Wikimédia France has installed a portal at www.wikitheque.fr (and had obtained .com and .org in order to prevent squatting).
This portal provides task-oriented directions for finding images and text content on Commons and Wikisource, with the help of Wikipedia (we may in the future extend this to friendly third-party sites with libre content).
Examples of tasks include: I'm looking for a photograph of an animal, where do I look? I only know the French common name of that species, what do I do?
The idea is to address the needs of e.g. teachers and schoolchildren with step-by-step instructions.
This portal is now not much developed, but we aim to make it bigger.
In order to preemptively address a few obvious questions: * This portal will not provide content; content will all be on other sites (Commons, Wikisource etc.). * This portal is not editable as a wiki because there would be difficulties with that: ** The wiki interface may scare "normal" people - too many buttons. ** We cannot afford vandalism on a portal for welcoming e.g. schoolchildren. ** We might use a "closed" wiki but it's a heavier solution than the current one.
-- DM
Examples of tasks include: I'm looking for a photograph of an animal, where do I look? I only know the French common name of that species, what do I do?
i'd say the best bet for that right now would be to go to the french wikipedia and find the scientific name (and possiblly even a link to commons) from there.
peter green wrote:
Examples of tasks include: I'm looking for a photograph of an animal, where do I look? I only know the French common name of that species, what do I do?
i'd say the best bet for that right now would be to go to the french wikipedia and find the scientific name (and possiblly even a link to commons) from there.
Yes, this is exactly the method we explain on www.wikitheque.fr. It may sound obvious to us, but external users can't be expected to guess it. This is why we give those task-oriented recipes...
David
How do we become involved in wikitheque? I see no login screen :)
Cary
-----Original Message----- From: commons-l-bounces@wikimedia.org [mailto:commons-l-bounces@wikimedia.org]On Behalf Of David Monniaux Sent: Friday, October 20, 2006 1:56 PM To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List Subject: Re: [Commons-l] www.wikitheque.fr (.org, .com)
peter green wrote:
Examples of tasks include: I'm looking for a photograph of an animal, where do I look? I only know the French common name of that species, what do I do?
i'd say the best bet for that right now would be to go to the french wikipedia and find the scientific name (and possiblly even a link to commons) from there.
Yes, this is exactly the method we explain on www.wikitheque.fr. It may sound obvious to us, but external users can't be expected to guess it. This is why we give those task-oriented recipes...
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Cary Bass wrote:
David
How do we become involved in wikitheque? I see no login screen :)
At this point, we've ruled against making the site editable.
Reasons: * The Wiki interface is heavy and disorienting for newcomers. Remember, this site is a bit like the help desk of a library, where you give clear and precise directions. => we would have at least to use a very "castrated" interface * We cannot afford vandalism in such a place, therefore even with a wiki we'd have to restrict edition. * We don't put up content there - simply "recipes" for common cases for looking for information.
Surely this kind of portal could be useful in many different languages? I don't suppose one, single multilingual portal would be useful.
Would it not be better to get it approved/officialised by Wikimedia Foundation for hosting on servers?
If other languages decide to create similar portals why not use third-level domains: fr.wikitheque.org, en.wikitheque.org, &c.
wikitheque like discotheque?
presumably wikitheque has some kind of meaning in French. I can't think of any obvious meaning in English, so I would hesitate to put a portal there...
Anyway, go WM France, good idea. Would be even better if we had some way to evaluate its effectiveness, but hey, gotta start somewhere.
Brianna user:pfctdayelise
On 22/10/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
Surely this kind of portal could be useful in many different languages? I don't suppose one, single multilingual portal would be useful.
Would it not be better to get it approved/officialised by Wikimedia Foundation for hosting on servers?
If other languages decide to create similar portals why not use third-level domains: fr.wikitheque.org, en.wikitheque.org, &c.
-- Oldak Quill (oldakquill@gmail.com) _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On 22/10/06, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
wikitheque like discotheque?
presumably wikitheque has some kind of meaning in French. I can't think of any obvious meaning in English, so I would hesitate to put a portal there...
Anyway, go WM France, good idea. Would be even better if we had some way to evaluate its effectiveness, but hey, gotta start somewhere.
Brianna user:pfctdayelise
Should all Wikimedia sites have English names for the sake of consistency despite any perception of (this may be a bit dramatic) imperialism? Or should we embrace our multilingualism?
On 10/21/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
Would it not be better to get it approved/officialised by Wikimedia Foundation for hosting on servers?
I think that would be the way to go if, 6-12 months from now, we decide that it has been a success and would be useful in other languages as well. At the moment, I see it as a cool experiment.
"David Monniaux" David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote on Friday, October 20, 2006 7:55 PM
peter green wrote:
Examples of tasks include: I'm looking for a photograph of an animal, where do I look? I only know the French common name of that species, what do I do?
i'd say the best bet for that right now would be to go to the french wikipedia and find the scientific name (and possiblly even a link to commons) from there.
Yes, this is exactly the method we explain on www.wikitheque.fr. It may sound obvious to us, but external users can't be expected to guess it. This is why we give those task-oriented recipes...
Maybe you could use one of the tools hosted on the commons-server, that collects interwiki-links starting from one article at fr.wp to automatically find the right page/category on commons ....
Another idea would be a small tool that just fetches the english interwiki-link and searches commons for matches.
Regards,
Flo