Dear devs,
This is a list of things that I consider are tech/dev priorities for
Wikimedia Commons. Thanks for your attention.
(0. SUL)
1. Improved search.
Dumping Mayflower in there would be a great start:
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tangotango/mayflower/
I suggest replacing the current search box with a Mayflower search
box, and moving the current text search box below the toolbox.
2. Backup.
No image dumps, still? This is quite worrying. To say the least.
3. Multilingual tagging system (ie categories).
I would prefer a system where a category has a 'preferred' or
'display' name able to be defined in each language, but also alternate
forms that can be used to access the category. So a category' might
have an alternate name in English might be [[category:Sydney,
Australia]]. Using this to tag an image will work. Also typing it in
a search box. But at the bottom of the image they will see a link to
the category using the display name [[category:Sydney]]. Users will
see the display name of the category according to their language
settings. If nothing else this is the most important part. We are
extremely hampered by not being able to use multilingual names for
categories. It's a blow for a site that wants to be multilingual and
serve all languages equally, to have no choice but to say 'sorry, you
have to do this part in English'.
3. Structured data.
This is basically needed to feed into the search engine. I don't know
how Mayflower does it but I suppose it's not ideal. At the moment we
use a [[template:information]] but it's not hugely well suited to it.
Fields include Description, Source, Permission, Date, License,
Geocode, Other_versions, etc etc etc.
4. Move/rename images function AKA image redirect capability
As Tim says, "How hard can it be?" :) This is only an issue because it
is such a common request.
5. Rating system
I would like a simple youtube-style 5star rating thing for image
pages, for logged-in users. More importantly it should be possible to
sort search results (and maybe categories?) according to rating. This
is important because, if you think about Wikipedia, any search query
likely has only half a dozen highly relevant results at most. Most I
would wager only have one. But on Commons, querying over individual
images, a reasonable search query can and often does have dozens or
even hundreds of results. The best way to sift through them would be
by ratings.
There is only so much manual rating we can do (and we are doing it).
As Commons grows this is only going to get worse. This may not seem
like a priority simply because we don't have the functionality now,
but I have a strong feeling this is the right direction.
6. Improved category handling
If the search was improved enough, it might make categories (and
galleries) more or less irrelevant. I can only pray. However for the
moment categories are often used for navigation. The bug of not
putting all subcats on the first page is a frequent problem. The
problem of not seeing the total number of items in the category is a
problem. The lack of ability to sort a category by, e.g. date item was
added to it, or date item was uploaded, is a problem. The lack of
ability to 'auto-flatten' a category is a problem.
7. Multilingual support.
There is one pretty big problem with how screwed up the interface is
for RTL languages. It's very weird for those users. The lack of
ability for anonymous users to choose a language and have it 'stick'
is also limiting. As I mentioned, lack of ability to display category
names in native languages is a problem. Lack of automatically
translating templates is a problem (we would like them to work as
MediaWiki messages do, more or less).
We seriously would like to be a multilingual wiki. But unfortunately I
can't really say we are at the moment.
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OK those things are all my big-ticket items. These are some lower priority ones.
8. Playback support.
Been discussed a little. Still needs major improving.
9. RSS and InstantCommons, 'embedding' feature
These items are about making our content accessible and keeping the
tie to our site. Keeping the 'tie' gives us some more control, which
is necessary since I suspect the lifespan of an image is pretty
unpredictable. Maybe when image renames work it won't be so bad.
It would be nice for admins to be able to define RSS feeds, also to
have RSS feeds of items added to a category.
InstantCommons: Wikitravel, Wikia, Wikihow, etc etc etc etc etc would
love to be able to easily access our content. We can benefit from
their participation. I'm not sure where this is at now.
'Embedding' feature - I'm just thinking about the success of the Flickr API.
10. Global native MW Checkusage, CommonsTicker functionality.
Checkusage is an utterly vital tool for us. Since the toolserver seems
vastly improved of late this has dropped on my list. But I don't think
we should have such critical tools on the toolserver only. When
toolserver dies it's as if RC stopped existing for vandalfighters:
really, what can you do...
CommonsTicker could be an extension that each local wiki could alter
to their preferences, in terms of where and when they want
notification about images they are using. At the moment it's a bot
that can leave messages on the talk pages of articles where an image
is used, that is in danger of being deleted on Commons.
11. ImportFreeImages extension (importing images from Flickr).
This was high priority six months ago when I opened the bug request
(8854). Since nothing happened, we developed community and bot
processes to solve the problem of verifying Flickr licenses -- the
same problem this extension would solve.
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Lowest priority -- things which we currently do with Javascript or
external tools, that would be nice to have as native functions.
12. Ability to move images from another Wikimedia wiki to Commons
13. User upload gallery function
14. Bulk upload function
15. Auto-resize galleries according to window size.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:ResizeGalleries.js
16. Category and gallery 'previews'
Example:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:SWB9470_Puetzstrasse.jpg?withJS=Med…
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Gallerypreview.js
This has improved usability so much even for me, an experienced user.
It just makes you so much more likely to explore. And that is
fantastic for how people should ideally use our site.
17. "Fotonotes".
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:ImageBoxes.js (a start,
but I think not totally user friendly yet)
Ability to put user annotations directly on an image. Another one of
those things that once we start using I'm sure we won't be able to do
without.
18. Special:Upload flexibility
Well, we are satisfied with our uselang hack so far, but if it kills
the cache and our toy gets taken away, that won't be so cool. So
that's your call I suppose (well, so is everything :)).
BTW I have a feeling these last ones are relatively easy to do,
especially since we have existing tools. So they might be nice
projects for beginning wannabe devs, or experienced devs who would
like a quick break from something more painful, etc. :)
Also some bugs are listed here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bugs (some are parts of
above mentioned issues, some are not)
regards
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise
PS> I believe Wikisource also has some welldefined problems they
believe are priorities for them. Last I know is this one:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikisource-l/2007-June/000294.html
BirgitteSB should be a good contact for a more up to date list.
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/
