I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986, I speak English, I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on the English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on Wikisource. I don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying that I'm not a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on Commons is full of deletion requests. I occasionally contribute a lot to Commons, but in between I might be away for a few months, often long enough for deletions to go through.
The idea that I might be a stable, long time contributor, well versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to take legal responsibility for what I have uploaded, hasn't occurred to the people posting these deletion requests. Instead, images are deleted 7 days after the warning is posted. This is completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals.
Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous. Sometimes the conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was perfectly legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished for this. In the last year or two, the community culture on Commons has made this kind of drive-by-deletion-request something normal. When I pointed out to another user that she needed to explain why some images should be deleted, *I* was told to behave.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LA2
The Swedish Wikipedia is among those that no longer allows image uploads, because everything should go on Commons. This means we are recruiting Swedish newcomers to join Commons and upload their images there. These are not programmers. They don't always speak English. They might be afraid of technology, and think that anything that goes wrong is their fault. (Yes, this includes women and older people.) Still, we want them to contribute because they might have unique pictures to share. Typically, if they are helped to set up a user account, the user interface at Commons will be set to Swedish.
One person who is not a newcomer, but a computer user pioneer in his field since the 1980s, is Sven Rosborn, archaeologist and manager of the viking museum at Foteviken in southern Sweden. He has contributed dozens of his own photos and maps. He was a speaker at the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks ago. He does speak English, only perhaps not as eagerly as I. He is not a programmer. His user talk page is also full of deletion requests. Two months after the fact, he enters and anwers in Swedish that these are his own self-made images and maps. But then the result of the request is already "the media was deleted".
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sven_Rosborn
Both myself and Sven are people who don't give up easily on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons. We could take a lot of mistreatment. But what about the real newcomers?
With the current behaviour of the Wikimedia Commons community, I find it pointless to try to recruit new contributors. It would be like pouring water into a bucket with a hole. This hole needs to mended first. So, how do we do that?
How do others manage to recruit newcomers to Wikimedia Commons? Are there any success stories in public outreach on Commons?
If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia and has the Swedish language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then why should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in English? Some of these template messages have links to translations in other languages, but that is an awkward solution. Will the requestor be able to read the user's answer in Swedish? Shouldn't it be possible to assign Swedish speaking admins to patroll contributions by Swedish speaking newcomers? That's how it would work if all images were uploaded directly to the Swedish Wikipedia. And the reason we moved images to Commons is not because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English messages or admins who fail to speak Swedish.
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
Lars,
Thank you very much for your e-mail. I'm afraid I don't have any good answers for you - your concern about how to treat people from other communities is a big concern for many people, including myself. I'm afraid I don't have a magic bullet for your problem, but I find the idea of allowing local uploads and then have some sort of automatic forwarding to Commons when things are locally checked a very good one. There is a striking lack of support for non-English speakers. As you might know, pt.wikipedia also disabled local uploads and the problem you mentioned for sv.wp also stands for pt.wp. I found lately several instances where pt users were perhaps not dealt with in the best manner mainly because of lack of communication. There was in most cases no attempt to fetch a Commons "regular" speaking Portuguese to help. We have a list of administrators by language that is perhaps not being put to use. In any case, it's not covering all languages. If Swedes are in general good English speakers/writers and you find problems, imagine what it is to deal with (mainly) portuguese and brazillians that in most cases have about zero knowledge of English. No, Commons is far from being good as a multilingual project. I wouldn't recommend disabling local uploads nowadays. Resolving the problems you mentioned requires more communication skills, which we are lacking right now. Our warnings are too scary and many of our admins too aggressive. I'm not sure what we could do to improve the current state of things, but something must change. Cheers, Patrícia
--- On Sat, 6/12/08, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote: From: Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se Subject: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:30 AM
I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986, I speak English, I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on the English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on Wikisource. I don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying that I'm not a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on Commons is full of deletion requests. I occasionally contribute a lot to Commons, but in between I might be away for a few months, often long enough for deletions to go through.
The idea that I might be a stable, long time contributor, well versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to take legal responsibility for what I have uploaded, hasn't occurred to the people posting these deletion requests. Instead, images are deleted 7 days after the warning is posted. This is completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals.
Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous. Sometimes the conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was perfectly legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished for this. In the last year or two, the community culture on Commons has made this kind of drive-by-deletion-request something normal. When I pointed out to another user that she needed to explain why some images should be deleted, *I* was told to behave.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LA2
The Swedish Wikipedia is among those that no longer allows image uploads, because everything should go on Commons. This means we are recruiting Swedish newcomers to join Commons and upload their images there. These are not programmers. They don't always speak English. They might be afraid of technology, and think that anything that goes wrong is their fault. (Yes, this includes women and older people.) Still, we want them to contribute because they might have unique pictures to share. Typically, if they are helped to set up a user account, the user interface at Commons will be set to Swedish.
One person who is not a newcomer, but a computer user pioneer in his field since the 1980s, is Sven Rosborn, archaeologist and manager of the viking museum at Foteviken in southern Sweden. He has contributed dozens of his own photos and maps. He was a speaker at the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks ago. He does speak English, only perhaps not as eagerly as I. He is not a programmer. His user talk page is also full of deletion requests. Two months after the fact, he enters and anwers in Swedish that these are his own self-made images and maps. But then the result of the request is already "the media was deleted".
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sven_Rosborn
Both myself and Sven are people who don't give up easily on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons. We could take a lot of mistreatment. But what about the real newcomers?
With the current behaviour of the Wikimedia Commons community, I find it pointless to try to recruit new contributors. It would be like pouring water into a bucket with a hole. This hole needs to mended first. So, how do we do that?
How do others manage to recruit newcomers to Wikimedia Commons? Are there any success stories in public outreach on Commons?
If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia and has the Swedish language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then why should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in English? Some of these template messages have links to translations in other languages, but that is an awkward solution. Will the requestor be able to read the user's answer in Swedish? Shouldn't it be possible to assign Swedish speaking admins to patroll contributions by Swedish speaking newcomers? That's how it would work if all images were uploaded directly to the Swedish Wikipedia. And the reason we moved images to Commons is not because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English messages or admins who fail to speak Swedish.
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
This is indeed a problem, and over the last few years it is my impression that non English speakers have become less comfortable on Commons. Even such important pages as Commons Scope still only have two translations (and part of a third) three months after the August re-write went live. Most non-English speakers cannot even tell what Commons is for!
Our admins are not I think normally aggressive, but they are (perfectly properly) rigorous in deleting copyvios. Without local-language explanation, what can to an English speaker appear an obvious deletion can, I am sure, seem like an agressive act to the uploader.
As Patricia says, there is no magic bullet and the need is to build up a committed group of users who pro-actively translate pages, templates and so on, and who can help our non-English users with upload issues. This will take time and will require sustained effort.
Would there be interest in setting up a Commons Project to attempt to address this in a systematic way?
Michael
Patricia Rodrigues wrote:
Lars,
Thank you very much for your e-mail. I'm afraid I don't have any good answers for you - your concern about how to treat people from other communities is a big concern for many people, including myself. I'm afraid I don't have a magic bullet for your problem, but I find the idea of allowing local uploads and then have some sort of automatic forwarding to Commons when things are locally checked a very good one. There is a striking lack of support for non-English speakers. As you might know, pt.wikipedia also disabled local uploads and the problem you mentioned for sv.wp also stands for pt.wp. I found lately several instances where pt users were perhaps not dealt with in the best manner mainly because of lack of communication. There was in most cases no attempt to fetch a Commons "regular" speaking Portuguese to help. We have a list of administrators by language that is perhaps not being put to use. In any case, it's not covering all languages. If Swedes are in general good English speakers/writers and you find problems, imagine what it is to deal with (mainly) portuguese and brazillians that in most cases have about zero knowledge of English. No, Commons is far from being good as a multilingual project. I wouldn't recommend disabling local uploads nowadays. Resolving the problems you mentioned requires more communication skills, which we are lacking right now. Our warnings are too scary and many of our admins too aggressive. I'm not sure what we could do to improve the current state of things, but something must change. Cheers, Patrícia
--- On *Sat, 6/12/08, Lars Aronsson /lars@aronsson.se/* wrote:
From: Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> Subject: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:30 AM I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986, I speak English, I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on the English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on Wikisource. I don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying that I'm not a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on Commons is full of deletion requests. I occasionally contribute a lot to Commons, but in between I might be away for a few months, often long enough for deletions to go through. The idea that I might be a stable, long time contributor, well versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to take legal responsibility for what I have uploaded, hasn't occurred to the people posting these deletion requests. Instead, images are deleted 7 days after the warning is posted. This is completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals. Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous. Sometimes the conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was perfectly legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished for this. In the last year or two, the community culture on Commons has made this kind of drive-by-deletion-request something normal. When I pointed out to another user that she needed to explain why some images should be deleted, *I* was told to behave. