Hi,
I would like to ask, if the ease of media handling (images, photographs on
Wikimedia Commons) is a priority for Wikimedia Foundation? If not, could it
be a priority? Recently we have seen a big step done for editors =
VisualEditor. Contributors have no longer study "wikicode" to be able to
contribute. That removes one of the technological barriers and it looks its
a priority for WMF.
While part of contributing to Wikipedia is still contributing by images. I
am from Wikimedia Czech republic. We run many projects based on media
harvest or organizing *low barrier media harvest activities* to bring new
users to Wikipedia.
As our newbies are not technologically skilled and not native English
speakers, there is a big technology block to contribute to Wikipedia with
ease:
1) there is no app for mobile phones and tablets for image upload
2) newbies are lost, when they click on "Upload image" and they are
transferred from Wikipedia to Wikimedia Commons
3) Wikimedia Commons is in English - foreign language for our participants
4) biggest language barrier are categories, which are in English only, we
need to insert name of the category in our mother tongue
5) Wikimedia Commons environment is still pretty "techy"
6) Insert metadata, takes a long time:
e.g.: you have an image of a cathedral in Des Moines, IW. 3 or 4 times you
have to insert same information: a) to file name (*Des Moines,
cathedral.jpg*), b) to file description (*en:** Cathedral in Des Moines,
Iowa, USA*/*es:* *La catedral de XY en Des Moines, Iowa, EEUU*) and c) to
the category (*category:Des Moines* or *Churches in Des Moines*,
*category:Cathedrals
in Iowa*).
Its 2015, there are many social projects around us. You can handle images
much easier on these projects than on mother of all social projects -
Wikipedia. Big step was done with using images allready present in Commons.
Could we do something for those, who contributes with their media to
Wikipedia? Could we do it in one or two years?
Thank you very much for your concern!
Regards,
Juandev