On 11 December 2014 at 16:40, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote: ...
The first issue here is one of demotivating contributors. I took a photo of an object I owned, and gave it away to be used in Wikipedia. The only interaction I ever get on Commons about my photos is a notification of when some fussy neckbeard wants to delete them. No thanks for thousands of uploads. No notification of how many views they produce for our projects. No message about downloads for free reuse.
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I'm reflecting on this, certainly having uploaded 700 times more images than Steven, I get far more hassle over weak categorization and minor format issues than I ever receive thanks. However I do appreciate unexpected thanks, even for long past upload projects. As an example, unbeknown to others, all year I have regularly recieved thank you notifications from Tokorokoko for photographs I uploaded yonks ago from the U.S. Department of Defense taken in Japan, which is jolly nice considering I have no other connection to them, it leaves me with a warm glow. Anyway, so from my own experience I agree that those of us that spend more time contributing content barely get any thanks. In practice as we are more active, it is a sad fact that we are far more likely to be challenged, be investigated by trusted users, have our time sucked up by others looking for help and sometimes by those who are desperate for drama and can't resist poking the bear.
With regard to having my uploads deleted, as of today I have had over 2,000 files deleted (the database shows 19,402 of my files deleted, however 17,000 were probably due to the same project error and I requested them deleted). I mostly agree with the deletions, I have gradually learned to accept that this is part of the risk we take in understanding and protecting the copyright due to original artists.
In comparison, Steven has as of today 1,215 files uploaded to Commons. Of these he is fortunate that only 19 have been deleted. 2 were at his own request while 6 were duplicates or scaled-down versions of files already on Commons. This leaves 11. I think a less than 1% deletion rate on your first 1,000 uploaded files shows that the project is not such a bad place to share images for their educational benefit.
I took a closer look due to the original "thousands of uploads" comment which seemed incongruous with Steven not appearing on my active users list.[1] Hopefully if he continues, the rate of deletions will keep on decreasing, I suspect that is a natural pattern for everyone uploading to Commons. For those of us who have been in many copyright discussions, the one thing we are sure about is that it is always changing and nobody is always right, including our assessment of the copyright of our own photographs.
Links: 1. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae/Userlist
P.S. with regard to being "young and handsome", please consider that struck per James' earlier objection. Let's presume nobody has any views about facial hair, age or similar personal attributes and that maybe one day soon Steven will feel able to apologise for defaming all of us unpaid volunteer Commonsists. As for me I am fabulous, and you are welcome to say so.
Thanks, Fae