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LA2 The Swedish Wikipedia is among those that no longer allows image uploads, because everything should go on Commons. This means we are recruiting Swedish newcomers to join Commons and upload their images there. These are not programmers. They don't always speak English. They might be afraid of technology, and think that anything that goes wrong is their fault. (Yes, this includes women and older people.) Still, we want them to contribute because they might have unique pictures to share. Typically, if they are helped to set up a user account, the user interface at Commons will be set to Swedish. One person who is not a newcomer, but a computer user pioneer in his field since the 1980s, is Sven Rosborn, archaeologist and manager of the viking museum at Foteviken in southern Sweden. He has contributed dozens of his own photos and maps. He was a speaker at the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks ago. He does speak English, only perhaps not as eagerly as I. He is not a programmer. His user talk page is also full of deletion requests. Two months after the fact, he enters and anwers in Swedish that these are his own self-made images and maps. But then the result of the request is already "the media was deleted". http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sven_Rosborn Both myself and Sven are people who don't give up easily on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons. We could take a lot of mistreatment. But what about the real newcomers? With the current behaviour of the Wikimedia Commons community, I find it pointless to try to recruit new contributors. It would be like pouring water into a bucket with a hole.. This hole needs to mended first. So, how do we do that? How do others manage to recruit newcomers to Wikimedia Commons? Are there any success stories in public outreach on Commons? If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia and has the Swedish language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then why should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in English? Some of these template messages have links to translations in other languages, but that is an awkward solution. Will the requestor be able to read the user's answer in Swedish? Shouldn't it be possible to assign Swedish speaking admins to patroll contributions by Swedish speaking newcomers? That's how it would work if all images were uploaded directly to the Swedish Wikipedia. And the reason we moved images to Commons is not because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English messages or admins who fail to speak Swedish. Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons. -- 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
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
The problems on Commons are a direct result of the enourmous growth in Commons. Currently the counter is at 3.5M and that number is increasing with 120K each month. Last time I checked (about a year ago) about 10% to 20% of those images is deleted. If this value is still the same, which I expect, then an unhealthy total of 20K images per month are deleted.
A significant amount of the deletions could be avoided if every user was helped personally in fixing the images. I'd wish every image could go through a community review but with the amount of images this is simply not possible. The backlog for regular deletion requests reaches to 11 Feburary 2008. 10 months, and I have seen it slowly increase: 6 months ago the backlog reached to 30 December 2007, a backlog of 6 months. The backlog has thus increased by 4 months in 6 months. If this trend continues we will have a backlog of one and a half year in one year.
The problem is not specifically the lack of admins, but the lack of community. Many deletion requests could use community input. Many new users could use an experienced member guiding them through Commons and help them fix their mistakes.
Unfortunately I see no solution (except, say, disabling uploads for the coming month ;))
Bryan
Is there some sort of mentor program in place? Maybe that should be a possibility with a note in the templates and different templates if a badge is present?
________________________________ From: Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2008 7:58:10 AM Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
The problems on Commons are a direct result of the enourmous growth in Commons. Currently the counter is at 3.5M and that number is increasing with 120K each month. Last time I checked (about a year ago) about 10% to 20% of those images is deleted. If this value is still the same, which I expect, then an unhealthy total of 20K images per month are deleted.
A significant amount of the deletions could be avoided if every user was helped personally in fixing the images. I'd wish every image could go through a community review but with the amount of images this is simply not possible. The backlog for regular deletion requests reaches to 11 Feburary 2008. 10 months, and I have seen it slowly increase: 6 months ago the backlog reached to 30 December 2007, a backlog of 6 months. The backlog has thus increased by 4 months in 6 months. If this trend continues we will have a backlog of one and a half year in one year.
The problem is not specifically the lack of admins, but the lack of community. Many deletion requests could use community input. Many new users could use an experienced member guiding them through Commons and help them fix their mistakes.
Unfortunately I see no solution (except, say, disabling uploads for the coming month ;))
Bryan
_______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
A specific project to improve communication between communities and usability of Wikimedia Commons, you mean? I've been kicking that idea in the back of my head for some months now. We could ask users across WMF projects what difficulties they usually find on Commons and ask them to suggest what Commons could improve to help them. I just opened such a discussion on pt.wp Village pump...
Maybe what we are needing is feedback. Or are we having feedback but not listening to it?
Patrícia
--- On Sat, 6/12/08, Michael Maggs Michael@Maggs.name wrote: From: Michael Maggs Michael@Maggs.name Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening To: snooze210904@yahoo.se, "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:23 PM
This is indeed a problem, and over the last few years it is my impression that non English speakers have become less comfortable on Commons. Even such important pages as Commons Scope still only have two translations (and part of a third) three months after the August re-write went live. Most non-English speakers cannot even tell what Commons is for!
