Brianna Laugher wrote:
Just thinking out loud here, but are we using our photographs in Commons to maximum advantage?
User:Para has also created something that works with Google Earth, which I haven't yet tried out: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~para/GeoCommons/
People, take a look at the screenshot at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~para/GeoCommons/GeoCommons.jpg to see what's available right now.
With such an interface you can easily choose the photos where the camera was pointing towards the object you're interested of, and additionally choose which side of the object to see without knowing anything else about the photos yet. If they were tagged with the object location only, like Wikipedia articles are, you would have to go through all of them. This method is far superior to browsing a gallery with views sorted by each side of the object.
And as was mentioned a few times already, please read up on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Geocoding.
<small>the Commons data in the screenshot doesn't reflect the present state of our geocoding</small>