As for the Wiki(p|m)edia thing, I have to say I agree 100%, although I don't know what other complications there might be.
On 10/28/10 1:21 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Now, the second part. Finding pictures in Commons is really hard. It seems that categories and textual descriptions are added by the uploader, and rarely modified or enhanced by others. Finding a map of bird migration paths across Europe might be easy, but finding a plain and simple map of Europe is hard.
I was just talking about this with some other people at the WMF... I don't fully understand the ramifications of the debate, but it seems obvious to me that categories as implemented are not useful.
The debate I see on Commons and elsewhere focuses on trying to fix Categories, but frankly IMO it would be better to migrate them to some other systems entirely.
I've been mumbling about creating a design doc or mockups for my ideas to a few people at the WMF... is anyone else interested in working on this?
What I'm thinking: I believe that we have a unique opportunity to make an amazing media curation system, far better than Flickr or Facebook can even dream of doing, and possibly of interest to scientists and other people that need to manage collections of media.
Our main advantage is the wiki model -- anyone can curate, and changes are easily revertible. At the other big image hosting sites, media are private by default and it's *hard* to build community tools, since everyone's concerned about unauthorized changes.
(Of course, our main *disadvantage* is also MediaWiki, since random templates do not add up to a real indexing system. That's the main thing we need to build).