Our admins are not I think normally aggressive, but they are (perfectly properly) rigorous in deleting copyvios. Without local-language explanation, what can to an English speaker appear an obvious deletion can, I am sure, seem like an agressive act to the uploader.
As Patricia says, there is no magic bullet and the need is to build up a committed group of users who pro-actively translate pages, templates and so on, and who can help our non-English users with upload issues. This will take time and will require sustained effort.
Would there be interest in setting up a Commons Project to attempt to address this in a systematic way?
Michael
--- On Sat, 6/12/08, Michael Maggs Michael@Maggs.name wrote: From: Michael Maggs Michael@Maggs.name Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening To: snooze210904@yahoo.se, "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:23 PM
This is indeed a problem, and over the last few years it is my impression that non English speakers have become less comfortable on Commons. Even such important pages as Commons Scope still only have two translations (and part of a third) three months after the August re-write went live. Most non-English speakers cannot even tell what Commons is for!
Our admins are not I think normally aggressive, but they are (perfectly properly) rigorous in deleting copyvios. Without local-language explanation, what can to an English speaker appear an obvious deletion can, I am sure, seem like an agressive act to the uploader.
As Patricia says, there is no magic bullet and the need is to build up a committed group of users who pro-actively translate pages, templates and so on, and who can help our non-English users with upload issues. This will take time and will require sustained effort.
Would there be interest in setting up a Commons Project to attempt to address this in a systematic way?
Michael
Patricia Rodrigues wrote:
Lars,
Thank you very much for your e-mail. I'm afraid I don't have any
good answers for you - your concern about how to treat people from other communities is a big concern for many people, including myself. I'm afraid I don't have a magic bullet for your problem, but I find the idea of allowing local uploads and then have some sort of automatic forwarding to Commons when things are locally checked a very good one.
There is a striking lack of support for non-English speakers. As you might
know, pt.wikipedia also disabled local uploads and the problem you mentioned for sv.wp also stands for pt.wp. I found lately several instances where pt users were perhaps not dealt with in the best manner mainly because of lack of communication. There was in most cases no attempt to fetch a Commons "regular" speaking Portuguese to help. We have a list of administrators by language that is perhaps not being put to use. In any case, it's not covering all languages. If Swedes are in general good English speakers/writers and you find problems, imagine what it is to deal with (mainly) portuguese and brazillians that in most cases have about zero knowledge of English.
No, Commons is far from being good as a multilingual project. I
wouldn't recommend disabling local uploads nowadays. Resolving the problems you mentioned requires more communication skills, which we are lacking right now. Our warnings are too scary and many of our admins too aggressive. I'm not sure what we could do to improve the current state of things, but something must change.
Cheers, Patrícia
--- On *Sat, 6/12/08, Lars Aronsson /lars@aronsson.se/* wrote:
From: Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> Subject: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 3:30 AM I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986, I speak
English, I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on the English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on Wikisource. I don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying that I'm not a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on Commons is full of deletion requests. I occasionally contribute a lot to Commons, but in between I might be away for a few months, often long enough for deletions to go through.
The idea that I might be a stable, long time contributor, well
versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to take legal responsibility for what I have
uploaded, hasn't occurred to the people posting these
deletion requests. Instead, images are deleted 7 days after the warning is posted. This is completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals.
Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous. Sometimes the
conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was perfectly legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished for this. In the last year or two, the community culture on Commons has made this kind of drive-by-deletion-request something normal. When I pointed out to another user that she needed to explain why some images should be deleted, *I* was told to behave.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LA2 The Swedish Wikipedia is among those that no longer allows image
uploads, because everything should go on Commons. This means we
are recruiting Swedish newcomers to join Commons and upload their
images there. These are not programmers. They don't always speak English. They might be afraid of technology, and think that anything that goes wrong is their fault. (Yes, this includes women and older people.) Still, we want them to contribute because they might have unique pictures to share. Typically, if they are helped to set up a user account, the user interface at Commons will be set to Swedish.
One person who is not a newcomer, but a computer user pioneer in
his field since the 1980s, is Sven Rosborn, archaeologist and manager of the viking museum at Foteviken in southern Sweden. He has contributed dozens of his own photos and maps. He was a speaker at the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks ago. He does speak English, only perhaps not as eagerly as I. He is not a programmer. His user talk page
is also full of deletion requests. Two months after the fact, he
enters and anwers in Swedish that these are his own self-made images and maps. But then the result of the request is already "the media was deleted".
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sven_Rosborn Both myself and Sven are people who don't give up easily on
Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons. We could take a lot of mistreatment. But what about the real newcomers?
