On 15 December 2013 19:36, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
The images contain metadata, which could be used for categorisation,at the book level.
Not that useful.
If you look at the images a lot are simply decorations and there are a fair number of duplications.
The whole point of the wiki model is that we make incremental steps towards completion.
An analogy could be drawn with Wikipedia's "stub" articles.
Commons already has 19 million images to make incremental steps on. En.Wikipedia has 4.4 million articles total, even the stubs are a lot more searchable and it has more people.
It's not good for us to lobby institutions to release media, and then decline to accept it.
So we need to decide in advance what we are looking at. With 19 million already we've reach the stage where we should probably be more selective.
I would have liked the release to have been direct to Commons; at least, I would have liked the opportunity to debate whether to accept it. I hope that the next tome such an release is being considered, we will be in a better position to facilitate the former.
Having the images on flickr isn't too bad. They are still searchable and fairly easy to import although my search results have been turning up less than 1% that area really of interest an even then the quality isn't always usable.