Food for thought.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michel Vuijlsteke wikipedia@zog.org Date: 22 February 2011 16:29 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay) To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 22 February 2011 14:14, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
- we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content
priority #1, people #2), or 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority
#1,
content #2).
So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is
time
we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will
be
creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the largest and the best...
Renata
To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over disputed content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with disputed notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload rules. But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got any templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007), except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other editors concerning the articles I have written.
I don't think it has to be as obviously annoying as slathering templates all over pages or wikilawyering the newbies away -- it's often much more subtle how content/data seems to be considered more important than people.
One interaction I encountered recently is typical. Michiel Hendryckx, one of Belgium's best-known photographers, started uploading fairly high-resolution, good quality images to Wikipedia (well, Commons) on 3 July 2010. Stuff like this 1983 Chet Baker portrait: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chet675.jpg
The first message on his talk page was a request to confirm his identity (which he did).
The second message was a complaint by Nikbot (no valid license for one particular image). A couple of hours later, at 10:51 on 4 July, the next message is from CategorizationBot, asking Hendryckx to add categories to his images.
The third message, not six hours later, was this:
*Please categorize our images !!!* You already have been asked by a bot to categorize your images. Therefore I don't understand why you keep on uploading images without categories. Uploading images without categorizing them doesn't make sense. Only categorized images can be found!
I'm pretty sure the user in question meant really well, but *this* is what that focusing on content over people means to me. It's in the small things, the interactions that experienced Wikipedians take in their stride, but that can end up scaring people away.
It's like the last message on Hendryckx' talk page, dated 1 February 2011: a notification that one if this images is listed at commons:deletion requests, and to "please do not take the deletion request personally... thank you!". Follow the link to the discussion ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Van_istenda...): turns out the requester couldn't see the image. His/her first action was to nominate the image for deletion. Took about three hours for someone to confirm that no, the image works perfectly fine for them, and about five hours for the original person to close the deletion request ("thanks").
Again: content over people. No personal interaction with the photographer, no message on the photographer's talk page after the deletion request was closed, nothing. The last interaction Hendryckx had on Commons -- on 19 February, almost three weeks after the deletion request was closed -- was a baffled question ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Deletion_requests/File:Van_is...), asking what on Earth is wrong with the image, and that he'd like to at least know why it needed to be deleted.
Again, I'm sure the user in question meant really well again, but here too: content over people. Drive-by templating, shoot first, don't ask questions, don't even provide feedback, trust people will read every last word in the templates, etc.
Michel Vuijlsteke _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Very true. This little story is very representative of how Commons can bite newbies (I know, I'm a biter). I believe that it is totally possible to solve this kind of communication problem on Commons.
But I think the solution is to hire full-time administrators.
An active admin on Commons can easily, in a single day and depending on his profile, close dozens of regular deletion requests and tag or speedy-delete one or two hundred pictures. Even if he limits himself to non-controversial, obvious actions. The workload and the backlog are really huge, the problematic contents land on Commons at a very high rate and the active administrators are really few. Contacting a user each time an action is taken is often simply not an option (in 75% of the cases, the user won't watch his messages on Commons anyway). I believe the current role of an admin on Commons is very different from the role on a Wikipedia, much more technical, much more task-oriented. The best I could personally do to improve the situation when I was sysop was to customize my message templates by automatically adding small textual explanations to them, with an invitation to contact me. I'm not sure it helped a lot, although I saw other admins using the same system after me (I think).
I don't think the Commons admin community could do much better, unless it can be ensured that a number of them spend 8 hours a day doing the job (and staying friendly all the time).
But I'm naturally pessimistic, so...
Guillaume
Le 22/02/2011 18:32, David Gerard a écrit :
Food for thought.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michel Vuijlsteke wikipedia@zog.org Date: 22 February 2011 16:29 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay) To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 22 February 2011 14:14, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
- we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content
priority #1, people #2), or 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority
#1,
content #2).
So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is
time
we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will
be
creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the largest and the best...
Renata
To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over disputed content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with disputed notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload rules. But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got any templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007), except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other editors concerning the articles I have written.
I don't think it has to be as obviously annoying as slathering templates all over pages or wikilawyering the newbies away -- it's often much more subtle how content/data seems to be considered more important than people.
One interaction I encountered recently is typical. Michiel Hendryckx, one of Belgium's best-known photographers, started uploading fairly high-resolution, good quality images to Wikipedia (well, Commons) on 3 July 2010. Stuff like this 1983 Chet Baker portrait: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chet675.jpg
The first message on his talk page was a request to confirm his identity (which he did).
The second message was a complaint by Nikbot (no valid license for one particular image). A couple of hours later, at 10:51 on 4 July, the next message is from CategorizationBot, asking Hendryckx to add categories to his images.
The third message, not six hours later, was this:
*Please categorize our images !!!* You already have been asked by a bot to categorize your images. Therefore I don't understand why you keep on uploading images without categories. Uploading images without categorizing them doesn't make sense. Only categorized images can be found!
I'm pretty sure the user in question meant really well, but *this* is what that focusing on content over people means to me. It's in the small things, the interactions that experienced Wikipedians take in their stride, but that can end up scaring people away.
It's like the last message on Hendryckx' talk page, dated 1 February 2011: a notification that one if this images is listed at commons:deletion requests, and to "please do not take the deletion request personally... thank you!". Follow the link to the discussion ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Van_istenda...): turns out the requester couldn't see the image. His/her first action was to nominate the image for deletion. Took about three hours for someone to confirm that no, the image works perfectly fine for them, and about five hours for the original person to close the deletion request ("thanks").
Again: content over people. No personal interaction with the photographer, no message on the photographer's talk page after the deletion request was closed, nothing. The last interaction Hendryckx had on Commons -- on 19 February, almost three weeks after the deletion request was closed -- was a baffled question ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Deletion_requests/File:Van_is...), asking what on Earth is wrong with the image, and that he'd like to at least know why it needed to be deleted.
Again, I'm sure the user in question meant really well again, but here too: content over people. Drive-by templating, shoot first, don't ask questions, don't even provide feedback, trust people will read every last word in the templates, etc.
Michel Vuijlsteke _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Speaking of friendliness on Commons, does CategorizationBot really need to post notices on both the File pages and User Talk pages? Maarten? This seems overly aggressive to me.
Ryan Kaldari
Hi Ryan,
Op 22-2-2011 21:06, Ryan Kaldari schreef:
Speaking of friendliness on Commons, does CategorizationBot really need to post notices on both the File pages and User Talk pages? Maarten?
Yes. People tend not the notice things left on file pages. This way they do notice.
This seems overly aggressive to me.
Aggressive? What's aggressive? The fact that a user is kindly invited to help out or the message itself? A user is asked to help out because we're always low on people helping out. The message is at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Please_link_images . If you don't like it, be bold and make it a better message.
My categorization project started somewhere in 2008. I was tired on stumbling upon uncategorized files. A lot of great photo's, but impossible to find. So first I wrote something to find all uncategorized files and tag them. Next step was to try to find categories for these images. At some point I started notifying people to try to get them involved. I don't know if it helped, what I do know is that the number of uncategorized files is pretty stable around (100K) and that my bot helped categorize over 200K files (probably even more). The full statistics are at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Multichill/Categorization_stats
The exact workings of the bot and frequently asked questions about the bot are at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CategorizationBot . I try to update this page based on the questions I get. Might be worth reading.
I don't consider it very friendly to dismiss my work as aggresive ;-)
Maarten
I don't dispute that CategorizationBot is enormously useful and has accomplished great things for Commons. I'm just saying that the user talkpage notices are a nag and are annoying. Combined with all the other bot and userscript notices, it creates an environment that is better described as "aggressive" and "bitey" than "friendly" or "welcoming". And I don't imagine that I'm the only person who has this opinion. Unfortunately, most of these notices are necessary by policy, but categorization notices aren't. So I think it would be better for CategorizationBot's user talkpage notices to be opt-in rather than opt-out. I'm sorry if I came across as being dismissive of your work. That certainly wasn't my intention. Your work is extremely important to Commons. I just didn't say that because I thought it was obvious :)
Ryan Kaldari
On 2/28/11 1:53 PM, Maarten Dammers wrote:
Hi Ryan,
Op 22-2-2011 21:06, Ryan Kaldari schreef:
Speaking of friendliness on Commons, does CategorizationBot really need to post notices on both the File pages and User Talk pages? Maarten?
