of a
third) three months after the August re-write went live.  Most non-English
speakers cannot even tell what Commons is for!

Our admins are not I think normally aggressive, but they are (perfectly
properly) rigorous in deleting copyvios.
 Without local-language explanation,
what can to an English speaker appear an obvious deletion can, I am sure, seem
like an agressive act to the uploader.

As Patricia says, there is no magic bullet and the need is to build up a
committed group of users who pro-actively translate pages, templates and so on,
and who can help our non-English users with upload issues.   This will take time
and will require sustained effort.

Would there be interest in setting up a Commons Project to attempt to address
this in a systematic way?

Michael

--- On Sat, 6/12/08, Michael Maggs <Michael@Maggs.name> wrote:

This is indeed a problem, and over the last few years it is my impression that
non English speakers have become less comfortable on Commons.  Even such
important pages as Commons Scope still only have two translations (and part of a
third) three months after the August re-write went live.  Most non-English
speakers cannot even tell what Commons is for!

Our admins are not I think normally aggressive, but they are (perfectly
properly) rigorous in deleting copyvios. Without local-language explanation,
what can to an English speaker appear an obvious deletion can, I am sure, seem
like an agressive act to the uploader.

As Patricia says, there is no magic bullet and the need is to build up a
committed group of users who pro-actively translate pages, templates and so on,
and who can help our non-English users
 with upload issues.   This will take time
and will require sustained effort.

Would there be interest in setting up a Commons Project to attempt to address
this in a systematic way?

Michael

Patricia Rodrigues wrote:
> Lars,
> 
> Thank you very much for your e-mail. I'm afraid I don't have any
good answers for you - your concern about how to treat people from other
communities is a big concern for many people, including myself. I'm afraid I
don't have a magic bullet for your problem, but I find the idea of allowing
local uploads and then have some sort of automatic forwarding to Commons when
things are locally checked a very good one.
> There is a striking lack of support for non-English speakers. As you might
know, pt.wikipedia also disabled local uploads and the problem you mentioned for
sv.wp also stands for pt.wp. I found lately several instances where pt users
were perhaps not
 dealt with in the best manner mainly because of lack of
communication. There was in most cases no attempt to fetch a Commons
"regular" speaking Portuguese to help. We have a list of
administrators by language that is perhaps not being put to use. In any case,
it's not covering all languages. If Swedes are in general good English
speakers/writers and you find problems, imagine what it is to deal with (mainly)
portuguese and brazillians that in most cases have about zero knowledge of
English.
> No, Commons is far from being good as a multilingual project. I
wouldn't recommend disabling local uploads nowadays. Resolving the problems
you mentioned requires more communication skills, which we are lacking right
now. Our warnings are too scary and many of our admins too aggressive. I'm
not sure what we could do to improve the current state of things, but something
must change.
> Cheers,
> Patrícia
>
 
> --- On *Sat, 6/12/08, Lars Aronsson /<lars@aronsson.se>/* wrote:
> 
>     From: Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se>
>     Subject: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
>     To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>     Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:30 AM
> 
>     I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986, I speak
English,     I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on
the     English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on    
Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on     Wikisource.  I
don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying     that I'm not
a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on     Commons is full of
deletion requests.  I occasionally contribute a     lot to Commons, but in
between I might be away for a few months,     often long enough for deletions to
go through.
>
 
>     The idea that I might be a stable, long time contributor, well    
versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to     take legal
responsibility for what I have
>      uploaded, hasn't     occurred to the people posting these
deletion requests.  Instead,     images are deleted 7 days after the warning is
posted.  This is     completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal 
   veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals.
> 
>     Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous.  Sometimes the    
conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was     perfectly
legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished     for this. In
the last year or two, the community culture on     Commons has made this kind of
drive-by-deletion-request something     normal.  When I pointed out to another
user that she needed to     explain why some
 images should be deleted, *I* was
told to behave.
> 
>     http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LA2
> 
> 
>     The Swedish Wikipedia is among those that no longer allows image    
uploads, because everything should go on Commons.  This means we
>          are recruiting Swedish newcomers to join Commons and upload their
    images there.  These are not programmers.  They don't always speak    
English.  They might be afraid of technology, and think that     anything that
goes wrong is their fault.  (Yes, this includes     women and older people.) 
Still, we want them to contribute     because they might have unique pictures to
share.  Typically, if     they are helped to set up a user account, the user
interface at     Commons will be set to Swedish.
> 
>     One person who is not a newcomer, but a computer user pioneer in    
his field since the 1980s, is Sven Rosborn,
 archaeologist and     manager of the
viking museum at Foteviken in southern Sweden.  He     has contributed dozens of
his own photos and maps.  He was a     speaker at the Wikipedia Academy
conference in Sweden some weeks     ago. He does speak English, only perhaps not
as eagerly as I.  He     is not a programmer.  His user talk page
>      is also full of deletion     requests.  Two months after the fact, he
enters and anwers in     Swedish that these are his own self-made images and
maps.  But     then the result of the request is already "the media was
deleted".
> 
>     http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sven_Rosborn
> 
> 
>     Both myself and Sven are people who don't give up easily on    
Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons.  We could take a lot of     mistreatment. 
But what about the real newcomers?
> 
>     With the current behaviour of the Wikimedia Commons
 community, I    
find it pointless to try to recruit new contributors.  It would be     like
pouring water into a bucket with a hole..  This hole needs to     mended first. 
So, how do we do that?
> 
>     How do others manage to recruit newcomers to Wikimedia Commons?
>     Are there any success stories in public outreach on Commons?
> 
> 
>     If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia and has the    
Swedish
>      language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then     why
should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in     English? 
Some of these template messages have links to     translations in other
languages, but that is an awkward solution.     Will the requestor be able to
read the user's answer in Swedish?     Shouldn't it be possible to
assign Swedish speaking admins to     patroll contributions by Swedish speaking
newcomers?  That's how
     it would work if all images were uploaded
directly to the Swedish     Wikipedia.  And the reason we moved images to
Commons is not     because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English
messages     or admins who fail to speak Swedish.
> 
>     Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers    
can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are     patrolled by
Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images     can be automatically
forwarded to Commons,
>      instead of the other     way around. Even though this would require
software development,     this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the
admin community     on Commons.
> 
> 
>     --       Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson..se)
>       Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
> 
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