With the current behaviour of the Wikimedia Commons community, I
find it pointless to try to recruit new contributors. It would be like pouring water into a bucket with a hole.. This hole needs to mended first. So, how do we do that?
How do others manage to recruit newcomers to Wikimedia Commons? Are there any success stories in public outreach on Commons? If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia and has the
Swedish
language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then why
should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in English? Some of these template messages have links to translations in other languages, but that is an awkward solution. Will the requestor be able to read the user's answer in Swedish? Shouldn't it be possible to assign Swedish speaking admins to patroll contributions by Swedish speaking newcomers? That's how it would work if all images were uploaded directly to the Swedish Wikipedia. And the reason we moved images to Commons is not because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English messages or admins who fail to speak Swedish.
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers
can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons,
instead of the other way around. Even though this would require
software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
-- 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
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Hoi, When people who speak no English, they will not benefit from Commons. People who do not speak English are not able to find useful images on Commons. As a consequence there are several Wikipedia projects that do not promote the use of Commons. When you combine it with "drive by deletionism" I find the arguments against using Commons persuasive. Thanks, GerardM
2008/12/6 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se
I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986, I speak English, I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on the English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on Wikisource. I don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying that I'm not a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on Commons is full of deletion requests. I occasionally contribute a lot to Commons, but in between I might be away for a few months, often long enough for deletions to go through.
The idea that I might be a stable, long time contributor, well versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to take legal responsibility for what I have uploaded, hasn't occurred to the people posting these deletion requests. Instead, images are deleted 7 days after the warning is posted. This is completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals.
Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous. Sometimes the conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was perfectly legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished for this. In the last year or two, the community culture on Commons has made this kind of drive-by-deletion-request something normal. When I pointed out to another user that she needed to explain why some images should be deleted, *I* was told to behave.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LA2
The Swedish Wikipedia is among those that no longer allows image uploads, because everything should go on Commons. This means we are recruiting Swedish newcomers to join Commons and upload their images there. These are not programmers. They don't always speak English. They might be afraid of technology, and think that anything that goes wrong is their fault. (Yes, this includes women and older people.) Still, we want them to contribute because they might have unique pictures to share. Typically, if they are helped to set up a user account, the user interface at Commons will be set to Swedish.
One person who is not a newcomer, but a computer user pioneer in his field since the 1980s, is Sven Rosborn, archaeologist and manager of the viking museum at Foteviken in southern Sweden. He has contributed dozens of his own photos and maps. He was a speaker at the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks ago. He does speak English, only perhaps not as eagerly as I. He is not a programmer. His user talk page is also full of deletion requests. Two months after the fact, he enters and anwers in Swedish that these are his own self-made images and maps. But then the result of the request is already "the media was deleted".
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sven_Rosborn
Both myself and Sven are people who don't give up easily on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons. We could take a lot of mistreatment. But what about the real newcomers?
With the current behaviour of the Wikimedia Commons community, I find it pointless to try to recruit new contributors. It would be like pouring water into a bucket with a hole. This hole needs to mended first. So, how do we do that?
How do others manage to recruit newcomers to Wikimedia Commons? Are there any success stories in public outreach on Commons?
If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia and has the Swedish language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then why should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in English? Some of these template messages have links to translations in other languages, but that is an awkward solution. Will the requestor be able to read the user's answer in Swedish? Shouldn't it be possible to assign Swedish speaking admins to patroll contributions by Swedish speaking newcomers? That's how it would work if all images were uploaded directly to the Swedish Wikipedia. And the reason we moved images to Commons is not because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English messages or admins who fail to speak Swedish.
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
-- 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
It appears many on Commons have forgotten its role as a service project, not just a happy little media repository unbeholden to anyone.
- d.
Commons is not just a Wikimedia service project, it is also a happy little media repository indeed. So both things must go hand-in-hand. The issue is not about Commons role in Wikimedia, it is about lack of communication.
--- On Sat, 6/12/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote: From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 2:06 PM
It appears many on Commons have forgotten its role as a service project, not just a happy little media repository unbeholden to anyone.
- d.
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Lars Aronsson wrote:
I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986, I speak English, I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on the English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on Wikisource. I don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying that I'm not a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on Commons is full of deletion requests. I occasionally contribute a lot to Commons, but in between I might be away for a few months, often long enough for deletions to go through.
Remember that there is a send notification of changes on your talk by email. It will be disabled if it's an old account. For new accounts, it should be automatically enabled if it isn't already.
