On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 5:27 PM, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:
So what is your proposal for how to effectively curate the firehose of good and bad content that is uploaded to Commons day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute?
Hi Pete,
I would generally advocate for the following:
- more emphasis on education and positive communication in cases of good faith, constructive behavior; - more tolerance for ambiguity regarding files in the collection (e.g. when the legal situation is truly ambiguous), and more use of tagging over deletion; - software which supports all of the above effectively.
Some of this is easier to act on. For example, the threshold at which we decide to delete (rather than wait, or tag) is one which we can modify. The templates we use for communication purposes are easy to edit to be friendly or specific. Software is slower to build, but we should definitely keep in mind what the ideal curation tools should look like, as well, so we can plan on where we situate it in the longer term roadmap of development efforts.
I do believe, though, that a lot of this conversation should ideally take place on Wikimedia Commons itself. These types of threads illustrate that there's a lot of real frustration in the larger community today. I would encourage folks who want to see Commons become a friendlier, more positive environment to not give up, but to advocate for changes to practices and policies on Commons itself, including in deletion discussions and policy debates. I don't think setting up a new site is likely to be the answer, though if someone wants to draft a clearer proposal for how such a site would work, this list is certainly one appropriate forum to discuss it.
Erik