Yes. People tend not the notice things left on file pages. This way they do notice.
This seems overly aggressive to me.
Aggressive? What's aggressive? The fact that a user is kindly invited to help out or the message itself? A user is asked to help out because we're always low on people helping out. The message is at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Please_link_images . If you don't like it, be bold and make it a better message.
My categorization project started somewhere in 2008. I was tired on stumbling upon uncategorized files. A lot of great photo's, but impossible to find. So first I wrote something to find all uncategorized files and tag them. Next step was to try to find categories for these images. At some point I started notifying people to try to get them involved. I don't know if it helped, what I do know is that the number of uncategorized files is pretty stable around (100K) and that my bot helped categorize over 200K files (probably even more). The full statistics are at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Multichill/Categorization_stats
The exact workings of the bot and frequently asked questions about the bot are at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CategorizationBot . I try to update this page based on the questions I get. Might be worth reading.
I don't consider it very friendly to dismiss my work as aggresive ;-)
Maarten
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
While Michel Vuijlsteke's points are excellent, and I agree that editors should be encouraged to be patient and welcoming to new editors, there may be a problem with the file. That said, a deletion nomination is not a good way to respond to a file problem.
I find that Safari does not display the preview of File:Van_istendael675.jpg correctly. It displays as a dark negative image. Camino does not display the preview and comments as follows on the file itself. "The image “http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Van_istendael675.jpg ” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors."
Google Chrome displays the file and preview properly. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Van_istendael675.jpg
Walter Siegmund
On Feb 22, 2011, at 9:32 AM, David Gerard wrote:
Food for thought.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michel Vuijlsteke wikipedia@zog.org Date: 22 February 2011 16:29 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay) To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 22 February 2011 14:14, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
- we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away
(content priority #1, people #2), or 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority
#1,
content #2).
So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is
time
we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will
be
creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the largest and the best...
Renata
To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over disputed content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with disputed notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload rules. But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got any templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007), except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other editors concerning the articles I have written.
I don't think it has to be as obviously annoying as slathering templates all over pages or wikilawyering the newbies away -- it's often much more subtle how content/data seems to be considered more important than people.
One interaction I encountered recently is typical. Michiel Hendryckx, one of Belgium's best-known photographers, started uploading fairly high-resolution, good quality images to Wikipedia (well, Commons) on 3 July 2010. Stuff like this 1983 Chet Baker portrait: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chet675.jpg
The first message on his talk page was a request to confirm his identity (which he did).
The second message was a complaint by Nikbot (no valid license for one particular image). A couple of hours later, at 10:51 on 4 July, the next message is from CategorizationBot, asking Hendryckx to add categories to his images.
The third message, not six hours later, was this:
*Please categorize our images !!!* You already have been asked by a bot to categorize your images. Therefore I don't understand why you keep on uploading images without categories. Uploading images without categorizing them doesn't make sense. Only categorized images can be found!
I'm pretty sure the user in question meant really well, but *this* is what that focusing on content over people means to me. It's in the small things, the interactions that experienced Wikipedians take in their stride, but that can end up scaring people away.
It's like the last message on Hendryckx' talk page, dated 1 February 2011: a notification that one if this images is listed at commons:deletion requests, and to "please do not take the deletion request personally... thank you!". Follow the link to the discussion ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Van_istenda...) : turns out the requester couldn't see the image. His/her first action was to nominate the image for deletion. Took about three hours for someone to confirm that no, the image works perfectly fine for them, and about five hours for the original person to close the deletion request ("thanks").
Again: content over people. No personal interaction with the photographer, no message on the photographer's talk page after the deletion request was closed, nothing. The last interaction Hendryckx had on Commons -- on 19 February, almost three weeks after the deletion request was closed -- was a baffled question ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Deletion_requests/File:Van_is...) , asking what on Earth is wrong with the image, and that he'd like to at least know why it needed to be deleted.
Again, I'm sure the user in question meant really well again, but here too: content over people. Drive-by templating, shoot first, don't ask questions, don't even provide feedback, trust people will read every last word in the templates, etc.
Michel Vuijlsteke _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Op 22 feb 2011, om 19:08 heeft Walter Siegmund het volgende geschreven:
I find that Safari does not display the preview of File:Van_istendael675.jpg correctly. It displays as a dark negative image. Camino does not display the preview and comments as follows on the file itself. "The image “http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Van_istendael675.jpg ” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors."
Google Chrome displays the file and preview properly. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Van_istendael675.jpg
Walter Siegmund
Check https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27635
-- Krinkle
This guy took the words right out of my mouth.
I have only been part of the Commons community as a hired developer since early 2010, but this conclusion is becoming very clear to me. Somewhere along the line, in a totally legitimate quest for quality, the community experience suffered greatly.
And it's hard to get longtime Wikipedians and WMCommons people to even think in a different direction -- it is assumed that all new features just set tighter and tighter filters, and there's no other option if we want Commons to be a very pure repository of freely-licensable content.
I disagree that we have to choose community OR quality. Commons will become better as a factor of both a larger community and better processes that mobilize people to improve quality. It's just that we have to think beyond "filter away the bad stuff" or "impose even more duties on submitters", and instead imagine processes where we can all work to make things better in both dimensions.
Erik didn't mention it in his response but he's been working hard on a White Paper about Foundation priorities. I think the Commons-related priorities are for the most part spot on -- we need a "delightful" uploading experience, but also tools to manage the growth collectively.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper
(At the WMF we've seen preview fragments of this research over several months but this is all starting to come into focus just this week).
On 2/22/11 9:32 AM, David Gerard wrote:
Food for thought.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michel Vuijlstekewikipedia@zog.org Date: 22 February 2011 16:29 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay) To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 22 February 2011 14:14, Yaroslav M. Blanterputevod@mccme.ru wrote:
We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
- we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content
priority #1, people #2), or 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority
#1,
content #2).
So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is
time
we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will
be
creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the largest and the best...
Renata
To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over disputed content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with disputed notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload rules. But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got any templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007), except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other editors concerning the articles I have written.
I don't think it has to be as obviously annoying as slathering templates all over pages or wikilawyering the newbies away -- it's often much more subtle how content/data seems to be considered more important than people.
One interaction I encountered recently is typical. Michiel Hendryckx, one of Belgium's best-known photographers, started uploading fairly high-resolution, good quality images to Wikipedia (well, Commons) on 3 July 2010. Stuff like this 1983 Chet Baker portrait: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chet675.jpg
The first message on his talk page was a request to confirm his identity (which he did).
The second message was a complaint by Nikbot (no valid license for one particular image). A couple of hours later, at 10:51 on 4 July, the next message is from CategorizationBot, asking Hendryckx to add categories to his images.
The third message, not six hours later, was this:
*Please categorize our images !!!* You already have been asked by a bot to categorize your images. Therefore I don't understand why you keep on uploading images without categories. Uploading images without categorizing them doesn't make sense. Only categorized images can be found!
I'm pretty sure the user in question meant really well, but *this* is what that focusing on content over people means to me. It's in the small things, the interactions that experienced Wikipedians take in their stride, but that can end up scaring people away.
It's like the last message on Hendryckx' talk page, dated 1 February 2011: a notification that one if this images is listed at commons:deletion requests, and to "please do not take the deletion request personally... thank you!". Follow the link to the discussion ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Van_istenda...): turns out the requester couldn't see the image. His/her first action was to nominate the image for deletion. Took about three hours for someone to confirm that no, the image works perfectly fine for them, and about five hours for the original person to close the deletion request ("thanks").
Again: content over people. No personal interaction with the photographer, no message on the photographer's talk page after the deletion request was closed, nothing. The last interaction Hendryckx had on Commons -- on 19 February, almost three weeks after the deletion request was closed -- was a baffled question ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Deletion_requests/File:Van_is...), asking what on Earth is wrong with the image, and that he'd like to at least know why it needed to be deleted.
Again, I'm sure the user in question meant really well again, but here too: content over people. Drive-by templating, shoot first, don't ask questions, don't even provide feedback, trust people will read every last word in the templates, etc.
Michel Vuijlsteke _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
The categories is one issue that can be addressed, by changing the upload page, at the moment its in the section marked *upload options* that should be moved/reworded so its not an option. The other is to make it a text field rather than the + so that it can be a compulsory field.
