Let's have a look at the mission of Wikimedia :
"The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." (1)
Is there any room in this mission for an artistic contest ? Is there any room in this mission for promoting little known young or older artists seeking recognition ? And should the recognition of the artistic skills of some contributors be done at the expense of the contributors who contribute with other skills, while their artistic skills are those of a beginner ?
Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day (2) is an artistic contest. Why on earth is it allowed on a Wikimeda website and given a prominent space on the main page of one of the main websites ? Should it not be abolished ?
If that artistic contest remained doing its business on its dedicated pages without interfering with the rest of the project, there would not be too much need to think too much about it. But I am afraid that the artistic virus is slowly contaminating other parts of the project.
I discovered this morning "poor composition" as an argument for deleting a picture (from someone else, not me). It means that the "picture of the day" people are slowly highjacking Wikimedia Commons to turn it into a beauty contest.
None of the pictures I take with my small 29.95€ made in China camera can compete with pictures that could be taken with a professional camera. If the destiny of my pictures on Wikimedia Commons is deletion because of their poor artistic qualities, I ought to be told right now so that I don't waste my time taking them and uploading them.
But if Wikimedia is about education rather than about art, does it matter if the school's architecture or the textbook is ugly, while the teacher teaches valuable skills and information to the pupils ?
I think there is some space for beauty and art within Wikimedia projects, but that space is very thin. Beauty fits the mission statement only as a pedagogic tool, as a part of the "effectively" adverb of the mission statement, thinking that it is easier to have the pupils feel comfortable at school if their school's building and their textbooks are somewhat attractive. But I don't see how beauty or art could be a top level priority.
Why don't we ever read on Wikimedia Commons' main page "look at this picture: it is quite awkward, poorly lit, but it is the first picture we've ever had to illustrate Wikipedia article "<name of page>". We are grateful to the contributor who sent it. AND we will never delete it even if no longer used in any Wikipedia article when better pictures are sent by professional photographers later.
(1) http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement (2) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Picture_of_the_day
Teofilo hett schreven:
I discovered this morning "poor composition" as an argument for deleting a picture (from someone else, not me). It means that the "picture of the day" people are slowly highjacking Wikimedia Commons to turn it into a beauty contest.
If that really is the only reason for deletion then the deletion request will be denied soon. It's just a single person. Everybody can file a deletion request. You don't need to bother about a single person with bad judgement. There are other people with better judgement who will straighten it.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
Apparently the image in question is http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guy_with_pierced_nipple.jpg. The deletion request didn't say "bad composition" but "Low quality, outside of project scope http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:PS. Being listed in a gallery does not grant an automatic "in-scope" determination." The image is low quality and it wouldn't be a great loss. But I'd still vote "keep" cause the ways of relevant image use are inscrutable. Even if the piercing can be hardly seenm the image can still be used (just some ideas): * an article about the specific type of necklace * some article about human mimic * a wikibook about image composition (as a bad example)
Even bad images can be useful in other contexts. Contexts the original uploader and the delete voters may not have thought about. There's no limit in disk space, so no reason to delete images that could be useful in contexts that may not be imagined at the moment.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
Marcus Buck hett schreven:
Teofilo hett schreven:
I discovered this morning "poor composition" as an argument for deleting a picture (from someone else, not me). It means that the "picture of the day" people are slowly highjacking Wikimedia Commons to turn it into a beauty contest.
If that really is the only reason for deletion then the deletion request will be denied soon. It's just a single person. Everybody can file a deletion request. You don't need to bother about a single person with bad judgement. There are other people with better judgement who will straighten it.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
Does educational value figure in the PotD or PotY contests? It should. Other projects have contests to produce content; it drives participation and quality. As long as the value being sought is understood ("great content that furthers the project mission"), then I don't see the problem.
Nathan
On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Does educational value figure in the PotD or PotY contests? It should. Other projects have contests to produce content; it drives participation and quality. As long as the value being sought is understood ("great content that furthers the project mission"), then I don't see the problem.
Nathan
In answer to my own question, the picture contests revolve around featured images - and the featured image requirements include an assessment of value that is based upon several criteria related to the core Commons mission.
Nathan
On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
In answer to my own question, the picture contests revolve around featured images - and the featured image requirements include an assessment of value that is based upon several criteria related to the core Commons mission.
There are also other things, like "quality images" http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:QI, which look more at how valuable the image subject is, rather than how good the picture itself is.
Why don't we ever read on Wikimedia Commons' main page "look at this picture: it is quite awkward, poorly lit, but it is the first picture we've ever had to illustrate Wikipedia article "<name of page>". We are grateful to the contributor who sent it. AND we will never delete it even if no longer used in any Wikipedia article when better pictures are sent by professional photographers later.
Whereas I generally do not agree with the general modality of the message I am replying to, I definitely think that this last point is important. Indeed, it is much easier to get recognition for a high-quality image than for an image which an uploader made an effort to make: a rare location or smth. This is definitely my personal experience - for instance, so far the only recognition I got for uploading the complete set of images of Beijing Subway (I have all 147 stations and uploaded so far about 50, more than the number of the station images existed on Commons a month ago), categorizing all this mess and adding pictures and links to Commons in all articles in all languages where they exist - the only recognition I got was one of my edits on one of Wikipedias instantly reverted. For the record, I spend several days of my time to take the pictures, and even more time to edit them.
Cheers Yaroslav
On 06/12/2010 08:10 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
[...] for instance, so far the only recognition I got for uploading the complete set of images of Beijing Subway (I have all 147 stations and uploaded so far about 50, more than the number of the station images existed on Commons a month ago), categorizing all this mess and adding pictures and links to Commons in all articles in all languages where they exist - the only recognition I got was one of my edits on one of Wikipedias instantly reverted. For the record, I spend several days of my time to take the pictures, and even more time to edit them.
I think this is an important point.
Until recently, I worked a lot with engineering teams to improve the way they worked. For whatever reason, a lot of engineering organizations are very focused on the negative. In every silver lining, they can find a cloud. I've seen teams do a retrospective on their week and come up with 50 negative observations and 0 positive ones. This has its benefits, but it also has some incredible downsides.
The biggest one is just that it discourages risk and effort. In theory, most organizations want their people to get fired up to make things better. But for the individuals in those negative organizations, the best possible outcome from any action is getting ignored, with a substantial chance of getting yelled at for some downside of the improvement. There's not even appreciation for succeeding, let alone appreciation for having the gumption to try.
In that environment, the optimal strategy is to do nothing bold, and to do just enough to avoid getting yelled at for doing nothing, while waiting for the chance to yell at somebody else for not being perfect. Over time, people like that tend to say, while people who actually want to make things better give up and go somewhere else.
I haven't done enough editing lately to know what the general contributor is like, but Yaroslav's story reminded me of ones I've heard over and over from engineers in organizations with significant cultural problems.
William
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org