On Sun, 17 May 2020 at 05:12, Gnangarra <gnangarra(a)gmail.com> wrote: The size of those contests means the average content has little chance of winning. On top of that phones are in most cases good enough. Attempts to throw money at the problem haven't been that effective. Wikimedia UK has equipment for loan but use levels vary. Providing tickets to things has some success but again rather mixed. Ultimately you tend to run into the problem that wikipedia editing tends to be a solo activity and most people don't want to deal with formal links to organisations. Geni

the NC discussion from memory fell in that they impacted the ability to include them in Wikipedia pages that are then rebroadcast by people like Google and answers.com because it was a more restrictive license. On Sun, 17 May 2020 at 12:44, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- GN. *Power of Diverse Collaboration* *Sharing knowledge brings people together* Wikimania Bangkok 2021 August hosted by ESEAP Wikimania: https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gnangarra Noongarpedia: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nys/Main_Page My print shop: https://www.redbubble.com/people/Gnangarra/shop?asc=u

I think you've hit the nail on the head Pine with We really need to address the lack of cross project support and community by further integration of projects rather than create more stand alone projects. On Sun, 17 May 2020 at 14:42, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- GN. *Power of Diverse Collaboration* *Sharing knowledge brings people together* Wikimania Bangkok 2021 August hosted by ESEAP Wikimania: https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gnangarra Noongarpedia: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nys/Main_Page My print shop: https://www.redbubble.com/people/Gnangarra/shop?asc=u

This discussion, although started with a question "why don't people contribute to Wikimedia Commons, now after actually the discussion above, covers more topics. A few notes, observations and comments: 1) I remember a major discussion took place somewhere on Wikimedia Commons when one of the strategy2030 draft recommendations suggested uploading non-free images on Wikimedia Commons. That discussion was also on the scope of Wikimedia Commons. I wish I could recall where exactly it took place. However, I am pretty sure that many of you have read or participated there. Most probably there I first read the idea of "uncommon/uncommons" (or an alternative version of Commons). 2) Wikimedia Commons is most possibly/definitely less popular than Wikipedia. I believe many editors start from Wikipedia and then move to Wikimedia Commons. There is, of course, another reason, when someone gradually becomes more experienced on Wikipedia, they learn they need to spend some time on Wikimedia Commons for the article–photos they are working on. I "personally" do "not" feel the solution of this "popularity" problem is rebranding. We need more Wikimedia Commons-focused plans, initiatives, and strategies (I find this is true for all other projects). 3) Yes, the difficulty of using the app/web interface might be an issue of seeing less contribution as well. You have different photo-sharing platforms which uploads photos in 1-click. Commons upload process is longer. (I am not saying the process is bad, of course, we need all the steps, and there is not an unnecessary step there.) 4) The human emotion and interaction part is kind of missing: On Facebook, Instagram the likes, comments etc one gets, work as a motivation. This is a major issue. On FB, or Instagram an uploader can connect with people instantly, and their responses/reactions are quick as well. (Here also, I am not really suggesting anything, just keeping it as an observation) Let's talk about Google Photos, their badges, photo views analytics, and email time to time (eg: Your photo is making a difference, or You are a star) is good for motivation as well. Thanks User:Titodutta On Sun, 17 May 2020 at 13:03, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:

"there are way less people maintaining it than it is needed" is naif summary of what is going on. IMHO. There are people maintaining it in a way that is counterproductive. You can always create an efficient workflow, if you want it. We don't need people that delete an image of a statue in the USA because of no:fop even if it is a small size in a big composition and than keep the other ones in the category that are in any case used on enwikipedia. We don't need people copying and pasting quickly motivations without even reading them confusing countries or scenarios, as it happened (they almost never apologize, of course, because they are so busy). We don't need people that when a deletion procedure is rejected keep insisting looking at the contribution of an user stressing them until they find something. We don't need people deleting low-resolution files that were few months short form entering the public domain, when in the same time they could have deleted 100 times more of useless images. We don't need people arguing to delete ancient images that couldn't be proved "not to be recent" against good faith.  We don't need people starting deletion procedure if an image is on line instead of simply asking the uploader.  However, it's a fact that some active members of the community created over the years a system where such people are encouraged to act in such a rigid way and probably even believe that their behaviour is necessary. Given these circumstances, it is not the moral duty of the silent majority of users to deal with the consequences of such behaviour. They can go on and try to delete everything the way they do and they will also deal with the huge amount of backlog they create wasting the time of users. It's only fair to me that whoever keep encouraging such unefficient workflow should be the one to clean the mess. A. Il domenica 17 maggio 2020, 12:15:30 CEST, Yaroslav Blanter &lt;ymbalt(a)gmail.com&gt; ha scritto: Concerning using Commons as a photo hosting, I have written a blog post earlier this year: https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/wikimedia-commons-as-private-photo-host… However, I can not see how it can become anything close to social media, nor do I think it should be. It already has a lot of garbage, and there are way less people maintaining it than it is needed. That it is one of the nastiest communities among all Wikimedia projects, with people being allowed to do things for which they would become instantly long-term blocked on other projects, does not help either Best Yaroslav On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 10:32 AM Tito Dutta &lt;trulytito(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

