2008/10/17 Kat Walsh kat@mindspillage.org:
So first of all I think that it's important to congratulate Richard and the NYC Wikimedians for putting together this event and getting so many new photos of local landmarks, and I hope that other local groups put together similar events in the future!
I want to wholeheartedly support what Kat is saying here. Both WMF and the Chapters want to support outreach activities like the NYC project. The questions about project scope are legitimate. Within any given photo "mission", presumably only some relatively small percentage of photos taken will turn out to be actually useful.
Speaking purely as a community member, I do support, in the absence of better processes, that Commons itself is used as the quality vetting tool for these processes. And I think it'll be a learning experience how to incorporate these quality vetting processes into the event planning for future scavenger hunts.
What I think we might want to work towards is a situation where Commons can support a "holding cache" for images coming from different external sources: be it an outreach event like this, an RSS feed, the Flickr API to CC-licensed images, etc. A special page (somewhat similar to the FlickrLickr tool) could then be used to mass-edit metadata and select the images that are relevant for inclusion. That way, basic QA could be applied before the images appear as regular uploaded files on Commons.
This is something we could put some tech resources towards as a contractor project. Thoughts?