Over the weekend I had some problem with causality. I found this
page on Commons,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pine_Grove_Springs_Hotel,_Spofford_L…
which claims to have gotten an image from my web site,
http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/picture/1849742/Pine_Grove_Springs_Hotel_Spof…
which in turn claims to have gotten the image from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pine_Grove_Springs_Hotel,_Spofford_Lake,_…
which also claims to have gotten the picture from Ookaboo.
Obviously this doesn't make sense. Although this image is old enough
that we're not going to have anyone getting angry about attribution,
but our users deserve to have sensible provenance information for this
image.
Ookaboo almost certainly got this image from Wikimedia Commons by
an automated process. It seems that somehow, Wikimedia Commons
re-imported the image from Ookaboo.
I'll grant that a large majority of images on Ookaboo were
gathered by an automated process that found images on Commons and
enriched the metadata. However, Ookaboo now allows users to add
images, and Ookaboo is now gathering images that aren't in Commons, see:
http://about.ookaboo.com/a/about/add_a_picture
Specifically, we're tuning our image loading process to fill gaps
in what Commons has, so I'd like to invite people to add our images to
Commons -- however, we ought to have a mechanism to prevent mistakes
like the one above.
Any ideas?