I have no doubt that on the long-term solutions will be found. Even if structural data were IMHO presented and used poorly, the catalyzing effect of them and Wikidata will be there. I am also in full support for the creation of a parallel Commons for NC files as well, which will also speed up many processes. I am not interested in some ideological stance about the matter, if we can keep NC files locally, we can also on a general platforms, or we don't keep them at all. The point is that such solutions will never really originate from a big part of the community of Commons (including part of OTRS), they simply cannot stem from a community structured the way some users actively shaped it over the years, encouraging a self-referential "righteous" vision. Think about what occurred with Wikidata, I saw users being trolled for discussing about its future role the beginning, but they were mostly right, I don't see the Commons users who invented paranoid scenarios to justify their behavior even thinking about that now. I don't have time to protect the social roles of users who behave in such a poor way. If I can solve things just going around them, I do so. It is a failure, but it's not the fault of many among us. After I have to fix problems from actions that could have simply being avoided with just a tiny amount of good sense, I don't have time to discuss that there might be  a better way of doing thing to users who will just ignore that and go to the first occasion to reproduce the same behavior again, because they are even rewarded for that. It takes me hours and I don't have any energy left, certainly not even to rename a file, create a category or verify a license. I don't have even energy to present it nicely to a third part who is witnessing that. I don't care how certain users look, because they are the first ones who don't care about the consequence of their actions. Over the years, I am more convinced that the best solution is to let them go. It does not matter if the backlog obviously increases. When we will be free to set up more functional solutions, the backlog can be reduced quite easily. I have therefore stopped many years ago to perform any actions outside my projects and I am happy that way. I am sure I am not the only one. I am slways happy to create tool outside of such bubble, of course, but not a lot inside it. Il domenica 17 maggio 2020, 20:14:49 CEST, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; ha scritto: Hoi,Just consider this, there are still many pictures in the English Wikipedia that could be in Commons because of its license and regularly there are pictures in Commons that are deleted because there license is not compatible with Commons. At Commons a revolution is taking place because the basic building blocks for it to become truly useful are in place. We are all invited to include "depicts" statements effectively linking them to Wikidata, to multilinguality, and make images findable.  It is relatively straightforward to replace license information with  wikidata and use it for a purpose. There is one tiny proviso; it means that English Wikipedia material has to be dealt with in the same way. Preferably in the same database. It then follows that all the true freely licensed material is part of Commons and its policies, for the rest there are the exemptions, the material that is allowed for use in English Wikipedia is part of English Wikipedia and its policies. When you then look for material to use in whatever project, the license limits what you can use, what you find. For material that we want to include that has an incompatible license, we find that we cannot use it in our projects and we may choose if and how we expose it to the world. Effectively what fits the Commons policies is usable at all our projects, the other stuff relies on the license involved. An example, an original that is reduced in size to fit the "fair use" criteria has a place but is not available. Obvious exceptions the care takers of our material.  The biggest benefit I see is that we bring together what is divided and bring options to the pruning process of Commons that enable it to recognise stuff that has a place in "fair use" situations. It opens up our content linguistically and it will definitely make us more inclusively for a world beyond the two U-s.Thanks,      GerardM On Sun, 17 May 2020 at 17:25, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:  "there are way less people maintaining it than it is needed" is naif summary of what is going on. IMHO. There are people maintaining it in a way that is counterproductive. You can always create an efficient workflow, if you want it. We don't need people that delete an image of a statue in the USA because of no:fop even if it is a small size in a big composition and than keep the other ones in the category that are in any case used on enwikipedia. We don't need people copying and pasting quickly motivations without even reading them confusing countries or scenarios, as it happened (they almost never apologize, of course, because they are so busy). We don't need people that when a deletion procedure is rejected keep insisting looking at the contribution of an user stressing them until they find something. We don't need people deleting low-resolution files that were few months short form entering the public domain, when in the same time they could have deleted 100 times more of useless images. We don't need people arguing to delete ancient images that couldn't be proved "not to be recent" against good faith.  We don't need people starting deletion procedure if an image is on line instead of simply asking the uploader.  However, it's a fact that some active members of the community created over the years a system where such people are encouraged to act in such a rigid way and probably even believe that their behaviour is necessary. Given these circumstances, it is not the moral duty of the silent majority of users to deal with the consequences of such behaviour. They can go on and try to delete everything the way they do and they will also deal with the huge amount of backlog they create wasting the time of users. It's only fair to me that whoever keep encouraging such unefficient workflow should be the one to clean the mess. A.    Il domenica 17 maggio 2020, 12:15:30 CEST, Yaroslav Blanter &lt;ymbalt(a)gmail.com&gt; ha scritto:   Concerning using Commons as a photo hosting, I have written a blog post earlier this year: https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/wikimedia-commons-as-private-photo-host… However, I can not see how it can become anything close to social media, nor do I think it should be. It already has a lot of garbage, and there are way less people maintaining it than it is needed. That it is one of the nastiest communities among all Wikimedia projects, with people being allowed to do things for which they would become instantly long-term blocked on other projects, does not help either Best Yaroslav On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 10:32 AM Tito Dutta &lt;trulytito(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>  _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

