Well my biggest comment (although this is not really related to the subject at hand) is that yotophoto doesn't actually index things. If I'm trying to find a free image, I generally search yotophoto and mayflower. Mayflower finds stuff 10 times more often then yotophoto. yotophoto theoretically should be a superset of mayflower, how come they don't find anything one you search them (I've maybe found images with them twice). </rant> -bawolff
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: 10-Mar-2007 07:51 Subject: Re: [Provide feedback] Wikimedia Commons photos
Brianna,
First, sorry for the delayed response and thanks for your comments. I especially appreciate feedback from people in your position as I want Yotophoto to be embraced by those contributing to important projects like Wikimedia Commons.
Right now, most of the links to go back to Wikipedia instead of the Commons for the main reason that awareness of the Wikipedia project is higher than that of Commons. It's just easier for people to get their head around it if they are unfamiliar with Commons. (As an aside, I find it pretty tough explaining how everything works with regards to 'free' licensing and how we index only third party sites and so on. You wouldn't believe how often people write us to ask if they can use one of "our" images or how they can upload their own images to us).
One thing I also like about linking to the Wikipedia page over the Commons one is that the list of pages that link to the image seem to be more accurate on Wikipedia than Commons. Is this your experience as well? Any feedback on this would be helpful. See #3 below for a little more on why this is relevant.
Having said that, I'm working a new version that will change a few things. Here's an overview:
- Every site we index will have it's own "about" page. Here we will
explain a bit about what each site is about, how to contribute, what kind of licenses the site allows and so on. In the case of the Wikipedia and Commons we intend to outline the relationship between the two and how Wikipedia will often hold a 'fake' image for images that come from Commons as you described.
[I told him about Check Usage.]
- Most images will have an intermediate preview (probably in a pop-up
lightbox). From here we can provide a link to *both* the Commons and Wikipedia pages for an image. What do you think?
- Yotophoto will eventually index images using captions from the
various Wikipedia articles that include said image. So if an image doesn't have a complete description on it's own page - we can still index it based on all the captions used for that image throughout Wikipedia. Commons tends to have decent image descriptions but for images only on Wikipedia taken from third party sites (say a PD US-GOV image), the descriptions are often lacking.
[I said: On Commons we have enough trouble forcing people to annotate their files with basic information like licensing and author, let alone a decent content description. Many people when they submit files, are submitting them with a specific purpose in mind and are focused on that, not on the possibility that the file might be re-used in the future for something else. Also when one is looking at an image, it is often quite self-explanatory, so the user doesn't feel the need to explain the purpose or background to the file beyond three words. Of course that doesn't stack up well for searching since machines can't "read" images well at all (or even, mostly, at all). ]
- Yotophoto would like to enable one click republishing of images
found so people can repost to their own blogs etc. To do this we will provide a copy and paste HTML code they can use. This code will link back to the image source (ie. Commons) as well as to the image license. Sites like Commons will get tons of back-links and exposure in this way I think. I like to think of this as the "Flickerization of Wikipedia" (and Commons).
[I forwarded this part to wikitech-l to see what they say.]
- The depth of the index will increase massively. We intend to one
day have the entire Commons and Wikipeida image collections searchable (right now it is only a fraction) including not only photos but other types of images as well like maps, charts, flags and so on.
I'd love to know what you think, and if you have any further suggestions. As well, feel free to invite anyone from the Commons to submit their ideas to me as well. I hadn't seen the Mayflower tool before but it looks quite nice - I want to look into it more.
Regards,
On 2/26/07, brianna.laugher@gmail.com brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Brianna Laugher sent a message using the contact form at http://yotophoto.com/feedback.
Hi, I'm a volunteer on the Wikimedia Commons website. I just wanted to say how impressed I am with Yotophoto at the moment. Displaying the license and the image dimensions in the results is particularly awesome. A couple of comments:
Is it possible to do domain-specific searches? (like in Google, site:commons.wikimedia.org) - doesn't seem like it, so far
As you may or may not know, when projects like Wikipedia use images from Wikimedia Commons, it creates 'fake' image pages like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Common_frog.jpg (note the red tab and the tag 'This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. The description on its description page there is shown below.'). To better promote Wikimedia Commons, it would be preferable if such images could be referred back to their Wikimedia Commons page, rather than the 'fake' page at Wikipedia. Would that be possible?
Also, another Wikimedia editor has developed an image search engine specifically for Wikimedia Commons called 'Mayflower', which you might be interested in checking out: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tangotango/mayflower/
As the default wiki search engine for media performs very poorly, we tend to be very happy whenever we find out about nice products like these :)
thanks!
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End of Commons-l Digest, Vol 22, Issue 12