On 24 February 2011 15:22, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
On 2/23/2011 9:20 PM, geni wrote:
Problem is that this is in practice a far better fit for wikipedia where such lists are generated in passing than commons.
And that's a critical insight.
From my perspective, wikipedia is a skeleton and commons is the flesh that's hanging on it. If you want to improve the organization of Commons, you've got the most incredible resource in the world to do that... Wikipedia.
Today, Freebase and Dbpedia can be used together to form a rich and powerful database and ontology that describes the contents of Wikipedia. A "top 100" list doesn't need to be compiled by experts or even by humans, but can be produced by a largely automated process. For instance, you could look for things that are typed '/people/person' in Freebase and then sort them in the order of how many Wikipedia articles and produce a list of the "top 100" people that is pretty good (except for the minor embarrassment that U.S. President #43 is the most linked person in my sample.)
With a little work, it should be possible to build something that makes lists like "Train stations in Poland that don't have pictures in en.wikipedia", though it's a query that's not on my fingertips because my system was built to pay attention to things that have photographs and ignore things that don't.
The problem with at is you are back to single custom lists and a lack of interaction. If you want people to work on becoming better photographers you multiple people focusing on one list. The thing that made the A History of the World in 100 Objects list interesting was not only were there multiple people looking to complete it but that were pics on it that could be improved (Maya maize god statue still could be although it's a tricky one).