[Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

Lars Aronsson lars at aronsson.se
Sat Dec 6 20:46:15 UTC 2008


Patricia Rodrigues wrote:

> That's a wonderful idea! But many times our main problem is the 
> lack of manpower in different languages to actually address 
> different users.

The more I think about this human side of the problem, the more I 
think we should go back to local uploading.  The forwarding to 
Commons could be implemented by adding a "category:Suitable for 
Commons" and a bot that scans this category. Then if the image is 
deleted from Commons, the local copy would still exist.

If we want Wikipedia to scale from the narrow nerd community to a 
wider society, including elderly, we need to greet them with 
respect and in their own language.  I don't see how we could 
manage this on Commons, even if uploaded images were marked with 
the uploader's interface language. We will always have the narrow 
nerd community too, which can act as admins and an interface 
towards the international community.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se



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