Dear wonderful, lovely, patient illustrators, and other wonderfully lovely and patient interested people,
The Request list for Round 1 is now published! http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun_illustration_project/Round_1/Request_list
This means Round 1 is due to open in 4 days (2008-08-01).
More information below. If you have any questions about specific requests please leave a comment on that request's talk page. If you have any questions about the general process please post them to this list.
==(Would-be) ILLUSTRATORS== Please browse over the list and see if you find a request that looks interesting for you.
A reminder, you will need an account on JIRA to assign yourself a request once Round 1 opens. It would be helpful if you use the same username as your wiki username. You can sign up here: https://jira.toolserver.org/secure/Signup!default.jspa
I will also put up some screenshots of how to use JIRA, before Round 1 opens.
In each case I put an English Wikipedia article where the illustration may be used, but I expect you to use external sources in almost all cases! Also I have put "Examples" links to diagrams out on the web. I don't expect you to copy these or even use them as inspiration (some are great, while some are awful), but they should give you a quick idea of the kind of graphic expected.
For some scientific and medical topics there is not much scope for originality. I would expect you to rely on standard textbooks for the specific features of those diagrams. For other topics there is scope to present the essential idea in a much more creative way.
Image guidelines again are here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun_illustration_project/Guidelines
==TRANSLATORS== Each request in the list has its own individual page. All translated information about each request should appear in that request's page, ie don't create a different page for the translation, just add your translation info to the existing page.
I have made space for German, Spanish, French, Polish and Japanese. Translations in other languages are of course accepted, but these are the languages where I know there are interested people (well actually, no German speakers have contacted me, but I'm being hopeful).
I put the en.wp article to give illustrators a quick idea about what kind of topic it is. If your Wikipedia does not have an equivalent article, you could create it (just translate the lead paragraph), or see if you can find an explanation on the web, and link to that instead. (It would be great if the article eventually got created though - especially since it's going to have an image pretty soon.)
==EVERYONE== Everyone is invited to browse over the list and make comments or suggestions or corrections to individual requests. Is a request too vague? ***Is there an existing free image?*** (If so, please email me and I will replace that request) Are there good examples on the web I've missed? Good textbooks you know of for that topic?
Ways to make more requests: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun_illustration_project/Requests ....or maybe more usefully.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_requested_diagram_images (does your project have an equivalent category?? let me know!)
Note: requests placed on meta that were not fulfilled during this round may be fulfilled during another round. I will clean up that Requests page and remove the fulfilled ones soon...
So I started going through this Category:Wikipedia_requested_diagram_images on en.wp, and I realised I probably should have done that from the start. Oh well. There are lots of old requests in that category (some that were since filled but the template was never removed), and also a lot of poor requests. The template is used without an explanation of what kind of diagram, to explain what concept, is requested.
That category currently has 549 pages in it, but realistically the requests suitable for this project are probably only 200 or 300. Probably it should have thousands of entries! So please go and add {{reqdiagram}} to as many article talk pages as you see fit (and please include an explanation of what you want, if it's not obvious).
Anyway I hope eventually that this project might inspire some Wikibooks or WikiProjects to systematically go through their high-importance articles (with a corresponding textbook in their lap) and sort out systematically which concepts are commonly explained by diagrams and which are not. I would be really excited to read about a WikiProject doing this kind of "complete diagram review". It's a lot of work, but in the end we will have topic areas with great looking diagram coverage all over.... what could be better!
thanks, Brianna [[user:pfctdayelise]]