The wording of templates has been distilled down to the simplist cleanest coldest plainest language possible to facilitate multilingual nature of Commons and that comes across as being agressive and unfriendly.
A philosphical point is that we hold is that once an image is released we actively discourage the author taking, holding ownership of the image we expect them to accept what ever the community decides to do with the image. Yet the moment there's an issue we expect them to take ownership and address the problems, obviously if its a license issue they have to but for any other issue it shouldnt be, we should notify about discussions involving an image but it should be as a courtesy and the language should reflect that courtesy. We have scripts for closing the deletion discussion so it should not be too hard to modify them to identify the Uploader and advise them of the outcome, again as a courtesy.
Commons culture is that of a battlefield, with roving gangs/cabals who work together to achieve their aims and its getting worse, one just needs to look at FPC to see how bad its become.
What we need is to develope and encourage authors to be proud of their original contributions, we need to encourage the community to respect those contributions, we need to encourage the community appreciate what is being contributed QI & VI does that FP did. Rather than hire admins maybe the foundatin could support a small grant system to get more content or to address backlogs, ie $200 grant for an editor to spend 40 hours clearing backlogs, or translating pages or categorising uncategorised images.
On 23 February 2011 06:02, Neil Kandalgaonkar neilk@wikimedia.org wrote:
This guy took the words right out of my mouth.
I have only been part of the Commons community as a hired developer since early 2010, but this conclusion is becoming very clear to me. Somewhere along the line, in a totally legitimate quest for quality, the community experience suffered greatly.
And it's hard to get longtime Wikipedians and WMCommons people to even think in a different direction -- it is assumed that all new features just set tighter and tighter filters, and there's no other option if we want Commons to be a very pure repository of freely-licensable content.
I disagree that we have to choose community OR quality. Commons will become better as a factor of both a larger community and better processes that mobilize people to improve quality. It's just that we have to think beyond "filter away the bad stuff" or "impose even more duties on submitters", and instead imagine processes where we can all work to make things better in both dimensions.
Erik didn't mention it in his response but he's been working hard on a White Paper about Foundation priorities. I think the Commons-related priorities are for the most part spot on -- we need a "delightful" uploading experience, but also tools to manage the growth collectively.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper
(At the WMF we've seen preview fragments of this research over several months but this is all starting to come into focus just this week).
On 2/22/11 9:32 AM, David Gerard wrote:
Food for thought.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michel Vuijlstekewikipedia@zog.org Date: 22 February 2011 16:29 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An
Essay)
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 22 February 2011 14:14, Yaroslav M. Blanterputevod@mccme.ru wrote:
We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
- we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content
priority #1, people #2), or 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority
#1,
content #2).
So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is
time
we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who
will
be
creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already
the
largest and the best...
Renata
To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over
disputed
content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with
disputed
notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload
rules.
But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got
any
templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007), except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other
editors
concerning the articles I have written.
I don't think it has to be as obviously annoying as slathering templates
all
over pages or wikilawyering the newbies away -- it's often much more
subtle
how content/data seems to be considered more important than people.
One interaction I encountered recently is typical. Michiel Hendryckx, one
of
Belgium's best-known photographers, started uploading fairly high-resolution, good quality images to Wikipedia (well, Commons) on 3
July
- Stuff like this 1983 Chet Baker portrait:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chet675.jpg
The first message on his talk page was a request to confirm his identity (which he did).
The second message was a complaint by Nikbot (no valid license for one particular image). A couple of hours later, at 10:51 on 4 July, the next message is from CategorizationBot, asking Hendryckx to add categories to
his
images.
The third message, not six hours later, was this:
*Please categorize our images !!!* You already have been asked by a bot to categorize your images. Therefore
I
don't understand why you keep on uploading images without categories. Uploading images without categorizing them doesn't make sense. Only categorized images can be found!
I'm pretty sure the user in question meant really well, but *this* is
what
that focusing on content over people means to me. It's in the small
things,
the interactions that experienced Wikipedians take in their stride, but
that
can end up scaring people away.
It's like the last message on Hendryckx' talk page, dated 1 February
2011: a
notification that one if this images is listed at commons:deletion
requests,
and to "please do not take the deletion request personally... thank
you!".
Follow the link to the discussion (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Van_istenda... ):
turns out the requester couldn't see the image. His/her first action was
to
nominate the image for deletion. Took about three hours for someone to confirm that no, the image works perfectly fine for them, and about five hours for the original person to close the deletion request ("thanks").
Again: content over people. No personal interaction with the
photographer,
no message on the photographer's talk page after the deletion request was closed, nothing. The last interaction Hendryckx had on Commons -- on 19 February, almost three weeks after the deletion request was closed -- was
a
baffled question (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Deletion_requests/File:Van_is... ),
asking what on Earth is wrong with the image, and that he'd like to at
least
know why it needed to be deleted.
Again, I'm sure the user in question meant really well again, but here
too:
content over people. Drive-by templating, shoot first, don't ask
questions,
don't even provide feedback, trust people will read every last word in
the
templates, etc.
Michel Vuijlsteke _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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If the category field is a text field then that will likely lead to categories being created that do not link to the index. Instead a drop down menu or search feature should be used. Also an option to attempt to apply the categories used in a Wikipedia page would be very useful.
... we already see is that what is currently in place doesnt work and that the notifications are putting people off further contributions.
If it starts to create categories, then thats useful because it shows that what we use isnt what others are looking for.... we need to recognise that then address it ...
On 23 February 2011 11:07, Kevin Morgan morgankevinj@gmail.com wrote:
If the category field is a text field then that will likely lead to categories being created that do not link to the index. Instead a drop down menu or search feature should be used. Also an option to attempt to apply the categories used in a Wikipedia page would be very useful.
-- Kevin Morgan Cell:(614) 481-0865 PGP Public Key ID 0xB6028066 Key fingerprint = 09FB 59EB D9FE 7C9C 12DF 9530 A877 FAB7 B602 8066
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
The main problem for categories is the fact of they are mainly in English... Many people who don't speak English don't put any categories because they don't know which categories are needed...
Florian Farge aka Otourly Sur lesprojets wikimédiens et l'Association française,sur OxyRadio, OSM, et sur MOVIM Socio di Wikimedia Italia
________________________________ De : Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com À : Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Envoyé le : Mer 23 février 2011, 4h 36min 17s Objet : Re: [Commons-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Friendliness
... we already see is that what is currently in place doesnt work and that the notifications are putting people off further contributions.
If it starts to create categories, then thats useful because it shows that what we use isnt what others are looking for.... we need to recognise that then address it ...
On 23 February 2011 11:07, Kevin Morgan morgankevinj@gmail.com wrote:
If the category field is a text field then that will likely lead to
categories being created that do not link to the index. Instead a drop down menu or search feature should be used. Also an option to attempt to apply the categories used in a Wikipedia page would be very useful.
-- Kevin Morgan Cell:(614) 481-0865 PGP Public Key ID 0xB6028066 Key fingerprint = 09FB 59EB D9FE 7C9C 12DF 9530 A877 FAB7 B602 8066
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Hi Kevin,
Op 23 feb 2011 om 04:07 heeft Kevin Morgan morgankevinj@gmail.com het volgende geschreven:\
If the category field is a text field then that will likely lead to categories being created that do not link to the index. Instead a drop down menu or search feature should be used.
Did you recently use the upload interface? It contains hotcat which works exactly how you describe it.
Also an option to attempt to apply the categories used in a Wikipedia page would be very useful.
That's exactly what the categorization bot does. The uploaded only gets notified if the categorization bot is unable to find any categories.
Maarten
-- Kevin Morgan Cell:(614) 481-0865 PGP Public Key ID 0xB6028066 Key fingerprint = 09FB 59EB D9FE 7C9C 12DF 9530 A877 FAB7 B602 8066
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On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Maarten Dammers maarten@mdammers.nl wrote:
Hi Kevin,
Op 23 feb 2011 om 04:07 heeft Kevin Morgan morgankevinj@gmail.com het volgende geschreven:\
If the category field is a text field then that will likely lead to categories being created that do not link to the index. Instead a drop down menu or search feature should be used.
Did you recently use the upload interface? It contains hotcat which works exactly how you describe it.
If there is a way to narrow down the search within a metacategory using a dropdown menu, it would make it much easier to find categories for the image. Taking this further if a new category is made the drop down menu could suggest a possible metacategory for the new category, to reduce the amount of uncategorized categories.
