On 17/08/07, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
IIRC almost all the projects started because they were decided to be "not Wikipedia". That doesn't mean they are content to define themselves with such a negative, small designation.
Hey, hey, I just threw it out there. Nothing like navelgazing for a Friday afternoon... :-)
It's honestly something that you hear mumbled a lot, and bits of Commons itself - much less anyone else - seem quite confused over. Who are we doing this *for*? Comments like the bandwith one made me think of it again.
I find the answer to your questions easily here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission "...to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." I don't see how acting as if we only exist for Wikimedia is effective for disseminating our content at all. For one thing there are many similar efforts by different groups around the world. If we act as if we only exist for Wikimedia, we are going to create a lot of wasted unnecessary duplicate effort.
I don't disagree with any of this, incidentally.
Lastly: frankly, *if we don't do it, someone else will.* There is nothing to stop them since all our stuff is freely licensed. So for God's sake let us be the ones to do it and benefit from it. Lest we see some whiz-bang Yahoo app that feeds directly from Commons with our name in tiny tiny print somewhere in a disclaimer.
Perhaps the most pressing reason!
We could probably implement something very similar to flickr's basic "use this image" approach with a link in the toolbox; a "select the size you want" page with preformatted HTML to use it and link back to us.
(eg/ http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1116183939&size=m )
This would probably be the simplest thing to get up and running - he said, waving his hands - and probably more generally useful than most of the other API stuff. However, we'd still need to find a way of getting author and license information standardised, so that the tool could pull them in.
I wonder how many of our images use the nicely-standardised {{Information}} template for metadata?