On 17/08/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)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?
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk