Wikimedia desparately needs more artists. Projects like Wikijunior - a
collection of Wikireaders for kids - need high quality illustrations in
order to flourish.
In my opinion, the Wikimedia Commons should become the central artistic
hub of the Wikimedia community.
What can we do to make it so?
Well, there are a few technical changes that will help:
- New upload form that makes it easier to choose licenses and write
descriptions. I'm planning to hack something together here soon, but it
won't be the super-ultra form that I've created mock-ups for in the
original Commons proposal.
- An external media manager to collect files and batch-upload them to the
Commons, with a nice Windows GUI to boot.
- A better discussion page system. The whole Image talk:, Commons talk:
etc. wiki page system is confusing for newcomers and difficult to track
for us.
But except for the first one, these changes will take months. There are a
few things we can do right now:
Create portals for different communities
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- 2D artists
- 3D artists
- photographers
- filmmakers
- sound experts
The purpose of these portals would be that we can pass on these URLs to
people who know nothing about Wikimedia. Each portal should give a brief
description of the type of files that we want - useful to Wikimedia
projects - and the free content principle. It should also highlight a few
of the existing works in that category as examples, including links to the
Wikimedia projects that use them.
Featured content separated by category
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Successful community art sites have some kind of comment and feedback
process. For us right now, that is [[Commons:Featured picture
candidates]]. I think we need to create this site in all the categories
mentioned above, and link the individual featured content candidate pages
from the portals.
Catalog and systematically approach existing projects
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The largest community art website I know is
deviantart.com. Much of their
content is not of interest to us as it is purely artistic. However, they
have many excellent photos. Alas, most of them are not under an open
content license.
First, we need a list of these projects.
Second, for each of them we need volunteers who search existing content
and browse new content. Virtually all of them have contact forms. In cases
where the content is useful to us, we could post standard messages:
Hi Xy,
your picture [bla] could be useful for the Wikimedia project [abc].
In order to use it there, we would need it under an [[open content]]
license, such as the GNU Free Documentation License.
Would you be willing to put your picture under such a license? I would
then upload it to the Wikimedia Commons, our shared media repository.
If you want, you can also upload it there yourself - see the
[portal link] for further instructions.
I think if these messages are sufficiently personalized, they will not be
considered spam.
Press release
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Once we have the portals more or less in operation, we need to start
working on our first real press release. One good occasion would be the
50,000th media file. I'm picking a reasonably high number so we have some
time to prepare this properly.
This press release would include a real press kit, with examples of our
media and information about the Wikimedia projects. It would also
prominently describe each of the different portals. We could create
variant versions to send to different communities - e.g. photo magazines,
artist weblogs etc.
Rules of exclusion
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During all of this, we need to make it very clear that the Wikimedia
Commons is for Wikimedia projects. People will be pissed off if we delete
excellent artistic works that have no relation to anything we do.
Maybe in the future, art itself will become one of our missions, but right
now it isn't. Anything that's created needs to be tied to the distribution
of knowledge. So that should be emphasized on all the portals.
Getting all of this off the ground will be a huge undertaking, especially
since our community is still small. I will be occupied by Wikinews in the
next few weeks, so I would appreciate it if anyone else took the
initiative to start working on this.
Regards,
Erik