Thanks Jonathan, I really like the photo-selection idea you suggest to
onboard new editors.
I wonder if anyone has thoughts on where this conversation should happen? I
was going to say it'd be better on wiki than mailing list, but really both
places suffer from the same problem. It may be very difficult to keep track
of the various discussions wherever they are, so I also wonder if we should
suggest organising a workshop of some kind. Perhaps we could have some sort
of informal fringe thing at Wikimania when lots of people (including e.g.
Aaron Halfaker) will also be over.
Thanks for all the thoughts!
Simon
From: wikimediauk-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan
Cardy
Sent: 17 April 2014 08:12
To: UK Wikimedia mailing list
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] [Wikimedia-l] Rating Wikimedia content (was Our
next strategy plan-Paid editing)
For media files there are two things we already have, size of the file and
who created it.
Filesize doesn't guarantee quality, but there must be a size below which we
just have a blurry thumbnail.
Assessing the possible quality of images by looking at how many other
quality images have come from the same user is likely to be helpful. Another
image by someone who has had multiple featured pictures should be a positive
on any rating system.
We now have hundreds of thousands of images that are categorised as being of
various important objects such as listed buildings in the UK.
Other variables we could consider include the camera used, again a good
camera with the settings mucked up is likely to take a worse photograph than
a cheap camera in the hands of someone who knows how to coax the bet out of
it.
Several other things may or may not be possible, though if there isn't
already open sourced software that can do it it could be expensive to create
it: Technology exists out there that can compare different human faces, so
it should be possible to write software that classifies images as blurred,
washed out or poorly lit. Also we could have software that identifies near
duplicates and in some fashion threads similar images behind the "best" one.
The AFT was always vulnerable to just creating extra work for the community
and diverting people from possibly improving articles to asking others to
fix them. But software could be written that encouraged rather than
undermined the SoFixIt culture of our heyday. If we had an app that invited
people to check "Is this still the best image to illustrate this Wikipedia
article?" Then we could feed it with articles where we believed we had more
images on commons than we were using, or where the same image had been used
for several years, or the image used was small or otherwise suspect, or
indeed where we didn't have an image. Leutha and I ran a couple of sessions
a year or so back showing donors how to add images to articles, and we found
that even people who were quite hesitant about editing were very confident
deciding which of several images could be used to illustrate an article,
even if they had never been to the village or river in question. As well as
improving articles and acting as a much needed new entrypoint for editors,
this could give us another metric on media quality - "one of x images
considered but not used to illustrate the article on that subject" or indeed
"image z was replaced in article x by image y" which should usually mean
that image y is higher "quality" than image z.
Some sort of weighted score that combines the above could be what we need,
though of course many of the criteria are subjective and scores could drop
over time as better media files are uploaded.
Jonathan Cardy
GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) Organiser/Trefnydd GLAM
(Galeriau, Llyfrgelloedd, Archifdai a llawer Mwy!)
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On 16 April 2014 19:53, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>
wrote:
On 16 April 2014 19:28, Simon Knight <sjgknight(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Dan, to be clear, the proposal is not to develop another manual
rating system (such as the AFT or the project rating systems), it's to
develop some automated quality assessments. Those might include some manual
elements as inputs particularly for any machine learning approach, but
generating new methods there is not the aim of the project.
There's the old DREWS acronym from How Wikipedia Works. to which I'd now add
T for traffic. In other words there are six factors that an experienced
human would use to analyse quality, looking in particular for warning signs.
D = Discussion: crunch the talk page (20 archives = controversial, while no
comments indicates possible neglect)
R = WikiProject rating, FWIW, if there is one.
E = Edit history. A single editor, or essentially only one editor with
tweaking, is a warning sign. (Though not if it is me, obviously)
W = Writing. This would take some sort of text analysis. Work to do here.
Includes detection of non-standard format, which would suggest neglect by
experienced editors.
S = Sources. Count footnotes and so on.
T = Traffic. Pages at 100 hits per month are not getting many eyeballs.
Warning sign. Very high traffic is another issue.
Seems to me that there is enough to bite on, here.
Charles
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