To be honest, I actively discourage newbies to edit but also to upload on Commons when they start. I prefer it when they focus on something else. If needed, I can find enough files because of my expertise and that's a decent starting point. Of course, I am active and soon or later uploading is a necessary step during many partnerships or classes, but I always assume and show the worst-case scenarios. You might think that such "cautious" attitude is not the wiki spirit, and I agree, but I know also that these users are not going to be helped, so it's mostly up to me to provide such support and I (like many other ones) have limited time. I also would like to offer to those potential long-term users a social ecosystem where they can grow and I am quite sure that at the moment Commons is not the best platform to do so.
it's a little bit more subtle than being "toxic"... it's dysfunctional, superficial, sloppy and unwarm. We have/had similar problems with other platforms... it's just human nature. There are groups of "active" users creating "bubbles" of realty where critical inputs from outside are dismissed as annoying or unworth. What is unique with Commons is that on other platforms this situation reduces/reduced contributions and, because of this reason, it does/did not create a huge backlog. Less involved people, less work induced by them. You get stagnation or hibernation if the situation is critical... but that's it. However, Commons just cannot end that way. On Commons the missing metadata, the generic categorizations, the partial descriptions, the necessary updates of copyright guidelines are just there, and similarly is the ongoing upload flow from other databases or initiatives because it is a nodal space. If people are more active on Wikivoyage, Wikisource or organizing Wiki Loves Monuments... this soon or later shows an effect and a backlog on this archive.
The community of Commons really needs a network of constantly involved users, but such users can always end up being motivated somewhere else where they feel that their needs are better understood. A.M.
Il mercoledì 20 maggio 2020, 18:49:06 CEST, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com ha scritto:
My2c on the original question: Commons does a lot to discourage people from uploading to Commons. Everything from not allowing non-free formats (even automatically converted to free equivalents) to asking for cross-wiki uploads to be disabled and repeatedly proposing the same file for deletion is discouraging uploaders.
That's still anecdotical evidence I guess, but when one sees established users deliberately avoiding Commons because of these shortfalls one should probably take them seriously.
Pe duminică, 17 mai 2020, Benjamin Ikuta benjaminikuta@gmail.com a scris:
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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