This isn't directly related to the board meeting, but I want to pause
for a moment to share some ideas. Not all of them are mine, quite a bit
of this is directly from the chapters.
The Swedish chapter had the idea to declare 2009 The Year of the
Picture, to put a concerted effort into adding images to the Wikimedia
Commons, along with using more illustrations in Wikipedia and elsewhere.
I think this is absolutely a great idea. Making better use of visual
material in our projects also fits in with the ongoing effort to improve
quality.
I applaud the efforts of all the chapters in this area, and I encourage
anyone who can to join in. You may recall that the German chapter
recently secured the release of a large number of images from their
federal archive, and several other chapters are also working on free
image collection projects. Hopefully our April meetings of chapter
representatives, in conjunction with the board, will be an opportunity
to develop more ideas and strategies. And of course, you don't even need
to have a recognized chapter to get a group together and organize photo
expeditions, as for example some of the people in the now-approved New
York chapter have done.
Commons is obviously an important part of any such efforts, as our
repository for freely licensed media. Now because Commons is a project
in itself, there has always been some tension around how separate and
independent it should be from the other projects. Should it be
considered to have its own community? (Yes, says Brianna, otherwise it
would be no different from Photobucket.) How much should it take
direction from the other projects in order to serve their needs? For
that matter, should the other projects occasionally take direction from
Commons as its participants do things like screen for copyright issues?
Just how broad of a scope does Commons have?
Our mission, fundamentally, is educational. That may sometimes be a
limitation, where media that doesn't have serious educational potential
should be avoided as a distraction, or things that detract from
education can be edited out. However, the needs of education may be
broad indeed, so I'd say that the scope of Commons could be broader -
actually, maybe I should say deeper instead. Along those lines, I'll
share some comments I made in an internal discussion on the subject.
Speaking primarily from my experience working with images, I find it
really restrictive to think of Commons as limited to those images
actually needed for Wikipedia. I think perhaps we should approach it
from the perspective of what a project like Wikibooks could use -
Wikibooks not as it is, but as it could be.
The actual art of matching illustrations to text requires having not
just one passably suitable picture, but choosing the best for your
particular purpose out of a range of similar options. It also is not a
matter of taking the one platonically perfect picture and dropping it in
every conceivable place, though given what's currently available that's
often what we end up doing. To find a good illustration when you want
one ultimately demands a vast library of images, many of which might
never be used otherwise because nobody has called for the particular
combination of features they provide.
I deal with this regularly in a professional capacity, this is what
stock photography firms are built on, and I can assure you that there is
no adequate freely licensed stock photography resource in the world.
Commons is the best there is, and it is barely usable, and then only
sporadically. Maybe some people imagine we have too many pictures of
people's cats and dogs, since those are popular subjects, but I'll say
we don't have nearly enough even of that - and in particular we don't
have enough variety. Suppose I wanted a picture of a dog and a cat
together, a fairly mundane subject, for which I did at least find a
category with 27 files at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cats_and_dogs. I suppose
that's a start, but at a glance there's no way that provides enough
options for what I might want, especially if I was particular about how
they're posed or what breed they are.
There are no doubt bigger gaps in our library, and arguably more
important ones. But mostly we need to get more pictures and figure out
ways to use them.
--Michael Snow