It's no wonder they're trying to sell now, when they think they can still get $1.5 billion. They see the writing on the wall; the simultaneous advancements in pro-sumer level digital cameras and growth of free content repositories like Flickr* and Wikimedia Commons have decimated their once lucrative business. And it's only going to go downhill for them from here. *Of course, most of Flickr's content does not qualify as free content, but even the small percentage that does makes up many millions of photographs, more than enough to threaten Getty's business model.

On 23/01/2008, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: The search, the search, the search! "We have Wikimedia Commons, with millions of freely-reusable pre-cleared photos. It's like Getty Images with a really crap search." (No, not even Mayflower has fixed that.) If turning categories into tags within Mediawiki is unlikely to happen soon (I recall the previous experiment where on Postgres it was lovely and on MySQL it was horribly slow ... and there's zero chance of Wikimedia abandoning MySQL in the foreseeable future) - what about a "tags" template for image pages, which can then be parsed by a search application on the toolserver? Update daily or something. Then an image can have 10 or 100 or 1000 tags, even if that many Mediawiki categories would be problematic to display or process. Sound feasible? (cc to commons-l and wikitech-l) - d. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

(Earlier today I floated the idea of using a template to hold tags, and a tag search on the toolserver that would read and index them every day, Not that I could write the latter. A bit kludgy too.)

On Jan 23, 2008 7:46 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: this. This requires accepting the whole OmegaWiki conlang (the associated meanings stuff) and there actually being a fairly complete OmegaWiki dictionary. There is a much simpler "worse is better" solution which simply involves having separate tag namespaces for different languages (and possibly even different fields of interest) and then marking category/tag pages with redirects and related tag links. We've talked about it at commons before, but their remains a resistance to tagging schemes and and allegiance to placing all images in a hierarchy of categories. I think the first step needed is simply accepting the use of "all that applies" tagging, either as a replacement for or addition to the current category system. Beyond that the details of how the tagging works can be resolved over time. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can possibly get it all right on the first try. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Jan 23, 2008 9:46 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sure it is. It is a conlang without a grammar but it has a lexicon, its words are the unique identifiers for the "defined meaning"s. It intends to create a word for every idea expressed in any language. The success of this approach as a tool for translation depends on it being possible to find meanings distinct enough so that distinct words remain distinct, but general enough that words in different languages will share the same meaning. Yes, there are a lot of languages defined.. which makes many things hard. This is why OmegaWiki invents a new language with the explicit goal of its words and ideas being a superset of all other languages, so that all other languages can be mapped into this singular new language. I'm quite aware of how many languages are defined but I am also aware that the overwhelming majority of them are not either distinct or popular enough to warrant common's specific attention. The approach you advocate requires first creating an enormous dictionary of ideas and mapping them into many languages before it is useful at all. A simple handling of this issue could be undertaken right away with little to no software development, no acceptance of the OmegaWiki concept. Yes, a simple approach will not hope to cover all possible languages. But your proposal would hardly cover anything at all: You would have us all so busy subsidizing the lack of interest in the majority of your languages that no one but extreme language advocates would be interested in participating at all. Instead, mapping and translation could be done on demand and as people are interested, rather than being forced into accepting your grand vision and undertaking a lot of work which they don't find interesting. (.. and, as you should be aware, the word "namespace" has meaning outside of mediawiki. I was not saying that multiple tag namespaces need to be accomplished with actual MW namespaces, language prefixes on tags automatically defaulted by the software, or some other mechanism would work.) [snip] I'm sorry that I do not share your position on the reasonableness of first creating a conlang to unify "25,000 languages" as a reasonable first step into making image tagging multi-lingual compatible. Our goal should to serve people not linguists. Commons does not need to support 25,000 languages in order to serve all the peoples of the world. Any attempt to go beyond the dozen or so languages which could be achieved simply through user contributed redirection will have diminishing returns and will ultimately hurt the quality of the results we provide for the overwhelmingly majority of the world in favor of increasingly tiny minority groups whom do not have enough size or involvement to support their own interests on the project. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Jan 23, 2008 9:46 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sure it is. It is a conlang without a grammar but it has a lexicon, its words are the unique identifiers for the "defined meaning"s. It intends to create a word for every idea expressed in any language. The success of this approach as a tool for translation depends on it being possible to find meanings distinct enough so that distinct words remain distinct, but general enough that words in different languages will share the same meaning. some Yes, there are a lot of languages defined.. which makes many things hard. This is why OmegaWiki invents a new language with the explicit goal of its words and ideas being a superset of all other languages, so that all other languages can be mapped into this singular new language. I'm quite aware of how many languages are defined but I am also aware that the overwhelming majority of them are not either distinct or popular enough to warrant common's specific attention. The approach you advocate requires first creating an enormous dictionary of ideas and mapping them into many languages before it is useful at all. A simple handling of this issue could be undertaken right away with little to no software development, no acceptance of the OmegaWiki concept. Yes, a simple approach will not hope to cover all possible languages. But your proposal would hardly cover anything at all: You would have us all so busy subsidizing the lack of interest in the majority of your languages that no one but extreme language advocates would be interested in participating at all. Instead, mapping and translation could be done on demand and as people are interested, rather than being forced into accepting your grand vision and undertaking a lot of work which they don't find interesting. (.. and, as you should be aware, the word "namespace" has meaning outside of mediawiki. I was not saying that multiple tag namespaces need to be accomplished with actual MW namespaces, language prefixes on tags automatically defaulted by the software, or some other mechanism would work.) [snip] I'm sorry that I do not share your position on the reasonableness of first creating a conlang to unify "25,000 languages" as a reasonable first step into making image tagging multi-lingual compatible. Our goal should to serve people not linguists. Commons does not need to support 25,000 languages in order to serve all the peoples of the world. Any attempt to go beyond the dozen or so languages which could be achieved simply through user contributed redirection will have diminishing returns and will ultimately hurt the quality of the results we provide for the overwhelmingly majority of the world in favor of increasingly tiny minority groups whom do not have enough size or involvement to support their own interests on the project. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

(.. and, as you should be aware, the word "namespace" has meaning outside of mediawiki. I was not saying that multiple tag namespaces need to be accomplished with actual MW namespaces, language prefixes on tags automatically defaulted by the software, or some other mechanism would work.)

If you want to make a name seems like commons is the best place to advertise your work if you ask me. Freely license at least some of your work (for example low resolution versions), and you can sell the others (high resolution version). This is an avenue we can take. Of course I would prefer high-quality high-resolution versions but we don't always get what we prefer.

Majority of our readers care not of the credit info.

On Jan 24, 2008 11:21 AM, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com> wrote: This statement lacks a citation. And even if it was true, it would not serve as an argument. What would be the effect if someone "proved" by a reasonable large survey that the majority of our readers do not care about the License of the text at all? I don't see any, except maybe the need for more education :) _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l