On Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:57:26 -0800, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
MZMcBride wrote:
Perhaps mobile uploading could use better native support, but again, is the cost worth it? Does Commons need more low-quality photos? And even as phone cameras get better, do those photos need to be _instantly_ uploaded to the site? There's something to be said for waiting until you get home to upload photos, especially given how cumbersome the photo upload process is (copyright, permissions, categorization, etc.). And this all side-steps the question of whether there are better organizations equipped at handling photos (such as Flickr or whatever).
This is a version of the general argument against participation. There are reasons it's not favoured.
Oh come on now, that's not really fair. I'm not arguing against participation, I'm arguing against shitty photos. I was almost completely uninvolved, but I seem to remember much ado earlier this year about Wiki Loves Monuments and mobile support (it even had its own mobile app, I guess?). But looking at all of the WLM winners (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012_winners), were any of them taken on mobile devices? A quick sampling seems to suggest that all of the good photos came from Nikon or Sony cameras. That isn't to say that mobile uploads ("muploads") aren't ever going to be valuable to Wikimedia wikis, but it does raise the legitimate question of whether it's a good use of finite resources to support such projects. What is the value? MZMcBride
Sorry but that smells like a red herring. First of all given a photography contest of course pro quality photos with pro cameras are going to dominate the list of winners. The winners of WLM are irrelevant to the topic of improving the quality and coverage of photos when ALL of the photos taken for WLM are available for use. A photo doesn't need to win WLM to be valuable to us.
More importantly while quality is nice, that's not what's really important. More important than quality is coverage. Getting photos of those things that we don't have photos for. That is where mobile devices will always be superior than said Nikon or Sony cameras. Images of things taken spur of the moment no-one has taken an image of yet. Especially in remote areas, sudden events, etc...