I am pleased to announce that a database has now been set up for the Wikimedia Commons.
The site is temporarily located at http://commons.wikimedia.org/ until the project gets its own domain.
This provides a space for those interested to begin forming the guidelines for the site, and to discuss how the software will need to adapt to make the Commons as useful as possible.
The previous discussions are now linked to from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_plan.
Batches of files may be uploaded as compressed zip files. Some time in the next few days, a script will be written to decompress these zip files on the server side. Please make sure you use appropriate file names inside the archives.
Thanks to Tim Starling for creating the database, and to all those who have contributed to the discussion so far.
Angela.
--- Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
I am pleased to announce that a database has now been set up for the Wikimedia Commons.
This is great news!
The site is temporarily located at http://commons.wikimedia.org/ until the project gets its own domain.
I'm pretty sure the plan was to keep the domain name exactly like it is now since it is a *common* resource for all Wikimedia projects (just like Meta).
This provides a space for those interested to begin forming the guidelines for the site, and to discuss how the software will need to adapt to make the Commons as useful as possible.
The previous discussions are now linked to from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_plan.
Batches of files may be uploaded as compressed zip files. Some time in the next few days, a script will be written to decompress these zip files on the server side. Please make sure you use appropriate file names inside the archives.
Hm. Lot's of images to transfer. Could the transwiki function be tweaked in order to do this?
-- mav
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
Angela wrote:
I am pleased to announce that a database has now been set up for the Wikimedia Commons.
The site is temporarily located at http://commons.wikimedia.org/ until the project gets its own domain.
This provides a space for those interested to begin forming the guidelines for the site, and to discuss how the software will need to adapt to make the Commons as useful as possible.
The previous discussions are now linked to from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_plan.
Batches of files may be uploaded as compressed zip files. Some time in the next few days, a script will be written to decompress these zip files on the server side. Please make sure you use appropriate file names inside the archives.
Thanks to Tim Starling for creating the database, and to all those who have contributed to the discussion so far.
Angela.
Hello,
In my mind, MediaWiki is not a software to manage a gallery of pictures or media.
As I understand the announcment, the community already choose MediaWiki and will just ask developpers to code new features. Basicly developpers will have to write from scratch a gallery system whereas there is already such software under GPL (example: http://pnavy.com/dcgallery/ with dublin data core support).
There is so much features that are needed for a media gallery, that soon the dev team will be overhelmed. What will happen when the community will want dublin core metadata, EXIF automatic parsing, e-commerce, XML-RPC, multiple fields search, ogg tags parsing, videos preview ... We don't even have a license system : we rely on using templates instead wich is clearly not a solution in term of search capabilities.
A wiki is not a database, it's a tool to create collaborative text. A media gallery is a database. Guess what ? A wiki system is not meant to act as a media gallery.
As for the batch zip uncompression, that just lead to easy vandalism (uploading a 3MB zip can easily generate 1GB of data).
In conclusion, the "commons" idea have been around for sometime now, we should not start things in a hurry and hope to fix it later. It will just give us a LOT more works. Instead I think we should carefully plan the project needs, do and don't, find an already existent solution and then either use it or enhance it (that's what GPL softwares are all about).
cheers,
Ashar-
In my mind, MediaWiki is not a software to manage a gallery of pictures or media.
Hmmm, kind of a bad naming choice for the software then ;-)
There is so much features that are needed for a media gallery, that soon the dev team will be overhelmed. What will happen when the community will want dublin core metadata, EXIF automatic parsing, e-commerce, XML-RPC, multiple fields search, ogg tags parsing, videos preview ...
Each of these features must be judged on its merits. As you pointed out on wikitech-l, the template system provides us with a direct path towards metadata. An existing gallery system is not an option as this is not what we are trying to create here. Users are encouraged, for example, to edit captions as they see fit, or to replace images with higher quality versions. We want to use all the cool features a wiki gives us - recent changes, diffs, page histories, and so on.
Wikis are something fundamentally new. Old software concepts do not apply. We need to instead think about how we transfer the benefits of the wiki to different applications. For example, there's no reason not to have a specific editing template associated with a namespace, so that all pages within that namespace have certain defined fields, and still allow diffs and versioning. As for galleries, a <gallery> tag that accepts a list of images seems like the best solution. For the actual gallery generation we may be able to use some existing code.
MediaWiki, in my vision of it, should eventually be capable of intelligently dealing with a wide range of media and enable massive online collaboration on them (it could interface with network-enabled purpose- specific applications like Inkscape or the GIMP to allow several people to work on the same image at the same time). The fundamental core idea of the wiki is not just "a page that anyone can edit", but "a way for people to collaborate on content without barriers."
There's indeed no need to hurry. While I find the early launch of the Commons somewhat suboptimal, I am sure that it will evolve together with the software.
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
Each of these features must be judged on its merits. As you pointed out on wikitech-l, the template system provides us with a direct path towards metadata. An existing gallery system is not an option as this is not what we are trying to create here. Users are encouraged, for example, to edit captions as they see fit, or to replace images with higher quality versions. We want to use all the cool features a wiki gives us - recent changes, diffs, page histories, and so on.
Wikis are something fundamentally new. Old software concepts do not apply.
I don't think that's really true: A wiki is just something you can edit from a web browser. Most of what it does is does in clunkier form elsewhere (editing the pages with emacs and diff'ing using CVS is a trivial example), but wikis make it easier for a non-technical user.
This gallery really should have the benefits of both editability and strong database support. Whether it's better to start from an existing gallery system and add editability to it, or start from a wiki and add metadata/EXIF/etc. to it is largely a matter of preference and ease of technical implementation.
-Mark
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
In conclusion, the "commons" idea have been around for sometime now, we should not start things in a hurry and hope to fix it later. It will just give us a LOT more works. Instead I think we should carefully plan the project needs, do and don't, find an already existent solution and then either use it or enhance it (that's what GPL softwares are all about).
While I very much understand and agree with what you're saying, the situation is that this is a major pressing need *today*, and there's much demand for even this step forward. If there is some other software that you know about which we could evaluate and test this week, and install next week, that'd be a good thing. But in the meantime, we had to just get the ball rolling.
--Jimbo
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org