[Commons-l] Friendliness & Lack of User Recognition

[Stan Shebs]

On 2/23/11 6:20 PM, geni wrote:
> On 23 February 2011 17:40, Paul Houle<paul at ontology2.com>  wrote:
>>      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".
> Problem is that this is in practice a far better fit for wikipedia
> where such lists are generated in passing than commons.
>
> For example:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects#Objects
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Photos_requested#A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects

To take an example from my activity, much of my plant photography is 
motivated by checking off a published list of the thousand-odd taxa 
recorded in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas.  I've been doing 
penciled annotation of the physical list, partly because I don't want to 
have to fight over having a WP or commons version of the list.  It would 
be very convenient to have it in commons to track what pics we are still 
looking for, and be able to point my fellow Vegas plant people at it, 
but I just know that there would be a nonstop parade of busybodies 
arguing that the list (full of redlinks ZOMG!) is inappropriate for commons.

There are all kinds of possible experiments, but we need to get back to 
a spirit of being willing to try stuff, and not forbidding everything 
that doesn't adhere to a narrow view of what commons is good for.

Stan