On 16/10/2007, Samuel Klein sj@laptop.org wrote:
I am happy to relay that Wikimedia Commons now has over two million files. This is around 11 months after we reached one million. Since
This is really exciting. Any stats on how quickly audio and video filetypes are growing?
None to hand. Having a regular breakdown of filetype would be an interesting thing to watch. I would guess or hope that Ogg uploads will increase now that they can be easily used. (Although having said that we have always had a decent number of pronunciation files and Spoken Wikipedia files.) Last time I checked SVGs were about 7% of total uploads which is pretty cool IMO. I was going to say Oggs are probably less than that but thinking about pronunciation files, I'm not sure.
Is there a list of outstanding feature requests for active commons users? A place for gathering problems that don't yet have good solutions?
I think my list from August is still current for me, at least: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/32980/ Please read this link for a fuller explanation of the items below.
Big ticket items:
0. SUL. In the works. 1. Integrated Mayflower search. Mayflower is complete, I think this would just take some dedicated time (but of course things are never that easy). 2. Backups. I am told Wikimedia has backups now so hopefully this can be crossed off. 3. Multilingual tagging system (ie categories). This would be a huge messy change that would potentially affect a lot of parts in MediaWiki, so I think this will only happen with a dedicated developer. 4. Structured data. Maybe partially solved by things such as Semantic MW or Wikidata but would take some dedicated time to make acceptable to core MW. 5. Move/rename images functionality. Maybe an easier task as something that is hopefully more isolated. 6. Rating system.Travis contacted me about this so I hope we can get something going here. 7. Improved category handling (eg all subcats on front page, print total# of items in cat, sort by params other than alphabetical, 'auto-flatten' subcats). These are all individual things which could be picked away at by those interested. 8. Multilingual support. [Hopefully for categories solved with item 3] Making languages "stick" for anon users. Fixing RTL interface. Translating templates "automagically" like MW system messages. I'm guessing these are all capital D Difficult problems.
Medium ticket items: 9. Playback support. Greatly improved thanks to OggHandler, would be nice to have the same for OO files, Midi and... maybe that's it? any other file formats we can't display... 10. Category RSS - solved thanks to Magnus+toolserver. InstantCommons - don't know what its status is. 11. Global native MW Checkusage, CommonsTicker functionality. I guess the reason we don't have global native checkusage is because of performance reasons. These are maybe relatively easy to write as isolated things. 12. Enable ImportFreeImages extension. (auto-Flickr import) http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8854 This extension has been enabled at Wikia but awaits review before being enabled here. We have since worked around it with toolserver+bot but it is less than ideal.
Small ticket items: 13. Ability to move images from another Wikimedia wiki to Commons (worked around with toolserver, bots to some extent). Maybe Special:Import just needs some tweaking? Maybe not /too/ hard? 14. User upload gallery function. Difficulty: relatively easy. (work around: toolserver) 15. Bulk upload function. Difficulty: ? (work around: user-created programs and scripts that have varying degrees of success and portability) 16. Auto-resize galleries according to window size. Difficulty: easy? (workaround: site JS) 17. Category and gallery Flickr-like 'previews'. Difficulty: at the difficult end of easy (workaround: site JS) 18. "Fotonotes" Difficulty: maybe a fun problem, difficult in itself, but relatively isolated (although how these things get recorded in the DB could be interesting) 19. Upload form flexibility. (such as ability to create purpose-specific forms) Difficulty: moderate.
We also have an incomplete list of bugs which could provide some nice bite-sized problems as well as some monsters like the above: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bugs
An item I did not write in this list is that of "copyright checking" or "workflow" or something. I somewhat doubt that 5k images every day each get eyeballed by even one other person than the uploader. That is worrying. Patrol is not quite the right tool. Stable will not quite be the right tool. I don't know what the right tool will quite look like but I guess this is another "dedicated" difficult problem.
cheers, Brianna