The idea that I might be a stable, long time contributor, well versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to take legal responsibility for what I have uploaded, hasn't occurred to the people posting these deletion requests. Instead, images are deleted 7 days after the warning is posted. This is completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals.
Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous. Sometimes the conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was perfectly legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished for this. In the last year or two, the community culture on Commons has made this kind of drive-by-deletion-request something normal. When I pointed out to another user that she needed to explain why some images should be deleted, *I* was told to behave.
Seems both Cecil and you thought the other could be a troll... We're too used to get trolls here :(
(...)
If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia and has the Swedish language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then why should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in English?
I try to send the template in the proper language, when I guess which one it is. But given a contributor many times I can't tell which is his mother tongue, defaulting to English messages.
Some of these template messages have links to translations in other languages, but that is an awkward solution. Will the requestor be able to read the user's answer in Swedish?
Shouldn't it be possible to assign Swedish speaking admins to patroll contributions by Swedish speaking newcomers? That's how it would work if all images were uploaded directly to the Swedish Wikipedia.
The problem is to know which ones are to be answered in Swedish, English or Portuguese. Newcomers usually don't know how to add babel templates (or that they should place one).
Plus, if I see a blatant copyrright violation, I shouldn't have to refrain from deleting it just because it "pertains to another admin".
And the reason we moved images to Commons is not because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English messages or admins who fail to speak Swedish.
If they want to talk with an admin, they should contat with a Swedish-speaking admin. Maybe the admin list by language is hard to find?
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
That's an interesting proposal.
On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
That's an interesting proposal.
How about this: Keep uploads at Commons, but automatically tag the image description with a (hidden) category of the interface language used on the upload page (except maybe for en)? That would allow for * determining the language to use when contacting a user * subgroup/filter images (e.g. all deletion requests uploaded in Swedish)
Should be easy enough to incorporate into the software. Initially, we could fall back to JavaScript (wgUserLanguage), which we use in the upload form anyway...
Magnus
That's a wonderful idea! But many times our main problem is the lack of manpower in different languages to actually address different users. Don't let [[Special:ListUsers/sysop]] fool you: only a handful of those 244 sysops is actually very active. The problem runs deeper than multilingualism; it's the cultural differences between communities that really messes things up. This said, I still think such a categorization would be very useful :).
Patrícia
--- On Sat, 6/12/08, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote: From: Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, 6 December, 2008, 6:06 PM
On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
That's an interesting proposal.
How about this: Keep uploads at Commons, but automatically tag the image description with a (hidden) category of the interface language used on the upload page (except maybe for en)? That would allow for * determining the language to use when contacting a user * subgroup/filter images (e.g. all deletion requests uploaded in Swedish)
Should be easy enough to incorporate into the software. Initially, we could fall back to JavaScript (wgUserLanguage), which we use in the upload form anyway...
Magnus
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Patricia Rodrigues wrote:
That's a wonderful idea! But many times our main problem is the lack of manpower in different languages to actually address different users.
The more I think about this human side of the problem, the more I think we should go back to local uploading. The forwarding to Commons could be implemented by adding a "category:Suitable for Commons" and a bot that scans this category. Then if the image is deleted from Commons, the local copy would still exist.
If we want Wikipedia to scale from the narrow nerd community to a wider society, including elderly, we need to greet them with respect and in their own language. I don't see how we could manage this on Commons, even if uploaded images were marked with the uploader's interface language. We will always have the narrow nerd community too, which can act as admins and an interface towards the international community.
From: Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail..com>
How about this: Keep uploads at Commons, but automatically tag the image description with a (hidden) category of the interface language used on the upload page (except maybe for en)? That would allow for
- determining the
language to use when contacting a user
- subgroup/filter images (e.g. all deletion requests uploaded in Swedish)
On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 21:08, Patricia Rodrigues snooze210904@yahoo.se wrote:
That's a wonderful idea! But many times our main problem is the lack of manpower in different languages to actually address different users. Don't let [[Special:ListUsers/sysop]] fool you: only a handful of those 244 sysops is actually very active. The problem runs deeper than multilingualism; it's the cultural differences between communities that really messes things up. This said, I still think such a categorization would be very useful :).
I agree that such a categorization would be useful. I agree too that many admins on commons are not active. I am one of them.
One of the reasons that I am not an active admin is that to me, one admin task takes for ever. Because I try and reach out, retrace the steps of one person to their upload on commons, go to their home wiki to talk to them to make sure they see my messages etc. That of course where the suspicion of copyvio is not clear to me. Which makes it difficult to even get the 5 admin actions needed to keep my admin status once in a while, because I don't have much time to devote to Commons.
