On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 3:01 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/12/6 Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com:
You said the problem is a lack of administrators who speak the language, right? What about making cross appointments of administrators who complete a 12 hour online boot camp on Wikimedia Commons procedures?
The job of commons admin requires being a serious heavy-duty copyright nerd, because that's what most of the work is. I'm not sure that can be done in twelve hours.
Absolutely, I used to be very involved in images on enwiki, and thought I would give commons a spin. I've never written why I didn't, so for the hard core commons people just take this as a single data point :)
The culture seems to be to be one of very uneven policy enforcement (why is this public domain http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:K-21.svg ?), and many subpopulations. enwiki images might be crazy, but the policy is largely coherent, even if it is in flux often.
Commons, to me, seems like one group of english speaking people that are extremely strict on copyright to the point that I feel like most of their work is enforcing terrible lowest-common-denominator laws from various countries, making inclusion more strict than any single country's legal system requires, so that they be "compatible" with them all. It seems entirely like a legal game, with laws from every nation on earth being interpreted by the community. This can be fun for some people, but it's not what I would call helpful really.
Alongside that group are various other subgroups that are usually less strict, maybe they don't speak english, or they represent too large a group of images to be mass deleted etc, which are ignored.
I dunno, I don't feel very helpful enforcing ridiculous panorama laws, call me crazy.