Hoi, Dear Ziko, your proposal is business as usual. The biggest question we should ask is not what do we do but WHY do we do it. When we decide that Open Content is there to be used, it follows that it is a key performance indicator to know to what extend we serve a public and what public we have, could have and how we can expand our public. The current notion that people where we only consider how many people see images in Wikipedia makes Commons objectives secondary to Wikipedia. We do not care if people can find pictures in Commons and to be brutal I have given up, I do really want Commons to serve my needs as a blogger. We do not know the number of people who download our content, we do not know what people think of the usability as a resource of freely licensed material. We only consider Commons at the front end (ingestion) and not at the backend We should care because THAT is our mission. Thanks, GerardM On Mon, 18 May 2020 at 11:31, Ziko van Dijk &lt;zvandijk(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Sun, 17 May 2020 at 08:33, Fæ &lt;faewik(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Pretty sure the most common license terms would breach the upload conditions of one or both of those sites. The problem is that most websites ask for a non exclusive license to whatever they want want with an image without giving credit which pretty much limits you to PD or MIT -- geni

Hello Alessandro, Thank you for your post and its insight. I recognized the same with me: I only make use of Wikimedia Commons in lessons if I have enough time. Also I would introduce it only to students with a solid knowledge of English. Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; schrieb am Mo. 18. Mai 2020 um 13:08: This is a great observation! And this phenomenon contributes to the on-going chaos, to the work-around-culture you need to adapt to if you want to make use of Wikimedia Commons. :-( Kind regards Ziko They are also not caring for it: if you spend your time starting

in the past "99% unproblematic" was true, because most of the things were obvious and standard (panorama of towns, ancient portraits), it's not nowadays. You can upload tons of unproblematic pictures because they are easy to find, but you don't need them really. So they mostly clutter the workflow. There are a lot of images of kittens that we can upload, good luck categorizing them. Of course, you can switch to very specific projects like "documenting all small rivers" but the core issue are also high-quality upload. And everything is potentially problematic there: the right of an important person to privacy, the right of the manufacturer of an instruments, how creative is the lighting of an object? if I upload an image of a town it's probably a very nice one, taken by a competent photographer who clearly show them on line as well. You are in a dimension where you need to study, learn, ask around, find a balance. Instead we have people acting randomly and superficially, because they do not care about the long-term effect of their actions. This impacts the maintenance of course, because very specific issues requires sophisticated categories, processes and metadata. The effort there is quite high, you are always the first one to arrive. the first one to clean up,the first one to explain to a third party. If you add on that more unnecessary stress than required, people reduce this job as much as they can as a necessary balance. But that job has an important effect in the overall maintenance, so at a certain point you start to see the effect when it is not there. It's not a big surprise, we tried to explain this fact for years, but the community is designed to ignore these aspects and encourage other work attitudes. It's just like that. Il lunedì 18 maggio 2020, 15:28:51 CEST, Yaroslav Blanter &lt;ymbalt(a)gmail.com&gt; ha scritto: To be fair, in most cases to use Commons for uploading files is totally unproblematic as soon as one has basic understanding of copyright. I am pretty sure 99% of my uploads can not be deleted (I had my files mass-nominated for deletion, once with the claim they are not mine, and once with the claim they are holiday photos and out of scope, but both cases admins were reasonably enough to speedy close the nominations). Of course there are always potentially problematic cases, for example I can imagine for one could start requiring "publication" dates for painting, which is copyright paranoia but some people take it seriously etc. But if one uploads something sufficiently far from the grey area it normally should be ok. (I am still a Commons admin, but I reduced my admin activity to a minimum and I am not planning to increase the activity level). Best Yaroslav On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 3:12 PM Ziko van Dijk &lt;zvandijk(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Hello Alessandro, Thank you for your post and its insight. I recognized the same with me: I only make use of Wikimedia Commons in lessons if I have enough time. Also I would introduce it only to students with a solid knowledge of English. Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; schrieb am Mo. 18. Mai 2020 um 13:08: This is a great observation! And this phenomenon contributes to the on-going chaos, to the work-around-culture you need to adapt to if you want to make use of Wikimedia Commons. :-( Kind regards Ziko They are also not caring for it: if you spend your time starting _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