Instead of warning the user after uploading the image, the user could be prompted by the upload wizard to remind them to do so.
On 23 February 2011 02:49, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:
The wording of templates has been distilled down to the simplist cleanest coldest plainest language possible to facilitate multilingual nature of Commons and that comes across as being agressive and unfriendly.
And it still comes as robotic and preremptory. Utter failure with the best of intentions is still utter failure. Improving a wrong approach to perfection does not make it work.
No, I don't have a ready alternative. That doesn't make a failure a success either.
- d.
On 2/22/2011 9:49 PM, Gnangarra wrote:
A philosphical point is that we hold is that once an image is released we actively discourage the author taking, holding ownership of the image we expect them to accept what ever the community decides to do with the image. Yet the moment there's an issue we expect them to take ownership and address the problems, obviously if its a license issue they have to but for any other issue it shouldnt be, we should notify about discussions involving an image but it should be as a courtesy and the language should reflect that courtesy. We have scripts for closing the deletion discussion so it should not be too hard to modify them to identify the Uploader and advise them of the outcome, again as a courtesy.
As someone who develops media collections, I've been thinking a lot about the role of community, and in my mind, Flickr is the site that is the most successful at attracting photographers because Flickr is all about the photographer. The way comments and favorites work is particularly sticky because you know you're giving feedback directly to the person who took the picture.
Now that's constructive. I would love to see something like that on Commons. But surely this is not the first time this is suggested, and this has been rejected for a reason?
Guillaume
Le 23/02/2011 15:58, Paul Houle a écrit :
As someone who develops media collections, I've been thinking a
lot about the role of community, and in my mind, Flickr is the site that is the most successful at attracting photographers because Flickr is all about the photographer. The way comments and favorites work is particularly sticky because you know you're giving feedback directly to the person who took the picture.
Not sure if anything as described below has ever been suggested, let alone rejected. Wikimedia projects usually do not work in the same way as Paul has indicated in the example for Flickr. "Ownership" is the main difference, I think, but ways of using and embedding the resources are also very different.
Still, each media upload on Commons has a media revision history, which indicates which user has uploaded the media, and there is a direct link to the user talk page of the uploader. From a page in a random Wikimedia where the media is being used, it takes 4 clicks to comment to the uploader, although this does not immediately provide a connection to the media file:
1. Click media in Wikimedia project page. 2. Click link to commons from Image: resource page in local Wikimedia project. 3. Click link to uploader talk page. 4. Click link to create new page section for commenting.
I agree; this is quite a journey, and many will probably fail to complete this challenge. What user story would be fitting here? From there, a solution could be designed.
Siebrand
Op 23-02-11 16:04 schreef Eusebius wikipedia@eusebius.fr:
Now that's constructive. I would love to see something like that on Commons. But surely this is not the first time this is suggested, and this has been rejected for a reason?
Guillaume
Le 23/02/2011 15:58, Paul Houle a écrit :
As someone who develops media collections, I've been thinking a
lot about the role of community, and in my mind, Flickr is the site that is the most successful at attracting photographers because Flickr is all about the photographer. The way comments and favorites work is particularly sticky because you know you're giving feedback directly to the person who took the picture.
Why is and why should "Ownership" be such a big deal, what ever the re-use license the author is still the image owner and always will be.
Commons best resource is always going to be our contributors because they make Commons unique we should be encouraging that resource, but we dont infact we drive our best contributors away by niggling at them by limiting them from promoting themselves(no customer user attributions boxes on image pages) but we let images sourced from FLICKR do just that and we even promoted FLICKR with custom boxes on the image pages, the same goes for other GLAM-type institutions that have contributed works they give a small resolution image in return they get a custom box with link back to where people are charged for larger images even on PD images.
I think we should be about improving the authors experience and valuing their efforts more,
Wikinews has three pages for each article, *collaboration and opinions* so the background setup is there maybe we can have three tabs as well,*file,talk,feedback * with feed back being solely about commenting on the image aspects
On 23 February 2011 23:20, Siebrand Mazeland s.mazeland@xs4all.nl wrote:
Not sure if anything as described below has ever been suggested, let alone rejected. Wikimedia projects usually do not work in the same way as Pau.l has indicated in the example for Flickr. "Ownership" is the main difference, I think, but ways of using and embedding the resources are also very different.
Still, each media upload on Commons has a media revision history, which indicates which user has uploaded the media, and there is a direct link to the user talk page of the uploader. From a page in a random Wikimedia where the media is being used, it takes 4 clicks to comment to the uploader, although this does not immediately provide a connection to the media file:
- Click media in Wikimedia project page.
- Click link to commons from Image: resource page in local Wikimedia
project. 3. Click link to uploader talk page. 4. Click link to create new page section for commenting.
I agree; this is quite a journey, and many will probably fail to complete this challenge. What user story would be fitting here? From there, a solution could be designed.
Siebrand
Op 23-02-11 16:04 schreef Eusebius wikipedia@eusebius.fr:
Now that's constructive. I would love to see something like that on Commons. But surely this is not the first time this is suggested, and this has been rejected for a reason?
Guillaume
Le 23/02/2011 15:58, Paul Houle a écrit :
As someone who develops media collections, I've been thinking a
lot about the role of community, and in my mind, Flickr is the site that is the most successful at attracting photographers because Flickr is all about the photographer. The way comments and favorites work is particularly sticky because you know you're giving feedback directly to the person who took the picture.
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Ok, at the risk of being the bad guy here:
Nobody is really suggesting we should become more like Flickr, right? Comment system is all nice, but 1) commons is not a social networking site (there are plenty of those on the web, do we need to emulate them?) 2) commons should not be a popularity contest (or else we would be having the same oversaturated HDR kitsch images that get som many praising comments on Flickr) 3) some people really should get over it
For crying out loud, do we really need to sugar coat every informational bot message? if peoples "feelings" are hurt because we tell them a bot they did something wrong that is essentially not my problem. Yes. There is a ton of work to do in commons and barely enough people to manage it with the help of bots. And I'm getting the impression people complain that we do not go around and hold newbies' hands have a chat with them over a cup of tea. Boo freaking hoo! We do not have the resources for that. And 99% of the time IT WOULD NOT BE WORTH IT IN ANY CASE. 99% of the people that get bot-shafted are drive-by uploaders that upload a few non-free junk pictures, without ever bothering to think about the purpose and mission of commons. Maybe we have to make that a little more clear. Have small online course with a few quizz questions to be answers at account creation time. Next complaint is: everything is in english. Yeah, we should get off our lazy asses and replicate our entire category system in every possible language. Oh yeah, and nobody should post anything on commons without all those zillions of translations attached to it. Geez, english, what made you world language?! We are such an exclusionary club. Ahrgh, again, WE DO NOT HAVE THE RESOURCES!!!
Ok, rant over. I guess I'm probably the problem with commons...
On 2/23/11 9:22 AM, Daniel Schwen wrote:
For crying out loud, do we really need to sugar coat every informational bot message?
Yes, we do - because the bots are so very often mistaken, and because what is normal in some cultures is unspeakably rude in others. I personally find the overall level of politeness just barely tolerable.
Would it be that hard to keep track of users' contribution levels, and gradually prune down bot messages accordingly? It's vaguely insulting when some noob's first bot gives me a long lecture about Commons policy, apparently unaware that I had a hand in formulating it in the first place!
Another possibility is to send new contributors' bot messages to a welcoming commmittee volunteer, let them decide whether to forward verbatim, or take a more constructive approach ("no you didn't forget to license, you typed "GDFL" instead of "GFDL").
Stan
Would it be that hard to keep track of users' contribution levels, and
Yes. It actually would be. 1) you need to program bots to be aware of "users' contribution levels" 2) You need to write, maintain and translate multiple levels of messages.
Boils down to my main point (don't worry David Gerard did not read it either): We do not have the resources for that.
It's vaguely insulting when some noob's first bot gives me a long lecture about Commons policy, apparently unaware that I had a hand in formulating it in the first place!
How should the bot know? Sorry, but you ''chose'' to be insulted... ...by a machine! Even if it had been an actual human who had put the message, I would argue that again the problem is the lack of resources. Right now the focus is on keeping commons on track of its mission. That means zero tolerance for unfree files.
