It's been pointed out to me that this is the first time I've posted on Commons-L, so some introduction is in order.
I'm working on Multimedia Usability at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm a recent hire, working by the graces of a grant from the Ford Foundation. In the past I've worked for sites like Flickr and Upcoming.org.
My main focus right now, along with Guillaume Paumier, is improving the upload experience for Commons users. We're getting close to a prototype that the rest of you can try, pretty soon.
On freenode IRC I'm 'flipzagging', but 'neilk' on pretty much every other way, including User:NeilK on most wikis and my email address.
On 03/16/2010 11:24 AM, Paul Houle wrote:
Who'd be better? [...]
I don't dispute anything you say, but I was just suggesting that Wikimedia Commons could also be a good a platform.
In some ways Commons should be even better for scientific work, since items are more "personal" by default at Flickr, and if one wants to collaborate one has to use workarounds or specifically grant permission. On Wikimedia projects there is more of a culture around collaboration by default, and contributing to general knowledge.
I don't think that things are, objectively, bad at Yahoo as people think.
It wasn't an opinion on Yahoo's continued financial health. They're just fundamentally not in the business of public knowledge.
Even if we could trust Yahoo to be in the image-metadata game forever, Flickr photos are only accessible as long as the owner is still paying. In 10 years, Flickr will be as outdated as Geocities, and even the content owners will have moved on. All those photos available on the astronomy groups today will be disappearing, one by one.
At best, the very few photos which are CC-licensed can be copied elsewhere. (It's unclear to me whether metadata like the astrotags is also CC-licensed.)
FYI, as mentioned above, I used to work at Flickr and had a stint in the rest of Yahoo as well. Those blog posts of mine that I linked to were on the Flickr developer blog.