On 10/02/07, bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com wrote: <snip history of en.wikinews>
Today there is not really any active anti-commons feelings. Mostly because commons has became a lot nicer. (pfctdayelise especially helped get commons in people's good books again imho). People no longer delete stuff whilly nilly, and if they do, they can always undelete. However there's still not a great deal of pro-commons feelings. When I first came to wikinews, the general opinion was, "if its free, you better be sure to upload to commons". Now a days its, "if you want to you can, but don't go out of your way".
Thanks for writing this great detailed overview. It is useful to be reminded of the impact (positive and negative) that our work can have, and quite humbling.
EN.wn is far from the only project that has been seriously annoyed at Commons. Some projects/people still are. See this Jan 2007 thread: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta:Requests_for_deletion&o... MaxSem who is a steward stating, "Meta must not depend on Commons... We already had problems with Commons, when they deleted an image for being a resized duplicate. No more problems, everythig should be under control of local admins." Aphaia, who is on the COMcom, edits the Foundation website, heavily involved with translation efforts at the Foundation-level, says, "I have seen they deleted logos which were used on other our websites and they claimed they had made checks. Consequently we found sometimes red links on foundationwiki and others. I think they are trying to improve the project on a good faith, but at the same time their work isn't reliable enough trust all images we need locally.... Forgotten past events could easily happen I am afraid.... [Once] failed, they promised improvement but the similar happened again - not once but multiple times. So I claim it is generally too risky to have Commons host our crucial materials. They do not care if the image they are going to delete is really not used. If they check Wikipedia and not used it is just okay for them. I am fed up with such their excuses. I think therefore we cannot take the further risk specially after our project becomes larger than those incidents happened, and our mistakes can take attention from the external people."
I sincerely hope we have improved since then, due to better CheckUsage tools and wider awareness. But it is clear that trust gained is fragile and needs to be treated with serious respect, because it can be lost so easily and once lost, might never be regained.
Anyway back to the EN.wikinews... There are advantages for all projects that choose to upload all [free] media to Commons only. The main one is: massively reduced maintenance work. Image maintenance (as in, checking stuff is properly sourced and licensed, and possibly categorising) is a big pain, and not really the point of any project (except Commons). In farming the work off to us, you are saving your admins a big task. That's my opinion, anyway.
I should probably start uploading our free images to commons (Most of them are well categorized and sourced), but its not exactly at the top of my priority list (My current priority is to bug the crap out of people who didn't source their (locally uploaded) images)
See above... :)
Also it currently doesn't help that we don't have a commons ticker on wikinews. It was disabled because the page got too long, and updates kept failing, which is my fault because i didn't archive it enough, mostly because I didn't get through it all. However it was still very useful (or even the deleted template [[commons:template:Used On Wikinews]] would be quite useful in combination of related changes.
Well, you can fix your CommonsTicker, right? It sounds like you need a bit of help maintaining the page though... you should call on your fellow Newsies!
Another thing that might be of help, is to have a special upload page for wikinews. ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/special:upload?uselang=wikinews ) There are some things for wikinews that don't apply elsewhere, and it'd be good to have a custom page.
:O
That's a totally brilliant idea. OMG we could even have ?uselang-ownwork on the Commons sidebar, that would be brilliant...
Well I support creating this (although it probably wouldn't be linked prominently from anywhere in Commons - but Wikinews is enough, I imagine) - shall we do it? Let me know what info you want. (Also I would call it ENwikinews just in case other wikinewses do it too)
- Introduce user recognition system.
Maybe take some inspiration from http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Contributing_Reporter_Awards
Yep, that is very much what I had in mind, except for a variety of tasks. Is anyone in "charge" of giving the awards? How does that work?
- Some degree of press recognition and fame :)
Help if google images saw you. I see more images that are local uploads to wikinews come on Google images then stuff from commons.
Yes. Sigh...
thanks again for this great email! cheers Brianna