2008/10/17 Kat Walsh <kat(a)mindspillage.org>rg>:
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?
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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