[Commons-l] Software impreovments (was: Should Commons be renamed?)

[Barcex]

2007/7/3, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh at gmail.com>:
>
> On 7/3/07, Barcex <barcexwiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This issue has come up multiple times, but without much result. What
> specific features does Commons need to have? A list of this might be
> interesting, because their are very likely users who are willing to
> implement those kind of things, either as an extension, javascript
> hack or external service.
>
> Bryan
>

Let me say that I'm not a photo professional, but I know well that on image
banks metadata is the king. Our support for metadata right now is a hack of
MediaWiki templates that are very difficult to edit, and are not searchable.
Then, there are professional standards like IPTC to add rich metadata to
pictures. Work on that standards is already done, is professional and we
should take a look to them instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Tags (a
la flickr) are a mess as our categories are, it is very hard to keep them
organized following the wiki model.

Of course, editing full IPTC can be difficult as is complex (having many
fields to fill in). But a simple interface could have the most important
fields to edit, and have an advanced editor for experienced users. This
interface should allow the edition of IPTC registering changes an versions
as we do with text (so you are able to compare each version of the metadata
as you do now with text, that's the wiki concept).

Once we can provide images with rich metadata, a lot of tools can be
developed to generate advanced searches.

That's my contribution to this brainstroming ;)

Barcex
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