Do i think the situation is ideal. No, of course not. But a few people jabbering around on a mailing list, making demands and essentially dispatching non existing resources, will not change a thing. This is a bit like politicians trying to improve the education system, but trying to do so without budget increases.
And I'm not talking about money here (in fact I think Gnangarras "paying the admins" suggestion is the worst possible approach possible, but thats an entire other mail).
The fact of the matter is commons has a bad reputation on the other projects, that's why we don't get more active contributors. That's why we don't have the manpower to cater to the emotionally sensitive among you.
However the bad reputation does not come from cold harsh bot templates. It comes from the fact that people are "just not getting commons". Wikipedia contributors see files being moved to commons by well meaning people and deleted because they do not fulfill our free licensing requirements. Contributors from foreign language (i.e. non-english) projects then feel unable to participate in the process involving the deletions. Just like that commons gets a reputation as content destroyer and local uploads get tagged with ''don't move to commons''. Seen it a dozen times on de.wp (maybe i'm generalizing...)
It is a vicious cycle, but you guys are trying to break it at the wrong point. it reminds me of overworked and underpaid wallmart cashiers that are mandated to greet customers friendly... or they will get fired, or the flight attendants who have mandatory smile-training.
I'm all for being nice and friendly, but when there is work to be done, and the question is "writing a personalized message and taking care of one copyvio" or "pasting five templates and taking care of five copyvios" the answer seems to be obviously #2 for me.
Breaking the cycle should start at firmly educating users about how commons works, what we do, and where our priorities lie. Add a page about bot and how the truly and honestly do not mean to hurt your feelings.
On 23 February 2011 19:48, Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
Boils down to my main point (don't worry David Gerard did not read it either):
For someone going on (and on) about how thick-skinned everyone else should be, you're remarkably thin-skinned yourself.
(This is, of course, a frequent pattern amongst those who think others should be less sensitive to the speaker's incredible rudeness.)
- d.
For someone going on (and on) about how thick-skinned everyone else should be, you're remarkably thin-skinned yourself.
Well, you are not a bot, are you? And you chose to invest the little time you might have in writing something entirely unproductive yet maximally dickish. So that is kind of the opposite of my defense for commons users.
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 9:02 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 23 February 2011 19:48, Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
Boils down to my main point (don't worry David Gerard did not read it either):
For someone going on (and on) about how thick-skinned everyone else should be, you're remarkably thin-skinned yourself.
(This is, of course, a frequent pattern amongst those who think others should be less sensitive to the speaker's incredible rudeness.)
Since personal attacks appear to have become acceptable on this list, let me get down to that road as well.
Your rude dismissal of any ideas that you do not agree with will not improve Commons and refusal to discuss them in any other way than attacking the person stating them, does not help this discussion, and is wasting time of many people, so please stop commenting on this mailing list.
Bryan
On 23 Feb 2011, at 20:21, Bryan Tong Minh wrote:
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 9:02 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 23 February 2011 19:48, Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
Boils down to my main point (don't worry David Gerard did not read it either):
For someone going on (and on) about how thick-skinned everyone else should be, you're remarkably thin-skinned yourself.
(This is, of course, a frequent pattern amongst those who think others should be less sensitive to the speaker's incredible rudeness.)
Since personal attacks appear to have become acceptable on this list, let me get down to that road as well.
Your rude dismissal of any ideas that you do not agree with will not improve Commons and refusal to discuss them in any other way than attacking the person stating them, does not help this discussion, and is wasting time of many people, so please stop commenting on this mailing list.
That really isn't helpful, and definitely is not acceptable, neither here nor anywhere else on Wikimedia. Please focus on the point: how do we make Wikimedia Commons friendlier, and generally increase the number of both contributors and administrators on the project?
One potential improvement could be getting bot messages translated and made friendlier via translatewiki.net, so that the burden of maintaining all of the different language versions of the same message is taken off the bot writer and given to translators in a central location. I'm not sure if Gerard Meijssen is on this mailing list - I've cc'd him in the hope that he can provide input on this.
Thanks, Mike
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On 23/02/11 15:39, Michael Peel wrote:
One potential improvement could be getting bot messages translated and made friendlier via translatewiki.net, so that the burden of maintaining all of the different language versions of the same message is taken off the bot writer and given to translators in a central location. I'm not sure if Gerard Meijssen is on this mailing list - I've cc'd him in the hope that he can provide input on this.
Translatewiki.net only does MediaWiki interface translations.
And in regards to bots, each bot uses different messages, which do not necessarily come from the MediaWiki interface (I don't know of any such bot that uses interface messages on Commons). Because such messages vary by wiki and name, translatewiki.net would not be very feasible.
- -- C Li (User:O) Can't think of a witty .sigline today... - -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GAT d-(++) s++:- !a C++ UL++++ P+ L++(++++) E+ W+++ N++(+++) !o !K w(+) !O M-- V-- PS(++) PE-(++) Y+(++) PGP++(+++) t--- !5 !X R(-) tv-(--) b-(+) !DI !D G !e h--(++) !r y- - ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
On 23 Feb 2011, at 21:17, C Li wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On 23/02/11 15:39, Michael Peel wrote:
One potential improvement could be getting bot messages translated and made friendlier via translatewiki.net, so that the burden of maintaining all of the different language versions of the same message is taken off the bot writer and given to translators in a central location. I'm not sure if Gerard Meijssen is on this mailing list - I've cc'd him in the hope that he can provide input on this.
Translatewiki.net only does MediaWiki interface translations.
And in regards to bots, each bot uses different messages, which do not necessarily come from the MediaWiki interface (I don't know of any such bot that uses interface messages on Commons). Because such messages vary by wiki and name, translatewiki.net would not be very feasible.
Yes, it's true at the moment that, for Wikimedia, it currently only does MediaWiki interface translations. It also does translations for a number of other non-Wikimedia projects. I believe that it would be an appropriate place to translate standard bot messages on Commons as well, if the Commons community wants that. This is because they are essentially the interface between the Wikimedia Commons community and infrequent Commons uploaders/contributors, on the whole. Remember that Commons is a unique wiki amongst the Wikimedia projects in that it's a very multilingual project, so the messages that other wikis use don't necessarily come into the equation here.
Thanks, Mike
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On 23/02/11 16:33, Michael Peel wrote:
I believe that it would be an appropriate place to translate standard bot messages on Commons as well, if the Commons community wants that.
But there are no "standard" bot messages, since each bot is assumed to be using different code, and with that, different messages. Translation of current messages would simply open up another can of worms. Furthermore, current messages lie in the Template namespace, not the MediaWiki namespace.
Creation of a collection of standard, human-translatable bot messages isn't a bad idea, however.
- -- C Li (User:O) Can't think of a witty .sigline today... - -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GAT d-(++) s++:- !a C++ UL++++ P+ L++(++++) E+ W+++ N++(+++) !o !K w(+) !O M-- V-- PS(++) PE-(++) Y+(++) PGP++(+++) t--- !5 !X R(-) tv-(--) b-(+) !DI !D G !e h--(++) !r y- - ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
On 2/23/11 11:48 AM, Daniel Schwen wrote:
Would it be that hard to keep track of users' contribution levels, and
Yes. It actually would be.
- you need to program bots to be aware of "users' contribution levels"
- You need to write, maintain and translate multiple levels of messages.
Boils down to my main point (don't worry David Gerard did not read it either): We do not have the resources for that.
Exactly as you say, it's a vicious cycle - do things that discourage people from participating, then say that nothing can be changed because the people aren't available.
It would very easy to encourage better bot-writing; toughen up the rules, and don't approve bots until they adhere to those rules. I'm routinely astonished at what is permitted, but in the few cases where I've said something about it, the response has been to argue or ignore. So I've learned my lesson, don't say anything.
Stan
Exactly as you say, it's a vicious cycle -
That is what I said
do things that discourage people from participating, then say that nothing can be changed because the people aren't available.
That, however, is not what I said.
The root of the problem (as far as i see it) is not that any one is actively "doing things that discourage people from participating". It is the dissonance between peoples expectations of what commons "should do for them" versus what commons "can do for them" with the limited resources we have.
It would very easy to encourage better bot-writing; toughen up the rules, and don't approve bots until they adhere to those rules. I'm
That is kind of easy to say. It is not like commons currently has much of a choice. Without the help of countless bots there would be no way to deal with the workload. And we could not even think about growth. We cannot afford to tell bot operators who spend their time writing and maintaining the code to sit down and write a zillion translated pieces of lengthy prose or else their bots are blocked.
routinely astonished at what is permitted, but in the few cases where I've said something about it, the response has been to argue or ignore. So I've learned my lesson, don't say anything.
