[Commons-l] Towards a Commons API

[Andrew Gray]

On 17/08/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:

> IIRC almost all the projects started because they were decided to be
> "not Wikipedia". That doesn't mean they are content to define
> themselves with such a negative, small designation.

Hey, hey, I just threw it out there. Nothing like navelgazing for a
Friday afternoon... :-)

It's honestly something that you hear mumbled a lot, and bits of
Commons itself - much less anyone else - seem quite confused over. Who
are we doing this *for*? Comments like the bandwith one made me think
of it again.

> I find the answer to your questions easily here:
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission
> "...to collect and develop educational content under a free license or
> in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
> I don't see how acting as if we only exist for Wikimedia is effective
> for disseminating our content at all.
> For one thing there are many similar efforts by different groups
> around the world. If we act as if we only exist for Wikimedia, we are
> going to create a lot of wasted unnecessary duplicate effort.

I don't disagree with any of this, incidentally.

> Lastly: frankly, *if we don't do it, someone else will.* There is
> nothing to stop them since all our stuff is freely licensed. So for
> God's sake let us be the ones to do it and benefit from it. Lest we
> see some whiz-bang Yahoo app that feeds directly from Commons with our
> name in tiny tiny print somewhere in a disclaimer.

Perhaps the most pressing reason!

We could probably implement something very similar to flickr's basic
"use this image" approach with a link in the toolbox; a "select the
size you want" page with preformatted HTML to use it and link back to
us.

(eg/ http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1116183939&size=m )

This would probably be the simplest thing to get up and running - he
said, waving his hands - and probably more generally useful than most
of the other API stuff. However, we'd still need to find a way of
getting author and license information standardised, so that the tool
could pull them in.

I wonder how many of our images use the nicely-standardised
{{Information}} template for metadata?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk