[Commons-l] Wikinews (en) and commons (RE: pfctdayelise's post)

[bawolff]

>* Continue to develop quality review mechanisms, and highlight
>high-quality work.
>The development of [[Commons:Quality Images]] is a great one I think,
>and I hope mechanisms like this continue to grow. [[Commons:Picture of
>the Year]] is also proving very successful which is fantastic.
>One area we are possibly lacking in is in pushing our high quality
>stuff back out to wikis. It is easy to miss this small %age which is
>our best of the best. We can promote this stuff by perhaps organising
>more translations, organising a weekly/monthly newsletter out to wikis
>that lists these images and suggests possible uses, ...? how else?


you are aware that some projects (french wikipedia to name one) use
The commons featured pictures as their featured pictures. Maybe you
should try to encourage more to.


>* Reach out to local Wikimedia wikis and actively promote "Commons
>only" upload policies.
>Switching to Commons only has massive benefits for both the local wiki
>(hugely reduced maintenance burden) and us (new contributions). But we
>all know now that preparation is required to make the transition a
>success. WE need language-speaking active admins; THEY need to promote
>Commons policy beforehand and attempt to educate their users as much
>as possible before the switch.
>I suggest we create a guide [[Commons:Turning off local uploads]] (or
>choose another name) to smooth the path for wikis who want to go down
>this road. We can offer tips from the ES.wp and PT.wp cases (is there
>another?? I have a feeling there was but I can't remember it, maybe
>SV.wb?).
>Maybe one of the steps will be a small group (even one?) of volunteers
>from the local wiki making contact with a small group of volunteers
>from Commons, and both groups committing to work together to move to
>Commons only uploads (community approval pending, of course). For
>example the Commons person can look for existing language speakers and
>encourage them to become admins or translate, and identify key pages
>for translating.
>I suggest we also start finding out more about the new-wiki creation
>process, and get involved with groups there, to encourage groups to
>consider starting their wiki with "Commons only" uploads from the very
>start.
>Also, it should be a much easier task to convert non-Wikipedia
>projects, where there is already a large number of that language
>admins. For example: EN, DE, ES, FR, NL?, PL. Wikinews, Wiktionary,
>Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikiversity. Some thirty-odd
>projects there that we already have the capacity to deal with, were
>they to turn off local uploads.

[note the following starts at the beginning of wikinews history. some
of it does not represent current opinions]
This is the main reason I'm writing. The English Wikinews (IMHO) is
drifting in the opposite direction of those goals. I don't know how
many people remember this, but originally, we were started with local
uploads turned off.  General opinion was fairly strong for commons at
the start (I believe, I'm getting this from archived pages so i might
misinterpret). On the original proposal page, Angela said, "I strongly
suggest that image uploads are turned off on the Wikinews site to
encourage use of the Commons, which is an excellent place for the
resources that Wikinews will use."
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikinews&oldid=482574#Image_uploads
However We did turn on image uploads for fair use and some restricted
images eventually. (Which is a good thing IMO for fair use and the
likes, as long as we keep away from free stuff (which we didn't))
Everything is happy, but then some images at commons start to go
missing or be substantially edited. Wikinews is not like other
wikimedia projects in we like to make our content and lock it away. No
one cares about what happened two years ago, so the article should
stay fixed. so when Images start to go away it annoyed people.
Anyways, some people got mad at Commons (
http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Wikinews_talk:Image_use_policy&oldid=260116
) and we started to upload "free" media to wikinews. Eventually people
got really mad up to the point (
http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Wikinews:Bots&oldid=339247 )
where we tried to get a bot to more or less cut commons out of the
loop. Although the vote technically passed (about 5-1), but Eloquence
managed to convince us otherwise so it never happened. Anyways after
that, most images got uploaded to wikinews locally. Slowly opinion of
commons got better.

Today there is not really any active anti-commons feelings. Mostly
because commons has became a lot nicer. (pfctdayelise especially
helped get commons in people's good books again imho). People no
longer delete stuff whilly nilly, and if they do, they can always
undelete. However there's still not a great deal of pro-commons
feelings. When I first came to wikinews, the general opinion was, "if
its free, you better be sure to upload to commons". Now a days its,
"if you want to you can, but don't go out of your way".

I should probably start uploading our free images to commons (Most of
them are well categorized and sourced), but its not exactly at the top
of my priority list (My current priority is to bug the crap out of
people who didn't source their (locally uploaded) images)

Also it currently doesn't help that we don't have a commons ticker on
wikinews. It was disabled because the page got  too long, and updates
kept failing, which is my fault because i didn't archive it enough,
mostly because I didn't get through it all.  However it was still very
useful (or even the deleted template [[commons:template:Used On
Wikinews]] would be quite useful in combination of related changes.

Another thing that might be of help, is to have a special upload page
for wikinews. (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/special:upload?uselang=wikinews )
There are some things for wikinews that don't apply elsewhere, and
it'd be good to have a custom page.

>* Continue to push local projects to adopt CommonsTickers.
>Related to several points above. Vital tool for inter-project harmony!
...sure (:

>* Introduce user recognition system.
>We are all volunteers, but there's no reason we can't develop an award
system that aims to recognise the time-intensive effort and/or
outstandingly high-quality contributions that longterm users have
made. The benefits of such a system are two-fold: they give the
contributors in question tangible, public and formal recognition of
their efforts, which thanks and encourages them; and it offers
concrete examples to other users of what kind of conduct is
appreciated and needed.
I have started writing about this on my user page, but I have some
more ideas in my head, that I hope the community will welcome when I
finally write them down. :)

Maybe take some inspiration from
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Contributing_Reporter_Awards


Here are some things that I hope Commons can achieve over the next 3-5 years.


* Some degree of press recognition and fame :)

Help if google images saw you. I see more images that are local
uploads to wikinews come on Google images then stuff from commons.

--bawolff