Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
I don't dispute anything you say, but I was just suggesting that Wikimedia Commons could also be a good a platform.
In some ways Commons should be even better for scientific work, since items are more "personal" by default at Flickr, and if one wants to collaborate one has to use workarounds or specifically grant permission. On Wikimedia projects there is more of a culture around collaboration by default, and contributing to general knowledge.
If it becomes a good platform, yes. It's got to become a bit more readerly than just a "private staging area for wikipedia content", which it is perceived as today.
There's the issue of making it easy to find things, but also a more fundamental issue of inclusionism vs. exclusionism. You can get away with a weaker navigation interface if you've got more content, since some of it is going to have passable metadata, if only by accident.
Personally, I participate in Wikipedia very little because of exclusionism. I'll certainly delete a spam link here, correct a typo there, or correct a fact, but I'm not going to invest hours and hours of my life into writing stuff that somebody can delete because it's "not notable."
I think Flickr is successful as a photo repository precisely because it's full of junk. I upload maybe 10% of the shots I take into Flickr. Many of these shots are only of interest to me, my friends, and family, but I also took a better shot of the capitol building than the one that the NY Times used today (and paid an arm and a leg to Getty for the privilege) If I knew that my images could be deleted by somebody, I wouldn't upload any at all (I might not even ~take~ any.)
Now, since people have uploaded millions and millions of "personal" images, it's possible to come in and select the good ones. This kind of after-the-fact curation is much more practical than hoping that people are going to show up at your stone soup party.
I don't think that things are, objectively, bad at Yahoo as people think.
It wasn't an opinion on Yahoo's continued financial health. They're just fundamentally not in the business of public knowledge.
Based on my experience in the "digital library" field, I've got little faith in any non-profit web publishing venture. For instance, you're working on some grant that's going to expire. I worked at a library that did over 100 "digital library" projects, and thought that they were doing financially well for a while It took a while to realize that a one-time $50,000 grant was going to really cost them $5,000 a year in annual costs forever... And that no funding agency whatsoever was interested in supporting the long-term cost of such projects.
In an extreme example, I worked for a service that saves readers $500 million a year in journal subscription costs but that has struggled to find any funding source to pay a meager $250,000 /year budget. People celebrate this service, but few realize how close it's come to destruction. In the meantime, a group of people in the same building were getting $2M/year to develop a web site that never developed an audience.
Businesses in the for-profit sector seem to systematically eliminate non-profits on the web. The root cause of this is that for-profit businesses stand to make a profit when the offer a better service to their users. They've got an incentive to make things 2% better because that means they can make 2% more money... The people involved get a bonus, the shareholders get some, everybody is happy. Make things 2% better this week, and 1% better this week systematically, and soon you're hundreds and hundreds of times better than a niggardly non-profit that's ruled over by somebody who's leading it because they're an expert in "subject X" or "subject Y" which could be any subject at all, so long as it isn't about making web sites or giving users a good experience
Yes, wikimedia is a counterexample, but it's really the only one. It would be interesting to understand why it's succeeded in a space where everything else has failed.
Even if we could trust Yahoo to be in the image-metadata game forever, Flickr photos are only accessible as long as the owner is still paying. In 10 years, Flickr will be as outdated as Geocities, and even the content owners will have moved on. All those photos available on the astronomy groups today will be disappearing, one by one.
My understanding is that they don't take your photos down when you quit paying; "PRO" membership in flickr increases your upload quota, but discontinuing it has no effect on what you've already uploaded.
It's no so clear what will replace Flickr and when it will happen. It's hard to displace entrenched companies in two-sided markets. Any replacement is going to need to be radically better than Flickr, not just 10% better.
At best, the very few photos which are CC-licensed can be copied elsewhere. (It's unclear to me whether metadata like the astrotags is also CC-licensed.)
Personally this is what I do.