On 6/4/07, para wikipara@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Location and direction is much better than location only, but one can provide direction information along with the subject location as well. There are some situations where this could be quite useful - if one was looking for a photograph of the top of the Empire State Building, for instance, they would have a difficult time using a system where photos were only tagged with a two-dimensional photographer location and a one-dimensional direction (three dimensional photographer location and two-dimensional direction might help if you have a good search system). (OTOH, if one were looking for a photo taken *from* the top of the Empire State Building, tagging photographer location would be a far superior tagging system. Having both tags available would be best.)
And then, of course, there's the problem with aerial/satellite photography, in which the photographer can be incredibly far from the subject location; and the problem where the photographer location can't be easily determined.