Hoi, Dear Ziko, your proposal is business as usual. The biggest question we should ask is not what do we do but WHY do we do it. When we decide that Open Content is there to be used, it follows that it is a key performance indicator to know to what extend we serve a public and what public we have, could have and how we can expand our public.
The current notion that people where we only consider how many people see images in Wikipedia makes Commons objectives secondary to Wikipedia. We do not care if people can find pictures in Commons and to be brutal I have given up, I do really want Commons to serve my needs as a blogger. We do not know the number of people who download our content, we do not know what people think of the usability as a resource of freely licensed material. We only consider Commons at the front end (ingestion) and not at the backend
We should care because THAT is our mission. Thanks, GerardM
On Mon, 18 May 2020 at 11:31, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, I would like to support Roland's and other's remarks that Wikimedia Commons has some serious problems and needs improvement in many ways. Some of these problems are very difficult to overcome, such as a better, multilingual search because we don't have all the necessary meta data. Other problems could be dealt with in a short time. For example, the main page (or main pages, in the different languages) has too many items and links. General and less general links; links to content by topic; links to other Wikimedia wikis, links to mainpages in other languages. Some of this is repeated in the left side bar. All together, also with general wiki function links - I counted 291 links or things to click on!
My ideal would be a clean page
- with a short explanation what the site is or does,
- and then three, four or five big items to click on: for example, "search
content", "contribute content", "learn more". Is it a realistic dream of me that we would see such a clean-up within the next 5 or 50 years? Kind regards Ziko
Am So., 17. Mai 2020 um 17:25 Uhr schrieb Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org:
"there are way less people maintaining it than it is needed" is naif summary of what is going on. IMHO. There are people maintaining it in a
way
that is counterproductive. You can always create an efficient workflow,
if
you want it.
We don't need people that delete an image of a statue in the USA because of no:fop even if it is a small size in a big composition and than keep
the
other ones in the category that are in any case used on enwikipedia. We don't need people copying and pasting quickly motivations without even reading them confusing countries or scenarios, as it happened (they
almost
never apologize, of course, because they are so busy). We don't need
people
that when a deletion procedure is rejected keep insisting looking at the contribution of an user stressing them until they find something. We
don't
need people deleting low-resolution files that were few months short form entering the public domain, when in the same time they could have deleted 100 times more of useless images. We don't need people arguing to delete ancient images that couldn't be proved "not to be recent" against good faith. We don't need people starting deletion procedure if an image is
on
line instead of simply asking the uploader.
However, it's a fact that some active members of the community created over the years a system where such people are encouraged to act in such a rigid way and probably even believe that their behaviour is necessary. Given these circumstances, it is not the moral duty of the silent
majority
of users to deal with the consequences of such behaviour. They can go on and try to delete everything the way they do and they will also deal with the huge amount of backlog they create wasting the time of users. It's
only
fair to me that whoever keep encouraging such unefficient workflow should be the one to clean the mess. A.
Il domenica 17 maggio 2020, 12:15:30 CEST, Yaroslav Blanter < ymbalt@gmail.com> ha scritto:
Concerning using Commons as a photo hosting, I have written a blog post earlier this year:
https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/wikimedia-commons-as-private-photo-hosti...
However, I can not see how it can become anything close to social media, nor do I think it should be. It already has a lot of garbage, and there
are
way less people maintaining it than it is needed. That it is one of the nastiest communities among all Wikimedia projects, with people being allowed to do things for which they would become instantly long-term blocked on other projects, does not help either
Best Yaroslav
On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 10:32 AM Tito Dutta trulytito@gmail.com wrote:
This discussion, although started with a question "why don't people contribute to Wikimedia Commons, now after actually the discussion
above,
covers more topics. A few notes, observations and comments:
- I remember a major discussion took place somewhere on Wikimedia
Commons
when one of the strategy2030 draft recommendations suggested uploading non-free images on Wikimedia Commons. That discussion was also on the
scope
of Wikimedia Commons. I wish I could recall where exactly it took
place.
However, I am pretty sure that many of you have read or participated
there.
Most probably there I first read the idea of "uncommon/uncommons" (or
an
alternative version of Commons). 2) Wikimedia Commons is most possibly/definitely less popular than Wikipedia. I believe many editors start from Wikipedia and then move to Wikimedia Commons. There is, of course, another reason, when someone gradually becomes more experienced on Wikipedia, they learn they need
to
spend some time on Wikimedia Commons for the article–photos they are working on. I "personally" do "not" feel the solution of this
"popularity"
problem is rebranding. We need more Wikimedia Commons-focused plans, initiatives, and strategies (I find this is true for all other
projects).
- Yes, the difficulty of using the app/web interface might be an issue
of
seeing less contribution as well. You have different photo-sharing platforms which uploads photos in 1-click. Commons upload process is longer. (I am not saying the process is bad, of course, we need all the steps, and there is not an unnecessary step there.) 4) The human emotion and interaction part is kind of missing: On
Facebook,
Instagram the likes, comments etc one gets, work as a motivation. This
is a
major issue. On FB, or Instagram an uploader can connect with people instantly, and their responses/reactions are quick as well. (Here
also, I
am not really suggesting anything, just keeping it as an observation) Let's talk about Google Photos, their badges, photo views analytics,
and
email time to time (eg: Your photo is making a difference, or You are a star) is good for motivation as well.
Thanks User:Titodutta
On Sun, 17 May 2020 at 13:03, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, 17 May 2020 at 07:20, Roland Unger roland.unger@soziologie.uni-halle.de wrote:
There are several causes why people do not upload their photos to
Commons.
Wikimedia Commons is less known like the other Wikimedia sisters.
We
had to
increase the awareness of these projects including the Foundation itself. But all people speak only about Wikipedia, and nobody
starts
an
ad campaign for the sisters to overcome this. Not only the scope of
Commons is broader, that of the movement is broader, too. Maybe the Foundation can improve its support for the sisters to attract new
users
for
the movement.
see:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2019/02/07/how-does-the-world-see-wikim...
Many photographers (and Wikipedians) will be become famous. There
is
the question why to
publish at Wikimedia Commons instead of Instagram, Flickr, or
Pinterest?
There is almost no support for the sister projects by Wikipedians.
Some
Wikipedians are
living in their own world, and sometimes they argue against their sisters.
- For many users it is difficult to use Commons or other Wikimedia
projects. They have to fight against an ancient and not user-friendly
user
interface (for instance manual edits of things stored in EXIF data or
in
the user account, adding categories without any automatic support,
etc.).
I am not really sure if an investigation should be done because
most
problems are known already now.
I think we should keep the opportunity of commercial use, because
all
Wikimedia products should be used freely. For instance, what shall an officer at a travel agency do if she/he cannot use Wikimedia products freely because of commercial-usage restrictions?
Roland
>> Benjamin Ikuta benjaminikuta@gmail.com 05/17/20 5:07 AM >>>
Anecdotally, it seems people sometimes don't upload their photos to
Commons because they don't realize that the scope of Commons is much broader than that of Wikipedia.
Has there been, or should there be, any research into this, or why
people don't contribute more broadly?
~Benjamin
A "share" link on image pages would go a long way to fixing this. If folks on instagram, flickr etc. got used to seeing nice images with links back to Commons, we might expect 1% to 4% of those readers to follow the link back to the source, so if a few go viral, that might actually attract a few high quality photographers.
A "mirror" tool would also be a great addition. If a photographer could easily share some of their photos by picking from their gallery and pushing to their flickr/instagram and a Commons account at the same time, all on a cc-by-sa license, they would come to see Commons as part of increasing their own internet footprint.
Fae
faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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