I think we could start to make the category structure obsolete and focus on structured data, there's already bots running basic structured data that could be ramped up. and Having Wikidata game( https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/) thats instead focused on whats in a file & its description, that would capture more structured data including licensing. It'd help teach people more about including structured data 62million files is a lot to process so it'll take time but we can run competitions like 1lib1ref, encourage affiliates to focus on doing Commons structured data game as outreach events, this will teach people about licensing, and about what makes a good photograph because everyone knows a 30px by 30px photo is crap we can have structured data items less than 100,200,500px on the long edge. Next step would be to look at the search function, add in an advance option with a few optional fields to fill in that searches the structured data. The advance search option could then sort by pixel size giving the biggest images first. On Mon, 18 May 2020 at 22:28, Samuel Klein &lt;meta.sj(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- GN. *Power of Diverse Collaboration* *Sharing knowledge brings people together* Wikimania Bangkok 2021 August hosted by ESEAP Wikimania: https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gnangarra Noongarpedia: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nys/Main_Page My print shop: https://www.redbubble.com/people/Gnangarra/shop?asc=u

Yes, structured data are far from perfect. I am sorry about it because I know their potential but they need to grow on a difficult soil and this slows down. We expected that, unfortunately. You can't just use them top-down, they need a bottom-up approach but we lack the right mentality of engaged users to make it grow. If you want to change and improve something right now with metadata, try galleries before categories. They are quite useless at the moment, I see some users are updating them but they are really poor. It was very frequent to finf low resolution files still there, they are not standardized as well. Since they have limited structural role, working on that should be easier. Il lunedì 18 maggio 2020, 17:20:31 CEST, Phil Nash via Wikimedia-l &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; ha scritto: The search has to be done before the category structure is addressed, even if that needs to be done. How else would you compartmentalise, what 32 million images? And structured data has to be fixed before either. The reason is that structured data does not have unique names, and I don't think people relate to the Q numbers as well as names of things they know already. It's actually very much worse than that because these automated "Depicts" suggestions do not appear to know about Commons categories such that they suggest an obvious statement. We all know it's maybe broken, but I don't see this as a fix, even if we run two systems in parallel until the structured data is (a) mature (b) sensible and (c) throughly reliable. --- New Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail replacement - get it here: https://www.oeclassic.com/ ----- Original Message ----- From: Gnangarra &lt;gnangarra(a)gmail.com&gt; Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; To: Wikimedia Mailing List &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Sent: 18/05/2020 15:53:35 Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons ________________________________________________________________________________ I think we could start to make the category structure obsolete  and focus on structured data, there's already bots running basic structured data that could be ramped up. and Having Wikidata game( https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/) thats instead focused on whats in a file & its description, that would capture more structured data including licensing. It'd help teach people more about including structured data 62million files is a lot to process so it'll take time but we can run competitions like 1lib1ref, encourage affiliates to focus on doing Commons structured data game as outreach events, this will teach people about licensing, and about what makes a good photograph because everyone knows a 30px by 30px photo is crap we can have structured data items less than 100,200,500px on the long edge. Next step would be to look at the search function, add in an advance option with a few optional fields to fill in that searches the structured data. The advance search option could then sort by pixel size giving the biggest images first. On Mon, 18 May 2020 at 22:28, Samuel Klein &lt;meta.sj(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- GN. *Power of Diverse Collaboration* *Sharing knowledge brings people together* Wikimania Bangkok 2021 August hosted by ESEAP Wikimania: https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gnangarra Noongarpedia: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nys/Main_Page My print shop: https://www.redbubble.com/people/Gnangarra/shop?asc=u _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