I am, like Lars, not better than anyone else, I'm just doing things differently, maybe because when I started working on commons (that was at the very beginning of the project), I had a dream that it would be this amazing international image resource. Which it has become, to some extent, and which it has failed to become, to other extents.
Anyway, I would be willing, for example to help those delete-maniacs (mind you, we need those as well) enter fruitful conversations with new and/or old users. I am passed the time where patrolling was a cool thing to do and having lots of edits was my goal in life (and Commons is really nasty in that regard, it's a lot of work for few edits), but I have come to that time where I think that making sure that the humans behind the uploads are taken care of, because I believe that we have something to achieve.
I have read the thread further, so I am going to comment on a few things and throw in a few ideas.
Geoffrey talks about mentors. I think the mentors should not be for the new comers, but for the existing admins. Admins should go by pair: the "deletionist" and the "patient" or something like that. So that the "deletionsist" can do their job right (ie. keep Commons free and cleanà and the "patients" would be the ones to engage in conversation (and lose time ;-)).
David Gerard states: "Commons appears to have forgotten it was created as a service project for other WMF wikis." As I understand it, that Commons is "at the service of", I tend to disagree with that, strongly. I still have hope that Commons can become,apart from an extremely useful resource for the other Wikimedia projects, a resource in itself for free media. If memory serves, when Commons was started, there was already this debate of whether Commons should just be for WM projects or more. It's a never ending debate. One thing is sure, with the actual interface and lack of internationalization, it will "only" ever be used by WM projects and never develop its own "community".
I find Lars' idea of sending back the uploads to local Wikipedias worth looking into.
I have a few ideas about making it easier for Commons admins to discuss with people: A) With SUL, it's probably easy enough to make sure that at least the "homewiki" of a user is prominently shown on their Commons user page. This would allow for: *Better communication (you'd know what language those people speak) *Better and more to the point warnings (you'd know if someone is a newbie or a long time contributor) B) Could the Commons talk page be embedded in the homewiki talk page somehow, allowing for people to get their message where they are at. Or at lest have a warning "your talk page on commons has a message!" C) If SUL does not allow link to homewiki, or if someone creates an account directly on Commons, maybe in the login page, they could be asked to link to their homewiki account.
These are just ramblings. Commons is my project of choice, because I think it is one with the biggest potential, so I'm biased :)
Another thing that might be worth looking into is whether the Stanton Grant [1] is only for Wikipedia (as is stated in the press release) or whether Commons enters into that overhaul. Because if it does, we might have a chance to make Commons the cool project it deserves to be.
Cheers,
Delphine
[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikipedia_to_become_more_...
2008/12/8 Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com:
Another thing that might be worth looking into is whether the Stanton Grant [1] is only for Wikipedia (as is stated in the press release) or whether Commons enters into that overhaul. Because if it does, we might have a chance to make Commons the cool project it deserves to be.
The focus of the Stanton project is Wikipedia, but due to the fact that uploading media to Commons is an integral part of editing a Wikipedia article, we hope that we can at least name some of the key challenges and make some improvements in that area as part of the project. We're also working on a separate grant proposal focused specifically on building an optimized workflow for media uploads.
I am noting with some interest the idea to use local projects essentially as a first contact point for all media. My primary concern about such an approach would be the risk of diluting an already difficult commitment to free content. That said, I don't want to deny the problems that Lars pointed out, and I think serious technical and social efforts will be required to address them, one way or another.
Well, maybe you are a very good example of the mentality of people who should stay out of Commons. That mixture of - "I don't understand why Commons admins apply different laws for different countries ! They should just ignore them all !" - "I don't understand something, so NEITHER SHOULD YOU" - "I don't understand what the law in France and Germany limits our uploads so much, can't Commons admins change them ?"
I do understand the difficulties of being a newcomer on Commons. But I think that some people do not understand the difficulties of being an admin on Commons. Commons admins are at least as useful as the clueless newcomers who upload copyvios could possibly become, so why should they be treated like servants? I have spent hours interacting with a stroke patient about copyright law, have you?
Commons has to respect the law of the USA (where the servers are), the law of the country in which the images are uploaded, and the law of the country where they were made. I have photographed swastikas in Switzerland and uploaded them without breaking any law.
Commons, just like Wikipedia, is a private projet on which contribution is a privilege. Your point about "a service they don't want and didn't ask for" could apply just as much to the NPOV policy on Wikipedia, so I suggest you keep it for British ISPs.
Commons is first and foremost a repository of Free media. If that makes it useless for you, too bad but so be it.
Debatable and a half indeed. That is typically what produces outputs which look incoherent from the outside.
