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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