We have two or three competing reasons to have commons like repositories: 1. Truly fully open content repository for Wikimedia projects and the world as a whole. (Commons now) 2. Truly fully open content repository in general of things which are worthy but not used in projects/articles now. (Some of Commons) 3. Commonly available repository for sufficiently free (fair use, other existing allowed cases like irreplaceable or so forth) use in at least one project so that other projects could also share the media efficiently if local content rules allow it. (Nowhere now, I’ve described as “uncommons” somewhat for its humor value as a name) I have previously pointed out that ideally we’d have a way to unify those for easy other projects reference, but there were wailing and gnashing of teeth from developers and I list energy. I also have pointed out that the “helpful” process of copying a non-fully-free image to Commons, local deletion due to overlap, then commons deletion removing *all* copies is pathological inter-project process behavior and we really needed to end that somehow. Also ran into much wailing and gnashing of teeth from commons people not entirely wanting to be blamed and others out of patience trying to deal with commons people, and everyone loses interest. Perhaps we would do better off to create an uncommons and change all the for-wider-use upload tools to deposit it there, point the internal image auto linking there, and have commons out on the side as not the direct Wiki project source but a specific curated open content source. Everything in commons would be in uncommons and linked for articles etc, new fair use or irreplaceable content goes to uncommons only, and curators with open license intellectual property expertise could curate upselection of the approved bits to commons. That should make everyone happy and be practical and implementable without horrible massive architecture changes. -george Sent from my iPhone

For what it's worth, I think that devoting WMF staff time and/or consultant time to developing a strategy for Commons and possibly another sister media project would be well worth considering. I would likely support redirecting resources from the branding project to such a strategy project. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

To be fair, lack of iterative processes can happen on other platforms as well: think about the role of portals on some Wikipedias, or some notability guidelines that are far from defined and groups of users claim opposite concepts. Even Wikidata has these issues (surprisingly mostly ignored by some actve users there) but in that case they rarely define the platform as a general perception. Plus, soon or later, they have to focus on them somehow. The problem with Commons is that it gets easier to just ignore them and try somewhere else, instead of centralizing issues and solve them there, it acts the opposite way when real problems emerge from real life. When I noticed that we could refine categorization of images from books I did not open the discussion on Commons, but on Wikisource. When I want to chat about how metadata can help I do with mostly Wikidata users, not Commons users, and so on. It should be mutlilingual but meta and Wikidata clearly do this better. What also is a problem is that copyright just... change... and again it's easier to handle it at level of national chapters than on Commons. So a platform that should be designed to handle a clearly iterative issue basically underperforms on that. As the first truly multilingual content-related active platform, Commons was probably not designed efficiently to handle its role and over the years we could not fix it. It should be the one to do a lot of things instead it just handle badly sometimes what other platforms or affiliates cannot handle in the first place. You can't handle metadata? let's start from Wikidata. You can't handle copyright issue? national chapters. OTRS? Language-based channels also from affiliates and meta. GLAM? Affiliates. Ancient documents and epigraphs? Maybe Wkisource, sometimes. Problem with some NC files? Local Wikipedias. is it just me or it is too big to fails, so we keep it because it has a strucutral role, but it basically just cannot catalyze efficiently new things. Il lunedì 18 maggio 2020, 16:28:00 CEST, Samuel Klein &lt;meta.sj(a)gmail.com&gt; ha scritto: Commons needs iterative workflows that tag problems and modify what reuses / transfusions are supported, rather than making everything a crude delete/keep decision.  Else it will always struggle w scaling to these uses. 🌍🌏🌎🌑 On Mon., May 18, 2020, 9:48 a.m. Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l, &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:  in the past "99% unproblematic" was true, because most of the things were obvious and standard (panorama of towns, ancient portraits), it's not nowadays. You can upload tons of unproblematic pictures because they are easy to find, but you don't need them really. So they mostly clutter the workflow. There are a lot of images of kittens that we can upload, good luck categorizing them. Of course, you can switch to very specific projects like "documenting all small rivers" but the core issue are also high-quality upload. And everything is potentially problematic there: the right of an important person to privacy, the right of the manufacturer of an instruments, how creative is the lighting of an object? if I upload an image of a town it's probably a very nice one, taken by a competent photographer who clearly show them on line as well. You are in a dimension where you need to study, learn, ask around, find a balance. Instead we have people acting randomly and superficially, because they do not care about the long-term effect of their actions. This impacts the maintenance of course, because very specific issues requires sophisticated categories, processes and metadata. The effort there is quite high, you are always the first one to arrive. the first one to clean up,the first one to explain to a third party. If you add on that more unnecessary stress than required, people reduce this job as much as they can as a necessary balance. But that job has an important effect in the overall maintenance, so at a certain point you start to see the effect when it is not there. It's not a big surprise, we tried to explain this fact for years, but the community is designed to ignore these aspects and encourage other work attitudes. It's just like that.     Il lunedì 18 maggio 2020, 15:28:51 CEST, Yaroslav Blanter &lt;ymbalt(a)gmail.com&gt; ha scritto:   To be fair, in most cases to use Commons for uploading files is totally unproblematic as soon as one has basic understanding of copyright. I am pretty sure 99% of my uploads can not be deleted (I had my files mass-nominated for deletion, once with the claim they are not mine, and once with the claim they are holiday photos and out of scope, but both cases admins were reasonably enough to speedy close the nominations). Of course there are always potentially problematic cases, for example I can imagine for one could start requiring "publication" dates for painting, which is copyright paranoia but some people take it seriously etc. But if one uploads something sufficiently far from the grey area it normally should be ok. (I am still a Commons admin, but I reduced my admin activity to a minimum and I am not planning to increase the activity level). Best Yaroslav On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 3:12 PM Ziko van Dijk &lt;zvandijk(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Hello Alessandro, Thank you for your post and its insight. I recognized the same with me: I only make use of Wikimedia Commons in lessons if I have enough time. Also I would introduce it only to students with a solid knowledge of English. Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; schrieb am Mo. 18. Mai 2020 um 13:08: This is a great observation! And this phenomenon contributes to the on-going chaos, to the work-around-culture you need to adapt to if you want to make use of Wikimedia Commons. :-( Kind regards Ziko They are also not caring for it: if you spend your time starting _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

