On 22 March 2010 21:01, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.comragesoss%2Bwikipedia@gmail.com
wrote:
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
What would you say if I uploaded a bunch of pictures of my son to Wikipedia Commons? Would they be deleted? For me there's a lot of value of Flickr being a space I can upload photographs that I choose, rather than needing to wonder if "it likely to be useful to a Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/ project?" I'd rather give my $25 a year to Flickr than face the prospect of arguing about the inclusion of my photos.
I'm not disagreeing; that's why I pay for Flickr. I don't think Commons can or should try to do *everything* Flickr does, but within the scope of Commons, there's still room to add a lot of the fun aspects of Flickr.
I must agree with Sage that whilst Wikimedia Commons and Flickr are similar they are not the same animal. We could certainly learn from them and incorporate many of their tools/features but it's not a zero-sum-game between the two projects.
However, I do see much greater competition between Wikimedia Commons and Flickr *Commons* - Flickr's project for the GLAM sector. For those interested, I wrote a blogpost in January about why Wikimedia Commons was a good thing for GLAMs (arguments you'd all be familiar with) and in response the Sydney Powerhouse Museum wrote this detailed and enlightening reply in defense of Flickr Commons: http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2010/01/25/why-flickr-comm...
For summary, the key reasons listed in that post were:
*1. Context matters a lot.*
*2. User experience and community*
*3. Managing that community*
*4. A sense of content control*
*5. Statistics*
*Now, whilst we can't do a whole lot about number 4, we can improve a lot on numbers 2 and 5, for example. *
*-Liam [[witty lama]] *
wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata
-Sage
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