On 6/20/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/20/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Yep. Look, while we're at it, some more requests: In-place modifications of the following types:
- increase/decrease contrast
- increase/decrease brightness
That thought of this makes me uncomfortable. Many people have uncalibrated monitors and weird tastes in brightness and contrast, it's hard to be objective about such changes.. please see the
Sure, but give people *some* credit. Also, all these things are available now, they just take a while to carry out. We don't want to prevent the 90% of times when this would be useful just to stop the 10% when it would be a pain?
miniessay on the last bullet of my commons userpage (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell). Such knobs would also encourage shed painting and create an unneccessary proliferation of additional versions.
What is "shed painting", and why would there be "additional versions" exactly? I'm proposing either: - parameters in [[Image: .... which would only be taken into account when it's shown (do you mean the extra versions which would have to be stored internally - is there a disk space problem?) - parameters on the image page, which would be taken into account everywhere it's used - only one version.
The current situation is the one that risks proliferating extra versions, as you have to upload new files each time...
- rotate arbitrary angle
I don't think this can be done without loading the entire uncompressed image into memory which pretty much makes it a non-starter.
Is this not the case for any of the other edits? I was kind of presuming this would be the sort of thing where the first time the tag was encountered, the image would be rotated then cached. But I don't know much about how it works behind the scenes.
It doesn't always play out so rosey... Sometimes someone spends hours getting a photograph just right (because unlike wikitext, even in the best case 98% of the work must be done by a single photographer) and they are proud of their work. Then along comes a self appointed
We have a name for those: Featured Pictures. The vast majority of user-created photos are happy snaps taken fairly quickly to illustrate the topic. If someone chooses to post-process my photos, so much the better!
wiki-photo expert... who goofs up the image to fit his tastes on his uncalibrated display and insists that it's better. Perhaps the new version is more contrasty, with over pumped saturation and sharpness.... At first glance it's more eye catching, so other passers
Ok, again, I think your scenario where suddenly Wikipedia is overrun with well-meaning, but tasteless editors destroying beautiful artwork is demeaning, unkind, and just not accurate.
by support the changed version, but it's lost it's depth, lost detail in the shadow, or just lost it's ability to captivate for more than a moment. Perhaps it's cropped to place the subject dead center,
Are we trying to captivate for much more than a moment? Sharp, bright, high contrast images suit our encyclopaedic mission better.
destroying the careful balence achieved in the photo which guides the eye...
Yep, I would probably crop photos to leave the subject dead centre, maximising the encyclopaedic value of the photo for a given number of pixels. Totally against the rule of two-thirds, but we're an encyclopaedia, not an art school.
Don't forget, the original creator can always come back and undo the changes, perhaps leaving a note to "please" not crop his image.
We've had photographers leave in digust over this.
That sounds like a totally separate problem. It's already possble to over-write each others' images, sounds like social solutions are needed to that particular social problem.
So I'm a bit hesitant to suggest we provided technical tools which may encourage bad aspects of our behavior. But this has gone wayyyy off-topic now. :) Once someone impliments some of this stuff we can debate the merits of turning it on.
IMHO, debating the merits of a proposed feature is perfectly on-topic. I think some of your objections are a bit spurious, but that doesn't make them off-topic...:)
Steve