To be honest, I actively discourage newbies to edit but also to upload on Commons when they start. I prefer it when they focus on something else. If needed, I can find enough files because of my expertise and that's a decent starting point. Of course, I am active and soon or later uploading is a necessary step during many partnerships or classes, but I always assume and show the worst-case scenarios. You might think that such "cautious" attitude is not the wiki spirit, and I agree, but I know also that these users are not going to be helped, so it's mostly up to me to provide such support and I (like many other ones) have limited time. I also would like to offer to those potential long-term users a social ecosystem where they can grow and I am quite sure that at the moment Commons is not the best platform to do so. it's a little bit more subtle than being "toxic"... it's dysfunctional, superficial, sloppy and unwarm. We have/had similar problems with other platforms... it's just human nature. There are groups of "active" users creating "bubbles" of realty where critical inputs from outside are dismissed as annoying or unworth. What is unique with Commons is that on other platforms this situation reduces/reduced contributions and, because of this reason, it does/did not create a huge backlog. Less involved people, less work induced by them. You get stagnation or hibernation if the situation is critical... but that's it. However, Commons just cannot end that way. On Commons the missing metadata, the generic categorizations, the partial descriptions, the necessary updates of copyright guidelines are just there, and similarly is the ongoing upload flow from other databases or initiatives because it is a nodal space. If people are more active on Wikivoyage, Wikisource or organizing Wiki Loves Monuments... this soon or later shows an effect and a backlog on this archive. The community of Commons really needs a network of constantly involved users, but such users can always end up being motivated somewhere else where they feel that their needs are better understood. A.M. Il mercoledì 20 maggio 2020, 18:49:06 CEST, Strainu &lt;strainu10(a)gmail.com&gt; ha scritto: My2c on the original question: Commons does a lot to discourage people from uploading to Commons. Everything from not allowing non-free formats (even automatically converted to free equivalents) to asking for cross-wiki uploads to be disabled and repeatedly proposing the same file for deletion is discouraging uploaders. That's still anecdotical evidence I guess, but when one sees established users deliberately avoiding Commons because of these shortfalls one should probably take them  seriously. Pe duminică, 17 mai 2020, Benjamin Ikuta &lt;benjaminikuta(a)gmail.com&gt; a scris: _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>