To be fair, lack of iterative processes can happen on other platforms as well: think about the role of portals on some Wikipedias, or some notability guidelines that are far from defined and groups of users claim opposite concepts. Even Wikidata has these issues (surprisingly mostly ignored by some actve users there) but in that case they rarely define the platform as a general perception. Plus, soon or later, they have to focus on them somehow. The problem with Commons is that it gets easier to just ignore them and try somewhere else, instead of centralizing issues and solve them there, it acts the opposite way when real problems emerge from real life.
When I noticed that we could refine categorization of images from books I did not open the discussion on Commons, but on Wikisource. When I want to chat about how metadata can help I do with mostly Wikidata users, not Commons users, and so on. It should be mutlilingual but meta and Wikidata clearly do this better. What also is a problem is that copyright just... change... and again it's easier to handle it at level of national chapters than on Commons. So a platform that should be designed to handle a clearly iterative issue basically underperforms on that.
As the first truly multilingual content-related active platform, Commons was probably not designed efficiently to handle its role and over the years we could not fix it. It should be the one to do a lot of things instead it just handle badly sometimes what other platforms or affiliates cannot handle in the first place. You can't handle metadata? let's start from Wikidata. You can't handle copyright issue? national chapters. OTRS? Language-based channels also from affiliates and meta. GLAM? Affiliates. Ancient documents and epigraphs? Maybe Wkisource, sometimes. Problem with some NC files? Local Wikipedias.
is it just me or it is too big to fails, so we keep it because it has a strucutral role, but it basically just cannot catalyze efficiently new things.
Il lunedì 18 maggio 2020, 16:28:00 CEST, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com ha scritto:
Commons needs iterative workflows that tag problems and modify what reuses / transfusions are supported, rather than making everything a crude delete/keep decision. Else it will always struggle w scaling to these uses.
🌍🌏🌎🌑 On Mon., May 18, 2020, 9:48 a.m. Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l, wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
in the past "99% unproblematic" was true, because most of the things were obvious and standard (panorama of towns, ancient portraits), it's not nowadays. You can upload tons of unproblematic pictures because they are easy to find, but you don't need them really. So they mostly clutter the workflow. There are a lot of images of kittens that we can upload, good luck categorizing them. Of course, you can switch to very specific projects like "documenting all small rivers" but the core issue are also high-quality upload. And everything is potentially problematic there: the right of an important person to privacy, the right of the manufacturer of an instruments, how creative is the lighting of an object? if I upload an image of a town it's probably a very nice one, taken by a competent photographer who clearly show them on line as well. You are in a dimension where you need to study, learn, ask around, find a balance. Instead we have people acting randomly and superficially, because they do not care about the long-term effect of their actions.
This impacts the maintenance of course, because very specific issues requires sophisticated categories, processes and metadata. The effort there is quite high, you are always the first one to arrive. the first one to clean up,the first one to explain to a third party. If you add on that more unnecessary stress than required, people reduce this job as much as they can as a necessary balance. But that job has an important effect in the overall maintenance, so at a certain point you start to see the effect when it is not there.
It's not a big surprise, we tried to explain this fact for years, but the community is designed to ignore these aspects and encourage other work attitudes. It's just like that.
Il lunedì 18 maggio 2020, 15:28:51 CEST, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com ha scritto:
To be fair, in most cases to use Commons for uploading files is totally unproblematic as soon as one has basic understanding of copyright. I am pretty sure 99% of my uploads can not be deleted (I had my files mass-nominated for deletion, once with the claim they are not mine, and once with the claim they are holiday photos and out of scope, but both cases admins were reasonably enough to speedy close the nominations). Of course there are always potentially problematic cases, for example I can imagine for one could start requiring "publication" dates for painting, which is copyright paranoia but some people take it seriously etc. But if one uploads something sufficiently far from the grey area it normally should be ok.
(I am still a Commons admin, but I reduced my admin activity to a minimum and I am not planning to increase the activity level).
Best Yaroslav
On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 3:12 PM Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Alessandro, Thank you for your post and its insight. I recognized the same with me: I only make use of Wikimedia Commons in lessons if I have enough time. Also I would introduce it only to students with a solid knowledge of English.
Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org schrieb am Mo. 18. Mai 2020 um 13:08:
In the end, it's more like inducing order from other projects than caring about the order on Commons because there clearly can't be with people acting the way they do.
This is a great observation! And this phenomenon contributes to the on-going chaos, to the work-around-culture you need to adapt to if you want to make use of Wikimedia Commons. :-(
Kind regards Ziko
They are also not caring for it: if you spend your time starting
unnecessary deletion procedures instead of cleaning up categories or description, you obviously have your priority, so we also have ours.
About the main page, we need to focus more on media files IMHO, and of course search is complicated but I am sure metadata can improve it.
A. Il lunedì 18 maggio 2020, 11:33:46 CEST, Robert Myers < robert.myers@wikimedia.org.au> ha scritto:
Well some people do, but it is when they get trolled by other contributors and/or overzealous Admin comes along and deletes the file. They quickly lose interest, in turn telling other people not to bother.
I just had another lot of photographs tagged by a troll, in which an Admin deletes (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=File:Ra...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=File:Ab... ). These have been on Commons for two + years, using the same camera gear I have used over the years. If it is enough for me to give up on the project, it would be the same for any other user but for a newbie it is something that would make me run for the hills (depart quickly as possible)!
On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 1:07 PM Benjamin Ikuta benjaminikuta@gmail.com wrote:
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
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