James, these were avoidable issues. Had anyone reviewed the timetable with me, or asked for my assistance, based on my experience as the primary user of GWT, I would have suggested how to avoid these foreseeable potholes.
Fae
Hi Brian,
Yes, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T98734 was one of the requests; others were https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T98744 and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T98733
These all related to a two-day workshop session organised at the British Library, at significant expense to the BL, to get to grips with GlamWiki Toolset.
The aim on day 1 was to introduce the capabilities of the GWT, Commons, categories etc; and then on day 2 to practically work through some sample image sets.
It was a learning experience for us on the Wikimedia side as well, but one of the very clear messages of the day is the whole set of processes that need to be gone through before one can get started with the GWT appear to be needlessly convoluted, obstructionist and time-wasting.
GWT is supposed to be the preferred path for GLAMs to upload their content, with maximum metadata capture and reliability.
For a major GLAM like the British Library, it ought to be a complete triviality for the head of their Labs group to get their main domain whitelisted. (And actually, even for the smallest minor GLAM while we're on the subject). The song-and-dance they got put through is utterly pointless and self-defeating.
By the end of the second day of the workshop, their main domain
*.bl.uk had still not been whitelisted, because somebody took it upon themselves to quibble about the quality of some of the images in a test set.
The domain acms.sl.nsw.gov.au for a visiting participant from the State Library of New South Wales was only cleared at 4pm in the afternoon, as the workshop was closing -- after quibbling about the metadata
Luckily the domain www.jacar.go.jp for some Japanese prints was cleared in time, so there was at least one dataset that the tool could actually be used on (rather than what should have been five). Even that was only because some passing admin had over-ruled an initial quibble.
Apparently:
* getting a domain approved requires the main system config file to be changed.
* this can only take effect at 4pm or midnight BST
* requests will only be considered on San Francisco time
* any request will get at least one gratuitous knock back.
This is simply not good enough. When the whole of Flickr is wide-open for use by the GW upload tool, this obstructionism is absurd.
We had five very experienced Commons users in the room today, all of them in good standing with thousands of uploads to their name, and none of them could do anything to move the process forward.
This ought to be reviewed urgently, and the GWT whitelist should be divorced from the central system config files as soon as possible, and instead be placed somewhere where any admin can update it with immediate effect, without any of the runaround on Phabricator, which for the GLAM people trying to learn how to do things for themselves at the workshop yesterday and today was an utterly confusing and unnecessary extra complexity.
And the next time somebody asks for content upload to be made possible from one of the great libraries in the world, please everyone let's not waste people's time with petty quibbling.
-- James.
On 12/05/2015 20:06, Brian Wolff wrote:
On May 12, 2015 6:36 AM, "Ally Crockford" <a.n.crockford@gmail.com> wrote:
curators with XML files who would like to test uploads on Beta but are
Hi all
Training is progressing well here at the BL, and there are several
still waiting to have the requested domains whitelisted.
anyone on the list and currently awake/available to approve the
The requests have been logged on Phabricator - I was wondering if there's
whitelisting?
Cheers,
Ally
----
Dr Ally Crockford
E-mail: A.Crockford@ed.ac.uk
Departmental Profile
Would that be https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T98734 ? There was a
comment by Dereckson that nobody has responded to.
--bawolff
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