On 6/20/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
The work curve today discourages casual modification.. it's both good and bad. If I spend four hours preparing an image, I'd feel better if the next person in line spend more than four seconds considering his changes. :)
It's a social problem. We can come up with a "please don't edit this unless you're willing to face the consequences" template. Easily.
What is "shed painting", and why would there be "additional versions" exactly? I'm proposing either:
It's hyperlinked! Follow the link.
Oh that. Parkinson's law.
Extra parameters in [[Image:]] create scaling problems. If we have a million images, then we'll have at a minimum of around a million thumbs. If people tend to use two sizes, two million thumbs. If they tend ti have two different rotations four million thumbs. It's not so much a disk space issue as it is an ability for the operating system and other software to scale to handling tens of millions of small files.
Isn't this currently the case? Or are thumbnails currently dynamically generated?
The current situation is the one that risks proliferating extra versions, as you have to upload new files each time...
Would you actually have multiple rotations though? If not, and you were indeed making a correction you overwrite the original.
Uh, this is a wiki. Unless I'm mistaken, we currently store old revisions of images, and this is not a problem. I'm not sure why it should suddenly become a problem because we allow a new way of modifying (that is, creating new revisions of) images.
All the other changes could pretty simply be done without decompressing the entire image. (We don't fully decompress jpegs for resizing today, but we do PNGs.. which is why PNGs have tighter size constraints.. people were running the servers out of ram with huge PNG maps)... Rotation OTOH would be much harder to accomplish incrementally.
Incrementally? I'll leave that one to the image manipulation specialists.
Fair enough... although the shed painting is sometimes the worst on Featured Pictures... Most people don't care to correct your happy snapshots.
Precisely. It's too much hard work for too little benefit. If all they had to do was click the image, drag two scrollbars and click "save", then maybe they would. Well, I would.
It's cost us good photographers. Wikipedia isn't overrun by goons, but we're desperately short of real photographers.
Again, social problem. Hell, protect these wonderful photographers' precious artworks if it will help keep them in the project. This is a very minor portion of the total number of photos, and not worth stressing over.
Are we trying to captivate for much more than a moment? Sharp, bright, high contrast images suit our encyclopaedic mission better.
No, we're trying to be tasteful, professional, and most of all informative. If we were just trying to push people's attention buttons we could make all the images flash, and make the text red on yellow.
Ok, you're being silly.
How does placing the subject dead center maximizes the encyclopedic value of an image? Yes, perhaps you could see a few more hairs in
Depends what the subject is. But fairly evidently, the more stuff in the thumbnail (and we are talking about the thumbnail that appears in the article here - the full picture is still accessible) that is relevant to the article, the better. Our thumbnails are already small, like 200x150. If 100x150 of that is empty space caused by artistic positioning, then we've lost a lot of possible informational content. There are times and places for it - but small images that illustrate an article are not them.
someones eyebrow with a tighter composition, but if someone needs to see that they can click for the full screen version... Worse, by overcropping you distort perspective and create an unnatural balance which is potentially distracting.
So don't overcrop.
If we wrote our text in some sort of compressed always machine parsable English we could probably express more ideas in a given number of words... but thats not what we do because the value to the reader is increased through brilliant prose.
Your example is good - we *do* cut waffle, and we *do* cut all the background discussion that you need to understand the article, or we put it down the bottom of the article, out of the way. Our lead paragraphs are idea-rich, information-dense text exactly comparable to cropping and increasing contrast in our thumbnails. Your example of "compressed always machine parsable English" might be comparable with "overcropping" - taking the idea too far and losing context.
And they are reminded that it's a collaborative project not an exclusive photo publishing ground (unless we're talking about wikinews)... And, of course, thats quite right. A balance is required, and far too often people simple change without asking.
Far too often people modify each others' images?? Thoroughly disagree - far too often, people are not bold, hence why most of our images look as though they came straight out of the digital camera, without passing the photoshop square, and without collecting $200.
I'm a big advocate of socal soutions to social problems... but I'd prefer that the technoligy not make things worse while we're trying to figure things out. :) Perhaps that would happen, perhaps it wouldn't.. I'm not sure.
Just remember that Wikipedia couldn't possibly work.
I don't know how to solve it... We have very few real photographers participating... a majority of our photo involved folks are primarly finding free images on the web, or just skimming their snapshot collections, so the culture of image alteration is very different from what it would be if more people were photographers.
And better image manipulation tools would discourage real photographers?
Steve