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 andthe 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' thatcombine 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 greatPokemon 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 thinkyou'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 ofcontributors 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 couldunscramble 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 filledout 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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