Sorry, but the lesson should rather be to listen what those people have to say rather than shut down.
On 23 February 2011 21:26, Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
That is kind of easy to say. It is not like commons currently has much of a choice. Without the help of countless bots there would be no way to deal with the workload.
It is entirely unclear that the work the bots do - which assumes a model wherein contributors have no ownership of images until there is a problem, at which point they are expected to hop to it - is actually doing the right job. As has been noted, the model does not work well with how contributors actually contribute.
The argument you're putting here appears to be that we can't improve the process because the present (broken) process is already very hard. I submit that this is not a good or useful objection to discussion of the brokenness of the present process.
- d.
On 23 February 2011 17:22, Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
For crying out loud, do we really need to sugar coat every informational bot message? if peoples "feelings" are hurt because we tell them a bot they did something wrong that is essentially not my problem.
If the current situation is your idea of "just right", the evidence seems to suggest that your idea of "just right" is in fact wrong for almost everyone else.
Generalising from oneself is prone to error. Generalising from oneself *in the face of contradictory evidence* is ... foolish.
- d.
Generalising from oneself is prone to error. Generalising from oneself *in the face of contradictory evidence* is ... foolish.
Way to set an example for the "Friendliness"... Quite extensively construed to make my point into "Generalising from oneself". Whatever.
On 2/23/2011 10:04 AM, Eusebius wrote:
Now that's constructive. I would love to see something like that on Commons. But surely this is not the first time this is suggested, and this has been rejected for a reason?
Commons has a different purpose than Flickr.
On Flickr I feel free to post pictures of my son, my woodstove and the dollhouse village that's down the road from my house. A few percent of my pictures are photos of notable named entities that would be suitable for Wikimedia Commons, but the rest aren't. I upload my photos to Flickr because it's easy for me.
For me, a big part of Web 3.0 is about 'union communities' that combine CC content from different communities. I've got a 'machine' (Ok, people + software system) that, if you put money in on one side, it locates named entity images in Flickr, unscrambles the metadata egg and captures and tags images with very high precision. Based on a naive scaling, if you put 10% of Wikipedia's 2011 budget into it, it could harvest more images than are already in Commons. The quality of images is better than you find in Commons, however, you'd find that you just can't find images for all the topics in Wikipedia that are CC in Flickr.
Many of the best contributors to Wikipedia Commons are great Pokemon collectors but lousy photographers. I can think of people who've traveled all over England and other countries photographing things but I want to scream at them... "Clean your goddamn lens!" People in Flickr are more serious about photography (probably own a DSLR, have something better than the kit lens, and keep it clean) but they're not so interested in "catching them all."
If you wanted to encourage a 'game mechanic' in Commons, I think you'd want to make it first of all a friendly competition to 'catch them all' and secondarily a competition to get better quality photographs. I think the ideal Commons photographer would be a person who's interested in some specific category (say going to concerts and snapping pictures of musicians or taking pictures of birds.) To support this there's a need for tools that make it clear where the holes are, both in the sense of "We don't have any pictures of X" or "We'd like to get better pictures of X".
Another big trouble with Commons, IMHO, is that the majority of contributors have empty user pages. To take an example,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Billy_Hathorn
has taken at least 1,717 pictures (for which my system could unscramble the metadata egg) used in en.wikipedia but has a blank User page. Here's a guy who's made a major contribution to Commons, but he's got no recognition, we aren't told anything about what he likes to photograph, the fact that he's a real MVP, where he lives, what he looks like, what his social media id's are, what kind of gear he uses, nothing. Now sure, he (or any of us) could put something on his User page, but he hasn't.
On a site like Flickr, you've got a photostream which gets filled out automatically so you automatically get some recognition for the hard work you're doing. Here you've got a guy who should be getting a lot of credit and he's not.
Hear hear. Great post.
On Feb 23, 2011, at 9:40 AM, Paul Houle wrote:
On 2/23/2011 10:04 AM, Eusebius wrote:
Now that's constructive. I would love to see something like that on Commons. But surely this is not the first time this is suggested, and this has been rejected for a reason?
Commons has a different purpose than Flickr. On Flickr I feel free to post pictures of my son, my woodstove and
the dollhouse village that's down the road from my house. A few percent of my pictures are photos of notable named entities that would be suitable for Wikimedia Commons, but the rest aren't. I upload my photos to Flickr because it's easy for me.
For me, a big part of Web 3.0 is about 'union communities' that
combine CC content from different communities. I've got a 'machine' (Ok, people + software system) that, if you put money in on one side, it locates named entity images in Flickr, unscrambles the metadata egg and captures and tags images with very high precision. Based on a naive scaling, if you put 10% of Wikipedia's 2011 budget into it, it could harvest more images than are already in Commons. The quality of images is better than you find in Commons, however, you'd find that you just can't find images for all the topics in Wikipedia that are CC in Flickr.
Many of the best contributors to Wikipedia Commons are great
Pokemon collectors but lousy photographers. I can think of people who've traveled all over England and other countries photographing things but I want to scream at them... "Clean your goddamn lens!" People in Flickr are more serious about photography (probably own a DSLR, have something better than the kit lens, and keep it clean) but they're not so interested in "catching them all."
If you wanted to encourage a 'game mechanic' in Commons, I think
you'd want to make it first of all a friendly competition to 'catch them all' and secondarily a competition to get better quality photographs. I think the ideal Commons photographer would be a person who's interested in some specific category (say going to concerts and snapping pictures of musicians or taking pictures of birds.) To support this there's a need for tools that make it clear where the holes are, both in the sense of "We don't have any pictures of X" or "We'd like to get better pictures of X".
Another big trouble with Commons, IMHO, is that the majority of
contributors have empty user pages. To take an example,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Billy_Hathorn
has taken at least 1,717 pictures (for which my system could
unscramble the metadata egg) used in en.wikipedia but has a blank User page. Here's a guy who's made a major contribution to Commons, but he's got no recognition, we aren't told anything about what he likes to photograph, the fact that he's a real MVP, where he lives, what he looks like, what his social media id's are, what kind of gear he uses, nothing. Now sure, he (or any of us) could put something on his User page, but he hasn't.
On a site like Flickr, you've got a photostream which gets filled
out automatically so you automatically get some recognition for the hard work you're doing. Here you've got a guy who should be getting a lot of credit and he's not.
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
-- David L. Sifry 415 846-0232 (Mobile) Blog: http://www.sifry.com/alerts Photos: http://flickr.com/photos/dsifry
On 2/23/2011 4:32 PM, David Sifry wrote:
Hear hear. Great post.
Something I realized about
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Billy_Hathorn
is that the page has some history, and that Billy once had a template on his user page regarding the deletion of one of his messages.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Billy_Hathorn&oldid=... http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Billy_Hathorn&oldid=43839853
To be fair, that message was visible for just an hour, because somebody moved the template to the talk page.
So you've got this guy who's a hero (he's uploaded thousands of useful images) but he looks like a zero (the only time anything was on his page, it was a mention of an image that was a candidate for deletion.) If the page that had the mention of the deletion candidate also had some recognition of the thousands of useful images he'd added, he couldn't complain that he was being maligned.
Another issue is that it's difficult to cite a photograph by "Billy Hathorn". Personally I'd like to say
This picture was taken by <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Billy_Hathorn">Billy Hathorn</a>
if I was using one of his images under creative commons on a web site. As it is, that URL tells me nothing, except that he's uploaded pictures to commons. Maybe I'm just too obsessed with named entities and linked data, but I think a link is a much stronger statement of identity than a name, and I think that link ought be 'deresolvable'... that is, we should get some idea who this guy is -- both so he can get the recognition he deserves, and also so his photographs are better documented.
As it is, I feel sheepish sending people to a link that's authoritative yet useless. It makes me feel bad about the "quality signal" I'm sending when I link people to an empty page, both about my own site and about commons.
Have you ever taken the possibility into consideration, that Billy does not want the 'praise' and 'recognition'?
Maybe he is just happy with the fact that his pictures are being used. This is all just speculation. And a single person is anecdotal evidence at best. I do not quite understand the fuss about "Billy Hathorn"
On 2/23/2011 6:29 PM, Daniel Schwen wrote:
Have you ever taken the possibility into consideration, that Billy does not want the 'praise' and 'recognition'?
