On 2/23/11 6:20 PM, geni wrote:
On 23 February 2011 17:40, Paul Houlepaul@ontology2.com wrote:
If you wanted to encourage a 'game mechanic' in Commons, I think
you'd want to make it first of all a friendly competition to 'catch them all' and secondarily a competition to get better quality photographs. I think the ideal Commons photographer would be a person who's interested in some specific category (say going to concerts and snapping pictures of musicians or taking pictures of birds.) To support this there's a need for tools that make it clear where the holes are, both in the sense of "We don't have any pictures of X" or "We'd like to get better pictures of X".
Problem is that this is in practice a far better fit for wikipedia where such lists are generated in passing than commons.
For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects#Objects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Photos_requested#A_History_of...
To take an example from my activity, much of my plant photography is motivated by checking off a published list of the thousand-odd taxa recorded in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas. I've been doing penciled annotation of the physical list, partly because I don't want to have to fight over having a WP or commons version of the list. It would be very convenient to have it in commons to track what pics we are still looking for, and be able to point my fellow Vegas plant people at it, but I just know that there would be a nonstop parade of busybodies arguing that the list (full of redlinks ZOMG!) is inappropriate for commons.
There are all kinds of possible experiments, but we need to get back to a spirit of being willing to try stuff, and not forbidding everything that doesn't adhere to a narrow view of what commons is good for.
Stan