On 6/20/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
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?
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. :)
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:
It's hyperlinked! Follow the link.
- 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.
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.
It can be permitted, of course, if the feature is important enough... the whole reason I started this thread was to remind the folks working on the next gen system (Brion :) ) that there is a justified need for some additional parameters beyond image width. What features those are, I'm not sure.. I made a few examples that I would support.
Settings one per image avoid the issue...
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.
- 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.
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.
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!
Fair enough... although the shed painting is sometimes the worst on Featured Pictures... Most people don't care to correct your happy snapshots.
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.
It's cost us good photographers. Wikipedia isn't overrun by goons, but we're desperately short of real photographers.
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.
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.
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.
How does placing the subject dead center maximizes the encyclopedic value of an image? Yes, perhaps you could see a few more hairs in 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.
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.
Don't forget, the original creator can always come back and undo the changes, perhaps leaving a note to "please" not crop his image.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On solution (as seen on Wikinews) was to compromise the Wikimedia foundation's goal of distributing free content... I'd hate to see that same compromise appear elsewhere.
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...:)
Well, it's off-topic until someone codes it... :) I think that everything you suggested would be desirable features in *MediaWiki* if not on the wikimedia wikis, someone should probably solve them for the zillions of small wikis out there that could use them, and then we can debate if the solutions are suitable (technically and socially) for use on the wikimedia wikis.