Maybe he is just happy with the fact that his pictures are being used. This is all just speculation. And a single person is anecdotal evidence at best. I do not quite understand the fuss about "Billy Hathorn"
You've got a good point. Some people might not be motivated by recognition, and some might have a strong desire for privacy and would be repelled by recognition.
On the other hand, I think that the large majority of people do like getting recognition and get unhappy if they aren't getting recognition for what they do (in work, family life, etc.) Now, it could be that commons, by offering little recognition, has selected for a special population of people who don't want recognition, but I think you'll attract more new people if people get recognition.
"Billy Hathorn" isn't remarkable because he's got an empty User page -- an overwhelming majority of commons users have empty User pages. He's remarkable because he's taken a lot of pictures. I found him by looking at a list of top contributors in my database; after I skipped over the top few users (that I knew were bots) he was the second person I looked at. I'd have no trouble finding 50 more people who've made major contributions and have no talk page.
Note that any privacy that Billy gets from not having a descriptive User page is weak privacy. If he keeps the clock in his camera accurate, I can use my database to put together a remarkably detailed description of places he's been and when he was there. The average cyberstalker might have a hard time putting his story together, but an intelligence agency or industrial espionage outfit would have no problem. [If he's putting bad timestamps on his pictures, he's harming the veridicality of both Wikipedia and Commons]
Even if Wikimedia Commons doesn't put together a useful 'summary' page for users, there's no reason why a third party can't use a fully automated process to make a 'photostream' page for Billy much like the photostream page on flickr -- and I'm certain that this is going to happen. ;-)
Better information about users would have many social benefits. For instance, if Billy was a bit more visible and recognized, his friends might decide to chip in a little money here and there and help him get a better camera. If he was connected to a community of photographers, he might find that he can improve his pictures greatly by buying $15 worth of supplies and learning to think a little more about light.
Just the other day I got an email from a woman who wanted to use this image
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abolqassem-Aref-Ghazvini.jpg
in a book. She was concerned with the validity of the public domain declaration of the image. Well, the best I can do is play jailhouse lawyer, look at the evidence, and put together an argument that the image is in the public domain. If we go back to the uploader, we see that he's got a User page but he's basically a cipher,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BehnamFarid
looking at what I can see there, plus what's in my database, I believe he's an Iranian who takes pride in his heritage -- but I don't know if he lives in Iran. It's plausible that he scanned this image out of a book or other document, but I really don't know. Somebody who wanted to put together the story of this image would need to contact him, but looking at the talk page I see "*I do /not/ visit Wikipedia very often so that there may be a considerable lapse of time before I respond to your message or messages placed on this page".
* Now, quite likely, Behnam Farid is as excited to answer this sort of question as I am (that his, he's not) but when users can't get answers to questions about the provenance of images, that degrades the value of PD declarations and CC license grants. And note that CC doesn't just protect the rights of content creators, it protects the rights of content consumers by maintaining information about provenance... For instance, if an image is photoshopped or staged, provenance information makes it possible for us to hold the manipulator responsible.
On the other hand, Behnam Farid might live in Iran, which has a repressive government which might give him trouble if they don't like the information he's posting to Wikipedia. He might have a really good reason to keep his head low.
As you see, like anything having to do with online identity, there are a lot of tradeoffs here and no one simple answer.
On 23 February 2011 17:40, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
If you wanted to encourage a 'game mechanic' in Commons, I think you'd want to make it first of all a friendly competition to 'catch them all' and secondarily a competition to get better quality photographs. I think the ideal Commons photographer would be a person who's interested in some specific category (say going to concerts and snapping pictures of musicians or taking pictures of birds.) To support this there's a need for tools that make it clear where the holes are, both in the sense of "We don't have any pictures of X" or "We'd like to get better pictures of X".
Problem is that this is in practice a far better fit for wikipedia where such lists are generated in passing than commons.
For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects#Objects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Photos_requested#A_History_of...
And ofcourse don't forget these:
* http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wikipedia_Takes_Manhattan * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiportrait * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wikipedia_Loves_Art * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Art_Netherlands * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2010 * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_Wiki_takes_Haarlem * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011 * etc.
See also the related categories [1] and project pages [2]
-- Krinkle
[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photo_scavenger_hunts [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photo_scavenger_hunts
2011/2/24 geni geniice@gmail.com
On 23 February 2011 17:40, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
If you wanted to encourage a 'game mechanic' in Commons, I think
you'd want to make it first of all a friendly competition to 'catch them all' and secondarily a competition to get better quality photographs. I think the ideal Commons photographer would be a person who's interested in some specific category (say going to concerts and snapping pictures of musicians or taking pictures of birds.) To support this there's a need for tools that make it clear where the holes are, both in the sense of "We don't have any pictures of X" or "We'd like to get better pictures of X".
Problem is that this is in practice a far better fit for wikipedia where such lists are generated in passing than commons.
For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects#Objects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Photos_requested#A_History_of...
geni
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On 2/23/2011 9:20 PM, geni wrote:
Problem is that this is in practice a far better fit for wikipedia where such lists are generated in passing than commons.
And that's a critical insight.
From my perspective, wikipedia is a skeleton and commons is the flesh that's hanging on it. If you want to improve the organization of Commons, you've got the most incredible resource in the world to do that... Wikipedia.
Today, Freebase and Dbpedia can be used together to form a rich and powerful database and ontology that describes the contents of Wikipedia. A "top 100" list doesn't need to be compiled by experts or even by humans, but can be produced by a largely automated process. For instance, you could look for things that are typed '/people/person' in Freebase and then sort them in the order of how many Wikipedia articles and produce a list of the "top 100" people that is pretty good (except for the minor embarrassment that U.S. President #43 is the most linked person in my sample.)
With a little work, it should be possible to build something that makes lists like "Train stations in Poland that don't have pictures in en.wikipedia", though it's a query that's not on my fingertips because my system was built to pay attention to things that have photographs and ignore things that don't.
Anyhow, Freebase is CC-BY so there's no problem feeding data from it back into Wikipedia/commons. I'll offer that data quality is a lot better in Freebase than dbpedia, so anyone going down this route will save a lot of time by relying primarily on Freebase and using Dbpedia to fill gaps.
On 24 February 2011 15:22, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
On 2/23/2011 9:20 PM, geni wrote:
Problem is that this is in practice a far better fit for wikipedia where such lists are generated in passing than commons.
And that's a critical insight.
From my perspective, wikipedia is a skeleton and commons is the flesh that's hanging on it. If you want to improve the organization of Commons, you've got the most incredible resource in the world to do that... Wikipedia.
Today, Freebase and Dbpedia can be used together to form a rich and powerful database and ontology that describes the contents of Wikipedia. A "top 100" list doesn't need to be compiled by experts or even by humans, but can be produced by a largely automated process. For instance, you could look for things that are typed '/people/person' in Freebase and then sort them in the order of how many Wikipedia articles and produce a list of the "top 100" people that is pretty good (except for the minor embarrassment that U.S. President #43 is the most linked person in my sample.)
With a little work, it should be possible to build something that makes lists like "Train stations in Poland that don't have pictures in en.wikipedia", though it's a query that's not on my fingertips because my system was built to pay attention to things that have photographs and ignore things that don't.
The problem with at is you are back to single custom lists and a lack of interaction. If you want people to work on becoming better photographers you multiple people focusing on one list. The thing that made the A History of the World in 100 Objects list interesting was not only were there multiple people looking to complete it but that were pics on it that could be improved (Maya maize god statue still could be although it's a tricky one).
On 2/23/11 6:20 PM, geni wrote:
On 23 February 2011 17:40, Paul Houlepaul@ontology2.com wrote:
If you wanted to encourage a 'game mechanic' in Commons, I think
you'd want to make it first of all a friendly competition to 'catch them all' and secondarily a competition to get better quality photographs. I think the ideal Commons photographer would be a person who's interested in some specific category (say going to concerts and snapping pictures of musicians or taking pictures of birds.) To support this there's a need for tools that make it clear where the holes are, both in the sense of "We don't have any pictures of X" or "We'd like to get better pictures of X".
Problem is that this is in practice a far better fit for wikipedia where such lists are generated in passing than commons.
