[Commons-l] Yotophoto (free image search engine) developments

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: 10-Mar-2007 07:51 Subject: Re: [Provide feedback] Wikimedia Commons photos Brianna, First, sorry for the delayed response and thanks for your comments. I especially appreciate feedback from people in your position as I want Yotophoto to be embraced by those contributing to important projects like Wikimedia Commons. Right now, most of the links to go back to Wikipedia instead of the Commons for the main reason that awareness of the Wikipedia project is higher than that of Commons. It's just easier for people to get their head around it if they are unfamiliar with Commons. (As an aside, I find it pretty tough explaining how everything works with regards to 'free' licensing and how we index only third party sites and so on. You wouldn't believe how often people write us to ask if they can use one of "our" images or how they can upload their own images to us). One thing I also like about linking to the Wikipedia page over the Commons one is that the list of pages that link to the image seem to be more accurate on Wikipedia than Commons. Is this your experience as well? Any feedback on this would be helpful. See #3 below for a little more on why this is relevant. Having said that, I'm working a new version that will change a few things. Here's an overview: 1) Every site we index will have it's own "about" page. Here we will explain a bit about what each site is about, how to contribute, what kind of licenses the site allows and so on. In the case of the Wikipedia and Commons we intend to outline the relationship between the two and how Wikipedia will often hold a 'fake' image for images that come from Commons as you described. [I told him about Check Usage.] 2) Most images will have an intermediate preview (probably in a pop-up lightbox). From here we can provide a link to *both* the Commons and Wikipedia pages for an image. What do you think? 3) Yotophoto will eventually index images using captions from the various Wikipedia articles that include said image. So if an image doesn't have a complete description on it's own page - we can still index it based on all the captions used for that image throughout Wikipedia. Commons tends to have decent image descriptions but for images only on Wikipedia taken from third party sites (say a PD US-GOV image), the descriptions are often lacking. [I said: On Commons we have enough trouble forcing people to annotate their files with basic information like licensing and author, let alone a decent content description. Many people when they submit files, are submitting them with a specific purpose in mind and are focused on that, not on the possibility that the file might be re-used in the future for something else. Also when one is looking at an image, it is often quite self-explanatory, so the user doesn't feel the need to explain the purpose or background to the file beyond three words. Of course that doesn't stack up well for searching since machines can't "read" images well at all (or even, mostly, at all). ] 4) Yotophoto would like to enable one click republishing of images found so people can repost to their own blogs etc. To do this we will provide a copy and paste HTML code they can use. This code will link back to the image source (ie. Commons) as well as to the image license. Sites like Commons will get tons of back-links and exposure in this way I think. I like to think of this as the "Flickerization of Wikipedia" (and Commons). [I forwarded this part to wikitech-l to see what they say.] 5) The depth of the index will increase massively. We intend to one day have the entire Commons and Wikipeida image collections searchable (right now it is only a fraction) including not only photos but other types of images as well like maps, charts, flags and so on. I'd love to know what you think, and if you have any further suggestions. As well, feel free to invite anyone from the Commons to submit their ideas to me as well. I hadn't seen the Mayflower tool before but it looks quite nice - I want to look into it more. Regards, On 2/26/07, brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l End of Commons-l Digest, Vol 22, Issue 12 *****************************************