Hi Wikimedia Commons folks!
Metadata Games (MG) is a FOSS project that we've been working on at
Tiltfactor Lab at Dartmouth College. It's a bit of an experimental
project using online games to help with the collection of metadata for
images in various collections (libraries, archives, etc...).
There's a bit of basic information up on the Tiltfactor website about
the background and main goals of the project:
http://www.tiltfactor.org/metadata-games
And (because talk is cheap :-), source code is up on Gitorious here:
http://gitorious.org/metadatagames
If you promise not to explode our server too much, you can point your
browser over to
http://metadatagames.com and see a version of the
software in action. Right now that's pointing to a test install with
some pictures from Dartmouth's archives. We have some great
black-and-white images from old Winter Carnivals, as well as some more
modern color photographs from around the campus. We're mostly done
collecting data with that particular test, so feel free to play around
with the images and games we have up there.
The MG system currently has a couple of different games for single and
multi-player tagging of images. In the next couple of months we're
hoping to add support for more media types (including audio and video)
as well as making some big improvements to the backend of the system
so that we can scale-up for big installs.
We're currently collaborating with a couple of different groups
including the Rauner Library here at Dartmouth, and we're eager to see
more groups benefit from tagging media with MG. Sam Klein pinged me
about working with Wikimedia, and we'd definitely be excited to
collaborate on improvements or expansions to the current system. The
simplest way to use MG would just be to funnel images from Commons
through the system, and then export and use the highest-ranked tags. I
haven't been very active in the Wikimedia community for the last few
years, so I'm not quite up to date on all of the projects percolating
out there, but there might also be some more creative ways in which
the MG system could be employed :-)
Cheers,
Robinson Tryon
(User:Womble on various wikimedia sites)