For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects#Objects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Photos_requested#A_History_of...
To take an example from my activity, much of my plant photography is motivated by checking off a published list of the thousand-odd taxa recorded in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas. I've been doing penciled annotation of the physical list, partly because I don't want to have to fight over having a WP or commons version of the list. It would be very convenient to have it in commons to track what pics we are still looking for, and be able to point my fellow Vegas plant people at it, but I just know that there would be a nonstop parade of busybodies arguing that the list (full of redlinks ZOMG!) is inappropriate for commons.
There are all kinds of possible experiments, but we need to get back to a spirit of being willing to try stuff, and not forbidding everything that doesn't adhere to a narrow view of what commons is good for.
Stan
I though that this was what user sub-pages were about. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rama/test
-- Rama
On 24/02/2011, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
On 2/23/11 6:20 PM, geni wrote:
On 23 February 2011 17:40, Paul Houlepaul@ontology2.com wrote:
If you wanted to encourage a 'game mechanic' in Commons, I think
you'd want to make it first of all a friendly competition to 'catch them all' and secondarily a competition to get better quality photographs. I think the ideal Commons photographer would be a person who's interested in some specific category (say going to concerts and snapping pictures of musicians or taking pictures of birds.) To support this there's a need for tools that make it clear where the holes are, both in the sense of "We don't have any pictures of X" or "We'd like to get better pictures of X".
Problem is that this is in practice a far better fit for wikipedia where such lists are generated in passing than commons.
For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects#Objects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Photos_requested#A_History_of...
To take an example from my activity, much of my plant photography is motivated by checking off a published list of the thousand-odd taxa recorded in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas. I've been doing penciled annotation of the physical list, partly because I don't want to have to fight over having a WP or commons version of the list. It would be very convenient to have it in commons to track what pics we are still looking for, and be able to point my fellow Vegas plant people at it, but I just know that there would be a nonstop parade of busybodies arguing that the list (full of redlinks ZOMG!) is inappropriate for commons.
There are all kinds of possible experiments, but we need to get back to a spirit of being willing to try stuff, and not forbidding everything that doesn't adhere to a narrow view of what commons is good for.
Stan
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On 2/24/2011 10:07 AM, Stan Shebs wrote:
To take an example from my activity, much of my plant photography is motivated by checking off a published list of the thousand-odd taxa recorded in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas. I've been doing penciled annotation of the physical list, partly because I don't want to have to fight over having a WP or commons version of the list. It would be very convenient to have it in commons to track what pics we are still looking for, and be able to point my fellow Vegas plant people at it, but I just know that there would be a nonstop parade of busybodies arguing that the list (full of redlinks ZOMG!) is inappropriate for commons.
Actually, the real problem is that presumably the list is not freely licensed. Even though your annotation of it makes a pretty good case for transformative fair use, that doesn't help you with Commons policy. Maybe there's too strong of an expectation that Commons is only for finished products and not intended to be a workspace, notwithstanding that it is still a wiki.
--Michael Snow
Does a species list meet the threshold of originality? I'm dubious that it qualifies for copyright protection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
I think it may be appropriate for a Wikipedia project. The only object that occurs to me is notability, but in my opinion, a location specific plant list, if published, is notable.
-- Walter Siegmund
On Feb 24, 2011, at 10:21 AM, Michael Snow wrote:
On 2/24/2011 10:07 AM, Stan Shebs wrote:
To take an example from my activity, much of my plant photography is motivated by checking off a published list of the thousand-odd taxa recorded in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas. I've been doing penciled annotation of the physical list, partly because I don't want to have to fight over having a WP or commons version of the list. It would be very convenient to have it in commons to track what pics we are still looking for, and be able to point my fellow Vegas plant people at it, but I just know that there would be a nonstop parade of busybodies arguing that the list (full of redlinks ZOMG!) is inappropriate for commons.
Actually, the real problem is that presumably the list is not freely licensed. Even though your annotation of it makes a pretty good case for transformative fair use, that doesn't help you with Commons policy. Maybe there's too strong of an expectation that Commons is only for finished products and not intended to be a workspace, notwithstanding that it is still a wiki.
--Michael Snow
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On February 22, this Commons welcome greeting was forwarded:
*Please categorize our images !!!* You already have been asked by a bot to categorize your images. Therefore I don't understand why you keep on uploading images without categories. Uploading images without categorizing them doesn't make sense. Only categorized images can be found!
This was written (on July 4, 2010) in English by a German. In my opinion, we should let Germans write software but not welcome greetings, at least not in English. All of the worst cases I have seen on Commons have been rude English messages written by Germans.
This kind of mastering, "I shall teach you" tone is not uncommon on the German Wikipedia. When these Germans come to Commons, they bring the tone and just translate the words. The result can be disasterous. In the worst cases, it is magnified through a less then perfect mastering of English.
In this case, the same user continues to this day, with lots of '''boldface''' and exclamation marks:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Dezidor&diff=pr...
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:CostaPPPR&diff=...
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Obenhausener&di...
Of course, most Germans are civilian. It's just that those who aren't, aren't corrected. Civility is treated just as any random personal property, like hair colour, and is not seen as an obligation.
Maybe Wikimedia Deutschland can organize a course in writing in a civil manner in English. That would be a real service to the community.
On 2/27/11 10:56 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
In my opinion, we should let Germans write software but not welcome greetings, at least not in English
Well, this shouldn't be controversial at all!
Maybe a German wrote this originally, but the rest of us have had ample opportunity to amend this. It's not German software; it's not American software, it's OUR software. Rather than blame those who tried to fix a problem, let's put our minds to work on coming up with an even better solution.
Without dragging putative national characteristics into this, let's just agree that our software could be nicer. The tone of its messages could be improved, but more importantly, we need to reduce the need for there to even be nagging messages.
On 02/27/2011 08:05 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
Maybe a German wrote this originally, but the rest of us have had ample opportunity to amend this. It's not German software; it's not American software, it's OUR software. Rather than blame those who tried to fix a problem, let's put our minds to work on coming up with an even better solution.
Magnus Manske wrote MediaWiki, Commons was suggested by Erik Möller, and the Toolserver is German. The Germans have contributed more than most to the Wikimedia projects, especially in software and technology. Not to mention the huge archive photo donations and Wikipedia Academy, pioneered by the German chapter. However, the German Wikipedia has a different set of standards, more strict rules for inclusion and notability, and more speedy deletions. This adds to the "focus on content, rather than people", and when this is described as a problem on Commons, what I can see is that users from Germany are the root of the problem.
Spanish or Norwegian admins on Commons are not the problem, as far as I can see, despite using the same software. So I don't think the software is the problem.
We do have admins who patrol uploaded images for copyright violations and lack of categories. Fine. But perhaps we also need to patrol against unfriendly greeting messages, and correct those admins who write them. It seems I was the first to point out on User_talk:Ies that the unfriendly tone was inappropriate.
On 2/27/11 11:30 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
what I can see is that users from Germany are the root of the problem.
I'm noticing that male software developers from Sweden born in 1966 also have their own issues... they seem to trolling threads where there was a danger of actual progress on some contentious issues.
Uh-huh.
Yt. User Htm
----- Original Message ----- From: "Lars Aronsson" lars@aronsson.se To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2011 8:56 PM Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Friendliness
On February 22, this Commons welcome greeting was forwarded:
*Please categorize our images !!!* You already have been asked by a bot to categorize your images. Therefore I don't understand why you keep on uploading images without categories. Uploading images without categorizing them doesn't make sense. Only categorized images can be found!
This was written (on July 4, 2010) in English by a German. In my opinion, we should let Germans write software but not welcome greetings, at least not in English. All of the worst cases I have seen on Commons have been rude English messages written by Germans.
This kind of mastering, "I shall teach you" tone is not uncommon on the German Wikipedia. When these Germans come to Commons, they bring the tone and just translate the words. The result can be disasterous. In the worst cases, it is magnified through a less then perfect mastering of English.
In this case, the same user continues to this day, with lots of '''boldface''' and exclamation marks:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Dezidor&diff=pr...
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:CostaPPPR&diff=...
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Obenhausener&di...
Of course, most Germans are civilian. It's just that those who aren't, aren't corrected. Civility is treated just as any random personal property, like hair colour, and is not seen as an obligation.
Maybe Wikimedia Deutschland can organize a course in writing in a civil manner in English. That would be a real service to the community.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l