This is indeed a problem, and over the last few years it is my impression that non English speakers have become less comfortable on Commons. Even such important pages as Commons Scope still only have two translations (and part of a third) three months after the August re-write went live. Most non-English speakers cannot even tell what Commons is for!
Our admins are not I think normally aggressive, but they are (perfectly properly) rigorous in deleting copyvios. Without local-language explanation, what can to an English speaker appear an obvious deletion can, I am sure, seem like an agressive act to the uploader.
As Patricia says, there is no magic bullet and the need is to build up a committed group of users who pro-actively translate pages, templates and so on, and who can help our non-English users with upload issues. This will take time and will require sustained effort.
Would there be interest in setting up a Commons Project to attempt to address this in a systematic way?
Michael
Patricia Rodrigues wrote:
Lars,
Thank you very much for your e-mail. I'm afraid I don't have any good answers for you - your concern about how to treat people from other communities is a big concern for many people, including myself. I'm afraid I don't have a magic bullet for your problem, but I find the idea of allowing local uploads and then have some sort of automatic forwarding to Commons when things are locally checked a very good one. There is a striking lack of support for non-English speakers. As you might know, pt.wikipedia also disabled local uploads and the problem you mentioned for sv.wp also stands for pt.wp. I found lately several instances where pt users were perhaps not dealt with in the best manner mainly because of lack of communication. There was in most cases no attempt to fetch a Commons "regular" speaking Portuguese to help. We have a list of administrators by language that is perhaps not being put to use. In any case, it's not covering all languages. If Swedes are in general good English speakers/writers and you find problems, imagine what it is to deal with (mainly) portuguese and brazillians that in most cases have about zero knowledge of English. No, Commons is far from being good as a multilingual project. I wouldn't recommend disabling local uploads nowadays. Resolving the problems you mentioned requires more communication skills, which we are lacking right now. Our warnings are too scary and many of our admins too aggressive. I'm not sure what we could do to improve the current state of things, but something must change. Cheers, Patrícia
--- On *Sat, 6/12/08, Lars Aronsson /lars@aronsson.se/* wrote:
From: Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> Subject: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:30 AM I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986, I speak English, I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on the English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on Wikisource. I don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying that I'm not a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on Commons is full of deletion requests. I occasionally contribute a lot to Commons, but in between I might be away for a few months, often long enough for deletions to go through. The idea that I might be a stable, long time contributor, well versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to take legal responsibility for what I have uploaded, hasn't occurred to the people posting these deletion requests. Instead, images are deleted 7 days after the warning is posted. This is completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals. Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous. Sometimes the conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was perfectly legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished for this. In the last year or two, the community culture on Commons has made this kind of drive-by-deletion-request something normal. When I pointed out to another user that she needed to explain why some images should be deleted, *I* was told to behave. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LA2 The Swedish Wikipedia is among those that no longer allows image uploads, because everything should go on Commons. This means we are recruiting Swedish newcomers to join Commons and upload their images there. These are not programmers. They don't always speak English. They might be afraid of technology, and think that anything that goes wrong is their fault. (Yes, this includes women and older people.) Still, we want them to contribute because they might have unique pictures to share. Typically, if they are helped to set up a user account, the user interface at Commons will be set to Swedish. One person who is not a newcomer, but a computer user pioneer in his field since the 1980s, is Sven Rosborn, archaeologist and manager of the viking museum at Foteviken in southern Sweden. He has contributed dozens of his own photos and maps. He was a speaker at the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks ago. He does speak English, only perhaps not as eagerly as I. He is not a programmer. His user talk page is also full of deletion requests. Two months after the fact, he enters and anwers in Swedish that these are his own self-made images and maps. But then the result of the request is already "the media was deleted". http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sven_Rosborn Both myself and Sven are people who don't give up easily on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons. We could take a lot of mistreatment. But what about the real newcomers? With the current behaviour of the Wikimedia Commons community, I find it pointless to try to recruit new contributors. It would be like pouring water into a bucket with a hole.. This hole needs to mended first. So, how do we do that? How do others manage to recruit newcomers to Wikimedia Commons? Are there any success stories in public outreach on Commons? If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia and has the Swedish language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then why should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in English? Some of these template messages have links to translations in other languages, but that is an awkward solution. Will the requestor be able to read the user's answer in Swedish? Shouldn't it be possible to assign Swedish speaking admins to patroll contributions by Swedish speaking newcomers? That's how it would work if all images were uploaded directly to the Swedish Wikipedia. And the reason we moved images to Commons is not because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English messages or admins who fail to speak Swedish. Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons. -- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson..se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists..wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
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