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

[Brianna Laugher]

On 04/07/07, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/3/07, Barcex <barcexwiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I Agree on this point, and think that the real problems why Commons is not
> > so successful are not related to its name but to the MediaWiki software (as
> > is now) that is very good to write encyclopedias but awful to implement an
> > image bank. The concept of "wiki" (easy edit with full history of changes)
> > is very useful for our needs, but the implementation with MediaWiki is far
> > from being good.
> >
> > Barcex
> >
> 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.

Well part of the point is that we need certain functionality as native
MediaWiki functionality.
- Check-usage
- CommonsTicker
- image-focused search engine
- User Gallery
- much-enchanced newimages patrol
- Deletion work queue
- Wikimedia image transfer tool

You won't be surprised to notice that all of these tools exist as
external tools on the Toolserver. The first three in particular NEED
to be native MW. It is ridiculous that every time the toolserver falls
over, Commons deletions go back to the dark ages (a couple of years
ago) where literally admins deleted stuff blind, with no idea about
who it would affect and no way to find that information out.

- Flickr transfer tool

(OH WAIT WE HAVE THAT BUT YOU NEED MAGIC SKILLS TO GET EXTENSIONS ENABLED)

If you want to know what functionality Commons needs, look at what our
external tools do and what our bots do.

- category moving/renaming
- image renaming (well, bots don't do this, and it's promised to be coming soon)

If you want to know about what functionality Commons needs, dream
about what might be possible.

- Might it ever be possible we could sort categories by date added to category?
- Might it ever be possible we could 'auto-collapse' subcategories of
a category with one click?
- Might it ever be possible we could union/intersect categories? (also
promised at one time, not sure what the status is now)
- Might it ever be possible we could have properly multilingual category names?
- Might it ever be possible we could search on strutured metadata
fields like date or author?
- Might it ever be possible we'd be able to rate images two ways, for
both general quality, and for 'copyright believablity' (for want of a
better phrase)? And from there, be able to easily find and view
unrated images, poorly rated images and highly rated images?
- Might it ever be possible that Commons was as easy to use as Flickr?

This bug http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3712 also has
some more thoughts/ranting from me on the subject.

Commons: Bugs is as Uber Halogen said, a good start; Commons:Tools is
another one.

cheers
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/