[Commons-l] Friendliness & Lack of User Recognition

[David Sifry]

Hear hear. Great post.

On Feb 23, 2011, at 9:40 AM, Paul Houle wrote:

>  On 2/23/2011 10:04 AM, Eusebius wrote:
>> Now that's constructive.
>> I would love to see something like that on Commons. But surely this is
>> not the first time this is suggested, and this has been rejected for a
>> reason?
>> 
>     Commons has a different purpose than Flickr.
> 
>     On Flickr I feel free to post pictures of my son,  my woodstove and 
> the dollhouse village that's down the road from my house.  A few percent 
> of my pictures are photos of notable named entities that would be 
> suitable for Wikimedia Commons,  but the rest aren't.  I upload my 
> photos to Flickr because it's easy for me.
> 
>     For me,  a big part of Web 3.0 is about 'union communities' that 
> combine CC content from different communities.  I've got a 'machine' 
> (Ok,  people + software system) that,  if you put money in on one side,  
> it locates named entity images in Flickr,  unscrambles the metadata egg 
> and captures and tags images with very high precision.  Based on a naive 
> scaling,  if you put 10% of Wikipedia's 2011 budget into it,  it could 
> harvest more images than are already in Commons.  The quality of images 
> is better than you find in Commons,  however,  you'd find that you just 
> can't find images for all the topics in Wikipedia that are CC in Flickr.
> 
>     Many of the best contributors to Wikipedia Commons are great 
> Pokemon collectors but lousy photographers.  I can think of people 
> who've traveled all over England and other countries photographing 
> things but I want to scream at them...  "Clean your goddamn lens!"  
> People in Flickr are more serious about photography (probably own a 
> DSLR,  have something better than the kit lens,  and keep it clean) but 
> they're not so interested in "catching them all."
> 
>     If you wanted to encourage a 'game mechanic' in Commons,  I think 
> you'd want to make it first of all a friendly competition to 'catch them 
> all' and secondarily a competition to get better quality photographs.  I 
> think the ideal Commons photographer would be a person who's interested 
> in some specific category (say going to concerts and snapping pictures 
> of musicians or taking pictures of birds.)  To support this there's a 
> need for tools that make it clear where the holes are,  both in the 
> sense of "We don't have any pictures of X" or "We'd like to get better 
> pictures of X".
> 
>     Another big trouble with Commons,  IMHO,  is that the majority of 
> contributors have empty user pages.  To take an example,
> 
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Billy_Hathorn
> 
>     has taken at least 1,717 pictures (for which my system could 
> unscramble the metadata egg) used in en.wikipedia but has a blank User 
> page.  Here's a guy who's made a major contribution to Commons,  but 
> he's got no recognition,  we aren't told anything about what he likes to 
> photograph,  the fact that he's a real MVP,  where he lives,  what he 
> looks like,  what his social media id's are,  what kind of gear he 
> uses,  nothing.  Now sure,  he (or any of us) could put something on his 
> User page,  but he hasn't.
> 
>      On a site like Flickr,  you've got a photostream which gets filled 
> out automatically so you automatically get some recognition for the hard 
> work you're doing.  Here you've got a guy who should be getting a lot of 
> credit and he's not.
> 
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David L. Sifry
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