[Commons-l] "Wikis Take Manhattan"

[Kat Walsh]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 6:23 AM, Alex <g1ggyman at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is being discussed at
> <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Commons:Wikis_Take_Manhattan_and_project_scope>

Wow. I took a look at the linked page and was a little bit
disheartened by all of the negativity there.

It's a big job to organize a huge event like this with many people who
may not be familiar with Wikimedia, and I would be completely shocked
if every single aspect came out perfect.

So first of all I think that it's important to congratulate Richard
and the NYC Wikimedians for putting together this event and getting so
many new photos of local landmarks, and I hope that other local groups
put together similar events in the future!

I'm not too worried that all of the details are not right immediately
-- this isn't a situation where a user no one knows and no one will
ever hear from again just came to dump a load of untagged images of
unknown source and then leave forever; I expect everything will be
tidied up and settled soon enough by the people organizing the event.
And if not, there is someone to remind politely about it.

So there are some lessons here for people doing similar events in the
future about things that this group wasn't prepared for; the next time
can go more smoothly as people think about how to handle these issues.
But I think this sort of event is very much the sort of thing we
should want local groups and local chapters to do, and that the
Commons community should be figuring out how to help them work even
better, rather than discouraging them by being overly critical of the
mistakes without acknowledging the larger effort.

Cheers,
Kat

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