Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
I don't dispute anything you say, but I was just suggesting that
Wikimedia Commons could also be a good a platform.
In some ways Commons should be even better for scientific work, since
items are more "personal" by default at Flickr, and if one wants to
collaborate one has to use workarounds or specifically grant permission.
On Wikimedia projects there is more of a culture around collaboration by
default, and contributing to general knowledge.
If it becomes a good platform, yes. It's got to become a bit more
readerly than just a "private staging area for wikipedia content",
which it is perceived as today.
There's the issue of making it easy to find things, but also a more
fundamental issue of inclusionism vs. exclusionism. You can get away
with a weaker navigation interface if you've got more content, since
some of it is going to have passable metadata, if only by accident.
Personally, I participate in Wikipedia very little because of
exclusionism. I'll certainly delete a spam link here, correct a typo
there, or correct a fact, but I'm not going to invest hours and hours
of my life into writing stuff that somebody can delete because it's "not
notable."
I think Flickr is successful as a photo repository precisely because
it's full of junk. I upload maybe 10% of the shots I take into Flickr.
Many of these shots are only of interest to me, my friends, and
family, but I also took a better shot of the capitol building than the
one that the NY Times used today (and paid an arm and a leg to Getty for
the privilege) If I knew that my images could be deleted by somebody,
I wouldn't upload any at all (I might not even ~take~ any.)
Now, since people have uploaded millions and millions of "personal"
images, it's possible to come in and select the good ones. This kind
of after-the-fact curation is much more practical than hoping that
people are going to show up at your stone soup party.
I don't
think that things are, objectively, bad at Yahoo as people
think.
It wasn't an opinion on Yahoo's continued financial health. They're just
fundamentally not in the business of public knowledge.
Based on my experience in the "digital library" field, I've
got
little faith in any non-profit web publishing venture. For instance,
you're working on some grant that's going to expire. I worked at a
library that did over 100 "digital library" projects, and thought that
they were doing financially well for a while It took a while to realize
that a one-time $50,000 grant was going to really cost them $5,000 a
year in annual costs forever... And that no funding agency whatsoever
was interested in supporting the long-term cost of such projects.
In an extreme example, I worked for a service that saves readers
$500 million a year in journal subscription costs but that has struggled
to find any funding source to pay a meager $250,000 /year budget.
People celebrate this service, but few realize how close it's come to
destruction. In the meantime, a group of people in the same building
were getting $2M/year to develop a web site that never developed an
audience.
Businesses in the for-profit sector seem to systematically
eliminate non-profits on the web. The root cause of this is that
for-profit businesses stand to make a profit when the offer a better
service to their users. They've got an incentive to make things 2%
better because that means they can make 2% more money... The people
involved get a bonus, the shareholders get some, everybody is happy.
Make things 2% better this week, and 1% better this week
systematically, and soon you're hundreds and hundreds of times better
than a niggardly non-profit that's ruled over by somebody who's leading
it because they're an expert in "subject X" or "subject Y" which
could
be any subject at all, so long as it isn't about making web sites or
giving users a good experience
Yes, wikimedia is a counterexample, but it's really the only one.
It would be interesting to understand why it's succeeded in a space
where everything else has failed.
Even if we could trust Yahoo to be in the
image-metadata game forever,
Flickr photos are only accessible as long as the owner is still paying.
In 10 years, Flickr will be as outdated as Geocities, and even the
content owners will have moved on. All those photos available on the
astronomy groups today will be disappearing, one by one.
My understanding is that they don't take your photos down when you
quit paying; "PRO" membership in flickr increases your upload quota,
but discontinuing it has no effect on what you've already uploaded.
It's no so clear what will replace Flickr and when it will happen.
It's hard to displace entrenched companies in two-sided markets. Any
replacement is going to need to be radically better than Flickr, not
just 10% better.
At best, the very few photos which are CC-licensed can
be copied
elsewhere. (It's unclear to me whether metadata like the astrotags is
also CC-licensed.)
Personally this is what I do.