On 12 September 2011 21:28, Harry Mitchell hjmitchell@ymail.com wrote:
I don't know how much use postcards, even Wikimedia postcards, would get, but some of the Commons POTYs would be great for that kind of thing. How we get past "look at the pretty picture" to "upload your own", I'm not sure. In my (relatively limited) experience, it's not the smallest sizes that are left over! ;) What else makes a good platform for advertising Commons?
Some "mosaic" Commons postcards (possibly from WMDE?) were floating around at Wikimania, and were very popular - well, they vanished fast, anyway. In my experience, a lot of people take these to be pretty pictures to put somewhere rather than to use as postcards qua postcards, which is fair enough, but perhaps we could capitalise on this.
If they're not actually using the back, we don't need to leave it blank - so why not pre-print it with a message?
Some options:
a) a quick guide to uploading to Commons, in two or three steps. b) ditto for creating an enwiki (or other project) account. c) a general introduction to free content. d) the story of the image.
The latter requires careful research and selection, but is potentially very impressive if we do it right -
"This picture of a sycamore was taken on June 2008 by Maria, a German Wikipedia editor in Munich. Since then, it's been used to illustrate 48 articles in 36 different language editions of Wikipedia, where it's been seen well over four hundred thousand times. It's used in over a hundred other websites as a stock photograph, and has appeared in a magazine and a children's schoolbook."
- and it should be fairly easy to follow that with a message of "you can really contribute something worthwhile"!