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-commons-and-why-wikimedia-commons-is-very-different/

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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