On Feb 15, 2008 6:31 PM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com> wrote:
After the recent discussion about image submissions through OTRS, I'm
putting my code where my mouth is:
CISS - the Commons Image Submission System
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/cgi-bin/ciss.pl
How it works: mail your images to
magnus@ts.wikimedia.org
and the mails (and images, if you included any) will appear on the site above.
That, said, it doesn't work - yet! It's a partially working demo with
more flaws than I can count, so any help is welcome.
Some flaws in this version:
* Uses my email adr on the toolserver
* No upload to commons
* No answering to mails
* No mailing thread management
* No real thumbnails
* No mail deletion/closing/archiving
* No spam filter
* No flood prevention
Hell, it doesn't even sort mails by date yet!
Despite all this, it should demonstrate the ideas I have for that system.
Ideas? Comments? Coding support?
Magnus
Love the idea so far! I'd be happy to help out with image submissions on OTRS, but I don't have access (yet?) and am not familiar with the system. If there is a tool like this it would be great and a good way for all Commons admins/trusted users to help out with submissions.
I'm afraid I can't help out with coding, unless you want some nice CSS to make it look spiffy ;) But ideas I can do...
Ideas beyond what you've listed so far:
* Rating/comment capabilities:
If a user doubts claims that the sender owns the copyright to the photo or took the photo themselves (and discussion with the sender doesn't clear anything up), they can mark it for review by other users before coming to a decision. Sort of like a deletion request where you get input from various individuals before deciding, but smaller. :)
* Categorization by photo type for review by "experts" on the subject
Rather complex and not really necessary, but I think if it's possible and not too complicated to code it would be a great feature **when we end up getting more than 20 or so submissions per day**. Before that, somewhat useless, but hey; good to plan in advance!
We're probably going to get images of all sorts of things, and of course not every admin/user is familiar with every subject out there. I wouldn't dream of handling submissions of mathematical graphs etc. that have complex categorization needs and need to be checked for accuracy before uploading. Those I'd want to shuffle off to the people who are very good at mathematics. If we get photos of ballet positions or sheets of dance notation, well the mathematic whizzes out there aren't going to know what the heck to do with them; they'll want to shuffle them off to me (15 years of ballet training is good for SOMETHING, you know ;) ). Plant and animal categories are also notoriously difficult to navigate, and if the sender has no clue what species the photo they took is of it would be nice to be able to let someone who can identify them take care of it.
A drop-down menu that you can use to categorize images with two clicks would be great, and then we can have admins who are knowledgeable in said categories focus on those categories, instead of people trying higgledpiggledy to upload stuff they know nothing about.
Summary:
- Each admin/user "signs up" for or suggests subjects they're familiar with
- categories are added as we have people to look after them, so we don't have categories being ignored/neglected
- Each image would have a drop-down menu with categories that have been added, so anyone can mark the image for review by someone knowledgeable in that field.
Sort of like the wikipedias' "This article is in need of assistance by an editor who is familiar with the subject" tag. You don't HAVE to categorize the photo before uploading if you think you can handle it, but if you're not sure, shuffle it off to the appropriate category.
That's about all I can think of right now.. sorry for the long post but I figure other people might have ideas and suggestions to add too, so here you go! :)
--
-Ayelie
(Editor at Large)