Thomas, Wiki Commons has only about 17 million files, and given the explosive growth of WikiData, this would be doable. I suggest doing it now rather than later.
David, thanks for that clarification - I get what you mean now and I support your vision. I disagreed BTW with the first Signpost op-ed piece of last week and agree more with Jarekt's answers to that discussion. I didn't even bother responding because my feeling after reading it was "they have no clue". Copyright issues faced by Commons admins are incredibly complex and not to be treated lightly. It's ridiculous to think that admins on the English Wikipedia could just step in and become admins on Commons (note: I am not an admin on any project). I also agree however with Johnbod's comment on that same Signpost page that Google images is better at locating Commons files in searches because my search experience on Commons is terrible. The whole porno-image problem discussed in that article will of course not be addressed by creating WikiData items for each file, but I agree that it would make that discussion more visible (along with everything else becoming more visible). Making them visible will help indirectly of course. Not everyone feels up to contributing to deletion discussions on Commons (personally I would rather go have a tooth pulled), but making those discussions available to more readers should help attract those who do.
Scott, you need to talk to Alex Peek on another thread about his vision of economic data - it looks like you two could do something interesting together.
Rereading my last post I see I left off a few Commons links. My point about interconnecting files on commons is as follows. [1] is an engraving of Hoogstraten and is a derivative of [2] but shows an example of Hoogstraten's work, which is [5]. Both [3] and [4] are later engravings from artist dictionaries which made use of [2]. Showing such relationships helps to build understanding for art provenance, but also for other art historical subjects, such as the historiography of art criticism. Getting these relationships outside of Commons could be done using an "F" namespace in WikiData I think. That would be a fantastic improvement to the Commons category system (which is still better than nothing).
[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dirk_van_hoogstraten_by_arnold_houbra... [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schouburg_I_Plate_I_Leonard_Bramer_-_... [3] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JCWeyerman_-_VI_plate_I_-_Leonard_Bra... [4] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean-Baptiste_Deschamps_-_Dirck_ou_Th... [5] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dirk_van_hoogstraten_-_maria_met_kind...
2013/6/23, Scott MacLeod worlduniversityandschool@gmail.com:
Dear David, Denny and Wikidatans,
Thanks for this email thread.
I'd like to float a proposal for this ecosystem of Wikidatas vis-a-vis World University and School, (which is like Wikipedia with MIT OCW), with our plans for a wiki school or online, Creative Commons' licensed university (with free, online, C.C., MIT-centric, university degrees planned) in all 7,105+ languages and 204+ countries. C.C. WUaS hopes to engage Wikidata, as well.
I've begun a link on the WUaS, wiki, Subjects' page called "Wikidata databases and ecosystem," - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Subjects- which can easily become an extensible, wiki, subject page itself (using a modified version of Wikidata with the WUaS SUBJECT TEMPLATE - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/SUBJECT_TEMPLATE) in all languages and countries, to link all the (small number of) Wikidatas that emerge. (Check out this extensible, WUaS, wiki SUBJECT TEMPLATE, since it has many of the possible categories mentioned above in this email thread).
Here is the beginning, Languages' wiki page at WUaS - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Languages - eventually to link all languages, each as a school or university.
And here is the beginning Nation States' wiki page at WUaS - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Nation_States - eventually to link all nation states, each as a school or university.
The wiki, extensible, WUaS all-languages' (7,105 per "Ethnologue") and all-nation states' (204 per "The Olympics") approach has the merit of potentially including all emergent Wikidatas in all languages (for an universal translator - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/WUaS_Universal_Translator), and in all nation states for legal questions, in a way that fully supports the amazing interlingual Wikidata (which is planned for Wikipedia's 285 languages +), and also, - since many/most of these Wikidatas may be data about generative shared knowledge - will therefore fit well with World University and School which is for open, free, wiki, people-to-people teaching and learning.
Best regards, Scott
On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 6:42 AM, David Cuenca dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 1:49 AM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
[...] do you think there is a need for this file to have its own "F" status in WikiData?
Yes. The reason to have file entities is mainly to have a platform that can store semantic descriptions of a file. For text searches in classical terms it doesn't matter much, but to search things like:
- "portrait engravings by artists born in Dordrecht"
- "depictions of Dutch poets born between 1600 and 1700"
For these kind of searches, the only possible way to return relevant results is to store the information a semantic way as Wikidata does. As Thomas pointed out, the task to transition to the new method looks somewhat daunting, luckily here there is not much trouble using bots to automate the task filling out the properties of the 17M files. The case of "image promotion" I think it is a different issue that would require some tagging (maybe "best depiction of") or a simple voting system (like in youtube, reddit, etc).
It is also important to note that the old issue of sexual content in Commons [1] has gained *a lot* of traction lately since the last three op-ed's questioning/defending its suistainability [2] [3]. Basically there is a need that the searches show what you are looking for and not some other random content. The urgency to present a solution is very high at the moment, a matter of weeks before starting organizing WikiLoveMonuments with a cleaned reputation, so I hope that Wikidata can present a proposal soon that I am sure will be better than this other proposal [4]
Cheers, Micru
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-05-10/Common... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-06-12/Op-ed [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-06-19/Op-ed [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Image_information
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