[Commons-l] Towards a Commons API

[Brianna Laugher]

Hello,

First, an anecdote.
I have had on my Google Reader for a while now, a feed from Technorati
which picks up any blog posts with the words 'wikimedia commons'. A
lot of crud comes through, but also a fair number of real bloggers who
use our photos to illustrate their blog posts. And let me say, they
almost always get it wrong. They fail to link. They fail to mention
the license. They fail to mention the author. Probably we are lucky if
they manage to mention the site name.
While I look at all these random blogs, I notice the proliferation of
Flickr plugins...part of Flickr's success, I feel certain, is due to
their API which allows anyone to easily "plug" Flickr into another
application - a blog, a website, facebook, etc. And in multiple ways:
by license, by keyword, by author(or, close enough: uploader). They
also have that

Commons could do this, but first we need to standardise. Anyone who
actually has tried to write a tool to pick up this stuff will know it
is hit and miss.

So, I am not really planning to work on this in any big hurry, but I'm
just saying it for reference and in case anyone else has a particular
interest in it.

The two main problems are keywords and licenses. Uploaders at least
MediaWiki takes care of. :)

first, the easy one: licenses. There is a painful problem at the
moment that we have no way  of knowing which templates are license
templates and which ones are not. New ones are created all the time
and old ones may be converted to deletion templates. (ook.)

so, my proposal.
1. ask for new License: namespace to be installed at Commons.
2. move all license templates into the License: namespace.
3. separate any template which conflates license and source, e.g.
"PD-NASA", "GFDL-GeoDB" (or whatever). Anything which is in the public
domain, regardless of how it got there, should have {{License:Public
domain}}. Indicating source by text + template is fine.
Now I am not sure if there is actually a good reason we have license
categories. Is it safe to assume that no one ever searches via
license? If so, is there any extra functionality we gain from having
the category?
If not, we can quit using categories as well as templates to indicate
licenses. If it is useful, we should change all license categories to
be prefixed with License:. So instead of [[Category:GFDL]] we would
have [[category:License:GFDL]].

I know technically "Public domain" is not a license. but close enough.

So, the second problem, keywords. Let's reduce this to an easier
(although less complete :)) problem: categories. Being able to have
per-category feeds would be extremely cool. Imagine such a feed on QI
or FP. Totally awesome.

So in general we can assume that categories on a file act as
describing keywords. There are two exceptions. One is license
categories (see above). The other is maintenance categories, such as
deletion, cleanup, user.
So I propose we rename all these kinds of categories, to
"Maintenance:X" or "Meta:X" for deletion and cleanup, and I guess
"User:X" for user.
I dunno. maybe these don't interfere too much. Sometimes they are
useful. This change is not as important as the license one.

In general, I think it is good for us to look at Flickr and say: how
do they facilitate sharing their content? how can we do that too?

cheers,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise

-- 
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