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

[Brianna Laugher]

On 10/02/07, bawolff <bawolff+wn at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip history of en.wikinews>
> 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".

Thanks for writing this great detailed overview. It is useful to be
reminded of the impact (positive and negative) that our work can have,
and quite humbling.

EN.wn is far from the only project that has been seriously annoyed at
Commons. Some projects/people still are. See this Jan 2007 thread:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta:Requests_for_deletion&oldid=527485#Bookshelf_logos
MaxSem who is a steward stating, "Meta must not depend on Commons...
We already had problems with Commons, when they deleted an image for
being a resized duplicate. No more problems, everythig should be under
control of local admins."
Aphaia, who is on the COMcom, edits the Foundation website, heavily
involved with translation efforts at the Foundation-level, says, "I
have seen they deleted logos which were used on other our websites and
they claimed they had made checks. Consequently we found sometimes red
links on foundationwiki and others. I think they are trying to improve
the project on a good faith, but at the same time their work isn't
reliable enough trust all images we need locally.... Forgotten past
events could easily happen I am afraid.... [Once] failed, they
promised improvement but the similar happened again - not once but
multiple times. So I claim it is generally too risky to have Commons
host our crucial materials. They do not care if the image they are
going to delete is really not used. If they check Wikipedia and not
used it is just okay for them. I am fed up with such their excuses. I
think therefore we cannot take the further risk specially after our
project becomes larger than those incidents happened, and our mistakes
can take attention from the external people."

I sincerely hope we have improved since then, due to better CheckUsage
tools and wider awareness. But it is clear that trust gained is
fragile and needs to be treated with serious respect, because it can
be lost so easily and once lost, might never be regained.

Anyway back to the EN.wikinews...
There are advantages for all projects that choose to upload all [free]
media to Commons only. The main one is: massively reduced maintenance
work. Image maintenance (as in, checking stuff is properly sourced and
licensed, and possibly categorising) is a big pain, and not really the
point of any project (except Commons). In farming the work off to us,
you are saving your admins a big task. That's my opinion, anyway.

> 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)

See above... :)

> 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.

Well, you can fix your CommonsTicker, right? It sounds like you need a
bit of help maintaining the page though... you should call on your
fellow Newsies!

> 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.

:O

That's a totally brilliant idea. OMG we could even have
?uselang-ownwork on the Commons sidebar, that would be brilliant...

Well I support creating this (although it probably wouldn't be linked
prominently from anywhere in Commons - but Wikinews is enough, I
imagine) - shall we do it? Let me know what info you want. (Also I
would call it ENwikinews just in case other wikinewses do it too)

> >* Introduce user recognition system.
> Maybe take some inspiration from
> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Contributing_Reporter_Awards

Yep, that is very much what I had in mind, except for a variety of
tasks. Is anyone in "charge" of giving the awards? How does that work?

> * 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.

Yes. Sigh...

thanks again for this great email!
cheers
Brianna