Commons admins are more than willing to buy the magic remedy that will make everybody understand what we do. But I am not convinced that this "hollier than thou" attitude towards admins is said magic remedy.
-- Rama
On 09/12/2008, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2008/12/8 Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com:
Another thing that might be worth looking into is whether the Stanton Grant [1] is only for Wikipedia (as is stated in the press release) or whether Commons enters into that overhaul. Because if it does, we might have a chance to make Commons the cool project it deserves to be.
The focus of the Stanton project is Wikipedia, but due to the fact that uploading media to Commons is an integral part of editing a Wikipedia article, we hope that we can at least name some of the key challenges and make some improvements in that area as part of the project. We're also working on a separate grant proposal focused specifically on building an optimized workflow for media uploads.
I am noting with some interest the idea to use local projects essentially as a first contact point for all media. My primary concern about such an approach would be the risk of diluting an already difficult commitment to free content. That said, I don't want to deny the problems that Lars pointed out, and I think serious technical and social efforts will be required to address them, one way or another. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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Lars Aronsson wrote:
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
So, what about this: *User uploads from Swedish wikipedia using Special:GlobalUpload (only for SUL accounts). *The image is uploaded on commons, where it gets an additional tag with 'uploaded from Swedish wikipedia'. *Blocked status of both local and commons is taken into account. *The upload log is created on both commons and wikipedia. *Once a wrong image is uploaded, there's a race condition between commons ans Swedish admins to detect it. As commons get much more images, they're likely to lose it. *Image can be deleted both by commons admins and local sysops. Local sysops can't delete it if it's older than a month (or another reasonable time). *Upload policies are still those of commons. *Commons templates are shown at wikipedia on the local language if available (interesting on its own, but hard). *Talk page links on uploader should point to Swedish talk (or give links to both talks).
Sounds workable in theory, can it be carried out in practice?
________________________________ From: Platonides Platonides@gmail.com To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2008 5:10:26 PM Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
So, what about this: *User uploads from Swedish wikipedia using Special:GlobalUpload (only for SUL accounts). *The image is uploaded on commons, where it gets an additional tag with 'uploaded from Swedish wikipedia'. *Blocked status of both local and commons is taken into account. *The upload log is created on both commons and wikipedia. *Once a wrong image is uploaded, there's a race condition between commons ans Swedish admins to detect it. As commons get much more images, they're likely to lose it. *Image can be deleted both by commons admins and local sysops. Local sysops can't delete it if it's older than a month (or another reasonable time). *Upload policies are still those of commons. *Commons templates are shown at wikipedia on the local language if available (interesting on its own, but hard). *Talk page links on uploader should point to Swedish talk (or give links to both talks).
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Copyright laws are complicated; there are too many possible cases for it to be possible to write a short and simple text for new users that would cover all cases; furthermore, people typically have no intuition about how copyright law works, and do not read our documentation anyway (one reason for that might be that it is not always trivial to find).
I do not think that the above can be fixed easily. What could do on the short term, however, would be altering the "Image deletion" template to inform people that it is not necessarily the end of the world if an image of their is questioned. Some of my images get to Deletion Request from time to time, and I do not find this insulting ; there are so many image, so many problems, etc. that it is inevitable that some images get requested for deletion, or indeed deleted. The points to underline would be: - it is the *image* that is questioned, not the user - the point of the request is for the image to have its documentation fixed - corollary: since there is no shame to have a few images deleted from time to time, people should not hysterically defend images which constitute copyright problems. I mean they should feel that it is not necessary to go ballistic about it. - maybe something should be done to encourage multilingual support further and possibly bring people on the IRC or some instant messaging where they can receive personal attention.
-- Rama
On 07/12/2008, Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com wrote:
Sounds workable in theory, can it be carried out in practice?
From: Platonides Platonides@gmail.com To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2008 5:10:26 PM Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
So, what about this: *User uploads from Swedish wikipedia using Special:GlobalUpload (only for SUL accounts). *The image is uploaded on commons, where it gets an additional tag with 'uploaded from Swedish wikipedia'. *Blocked status of both local and commons is taken into account. *The upload log is created on both commons and wikipedia. *Once a wrong image is uploaded, there's a race condition between commons ans Swedish admins to detect it. As commons get much more images, they're likely to lose it. *Image can be deleted both by commons admins and local sysops. Local sysops can't delete it if it's older than a month (or another reasonable time). *Upload policies are still those of commons. *Commons templates are shown at wikipedia on the local language if available (interesting on its own, but hard). *Talk page links on uploader should point to Swedish talk (or give links to both talks).
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