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?).