Personally, I have the various share buttons in all sites deactivated
by browser extensions as much as possible. I know alike I hope most
people how to paste a url in an email, or--if I should ever want
to--add it to a Facebook page, and that meetws any need I am likely to
have.
Others feel differently. We are providing an encyclopedia for the use
of everybody, and our goal should be to facilitate this use to the
extent we can with compromising our principles. If people want to use
our pages for sharing on the various services, there is no reason to
discourage. We're not here to build PageRank as such, but we are here
to make our information as widely available as possible.
On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
This is a good thing to watch for, but I
don't see how it relates to the
idea of having "share" buttons.
Wikimedia projects already have towering, monumental PageRank. And our
URLs can already be submitted to social media, and there are obvious
opportunities for SEO hacks already. Luckily we have a pretty vigilant
community.
The "share" button makes it easier for ordinary users to share things
via social media. I don't see how it enables SEO spammers any more than
we already do.
But I'm not super familiar with that world, perhaps you can explain it
further?
We don't want to include a "Share in spammy site" button.
there's people out there who really hate Facebook.
"Facebook", "Twitter", "Digg", "Reddit",
"StumbleUpon", "Delicious".
If we want to avoid people complaining, we just have to do nothing.
And of course, until the social media sites standardize on some API,
there's always the question of which sites to include in a "share"
widget, and whether this means some form of approbation. Personally, I
don't agree that putting a "Digg" button on the site means that we
approve of Digg or whatever, it's just a convenience.
It would be nice to support a public API if there's one, allowing the
user to choose the service, and then not allow any other site unless
they implement it.
I am no fan of social media sites, and mostly find those buttons not
worth the space they take. Is it so hard to share one link without them?
And is it worth showing those images to averybody for all our images?
I mean, it has a point for a piece of news or a brilliant blog post
where my first reaction may be "let all people know it" [1].
But for a image site? I would expect browsing commons to dowload an
image, use it in another page, maybe set it as a wallpaper. But not to
"share the image with others" [2]. I would instead share the Wikipedia
article about the topic the image is about.
1- Yes, you see those buttons on all blog posts, because they obviously
think all those boring entries are brilliant or perhaps 'just in case'.
Let they dream.
A blog post of a respectable size will have those small buttons at the
bottom being only a tiny fraction of the article area.
OTOH in the commons case, they will be seen at the same time as the
image (no need to scroll) and taking perhaps up to half the image area.
2- I would accept doing an exception for milestone images which could
have more sharing needs (but why not share the local page about the
milestone instead?).
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