Daniel Arnold wrote:
Am Freitag, 05. Mai 2006 11:30 schrieb Gerard
Meijssen:
Wrong. InstantCommons has everything to do with
the WM Foundation.
InstantCommons would have been coded by now if this was not the case.
InstantCommons is a nice idea but without a notification framework that
*automatically* notifies other projects about things that need their
attention like duplicate files, files missing required info and all kinds of
deletion requests it simply would increase our current problems by a order of
magnitude and thus would make Commons unmaintainable.
It does not. At this moment there is nothing stopping people from taking
content from Commons. People do. We are not responsible for this, as it
is. The best we can do is what we do. Mind you InstantCommons is NOT to
be used for Wikimedia projects. From a performance point of view,
currently many installations use the pictures of Commons on a real time
basis. This has an impact on our responsiveness.
The consequence of what you are saying is that our pictures are not Free
to use. The fact is that no matter how diligent and intelligent we
maintain Commons we will never get to the situation where all material
is certified as being completely and correctly. This means that either
Commons is Free for people to use or it is not. With InstantCommons Meta
data will be available about these pictures on the remote Wikis.
Consequently the situation will be much better to find the material that
needs deletion and that is also elsewhere. Remember, Google is our
friend :) We can even build in some functionality that helps the remote
administrator to check Commons for issues. This however is something
that they have to do. It is not our responsibility.
Duesentrieb
(
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Duesentrieb) is currently
writing an automated notification framework called CommonsTicker that would
run on the tool server and would work as follows:
A database cronjob at the toolserver looks for new files that need the above
described attention. The new files will be send through CheckUsage on the
same server and this will return a usage list of these images of every local
project. In the end a pybot will write in every local project a at a
dedicated page a daily compiled list of files that get used by them and that
need their attention (like unlinking images and thus reducing image "holes"
in articles, alerting people on deletion debates in Commons and so forth).
Of course this solution can only be temporarily and needs to be integrated
into MediaWiki via a RSS feed that can be imported by other MediaWiki
installations (which will do the automated checkusage filtering locally on
their own on the imported RSS feed) and thus tracked by them.
So at first we need to solve our current Wikimedia wide communication problem
and see how CommonsTicker performs, after that it needs to be coded into
MediaWiki and later if things have stabilized after a time in Commons we can
think of how to realize InstantCommons.
This is a solution to a WMF problem. It does not answer the question; is
our data Free to use or not but also, CommonsTicker and InstantCommons
are not related.
A summary of what happened is nice. It is not
what I am really
interested in. What I am interested in is having things announced before
they happen. This will have, as an effect, that people do not have the
excuse that they did not know. They will have less reason to moan (they
will anyway). When you say nobody told us, you mean nobody told you.
Fine. This has been discussed at previous occasions when we had a flash
in the commons pan.
See above. We have so many things to do daily it is impossible notifying
people in local wikis on a regular basis manually. And of course there are
also other people suddenly jumping into Commons (you never heared of them
before) and that just put thousands of images onto deletion request without
any debate or worse simply make mass image changes (and are as well unwilling
to share their points) and that make really *big* trouble if I stop them. In
order to get an impression how much energy it took for me making a proper
debate on a certain single issue see:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Licensing#Review_of_license_…
Well and for sure there are many more such people I can't be aware of and
ocassionally someone makes a general Commons-admins-flame on Village Pump and
afterwards we try to find out what he was flaming about at all and who was
the person that did something wrong...
So there are two sides:
* One side that makes trouble because we talk to much and do not delete fast
enough.
* The other side that says we talk to less and delete too fast.
Seems to me that at least one side must be wrong...
The facts are:
* Far more images need to be deleted in Commons daily.
* Local unlinking of files and manual local notifications are such a huge task
no Wikipedian can imagine (really Wikipedians simply don't realize *how huge*
Wikimedia universe is).
* Many people upload images in Commons without even interested in a minimum of
communication.
* A tiny fraction of active Commons admins tries to catch up...
You do not get my point. When policies are to be changed, when the way
things work are to be changed, this is when you should inform the
communities in advance. Some careful marketing communication is what is
needed. Marketeers call it customer relations. And you /need /to inform
your customers; when you do, you talk to all your customers when you
don't you have to deal with them one at a time and you may find that
customers do no longer give you their custom. Given how busy you are,
you would not even notice.
As to my definition of "profound";
changes in policy that affect usage
need to be communicated widely before they are finalised and implemented.
Well I could have talked a lot previous to my many *very bold* changes in
Commons and wouldn't have come so far. I prefer in that case a model of
communication with some people I know, switching in my brain previous to an
edit of mine and and then simply do the thing and if something is not that
ideal hey we can sort it out afterwards. That's the only way how things can
efficiently get done in Commons.
Regards,
Daniel/Arnomane
Efficiently in Commons. Sadly there are these other projects and
while
many, myself included, applaud the hard work and understand its
importance many others balk and refuse to use Commons for their
material. Given your preference to limit your deliberations to your
intimi, I am afraid this will not instil trust in the very people who
refuse to use Commons.
Thanks,
GerardM