[Foundation-l] Re: Launch of the Wikimedia Commons

[Erik Moeller]

Ashar-
> In my mind, MediaWiki is not a software to manage a gallery of pictures
> or media.

Hmmm, kind of a bad naming choice for the software then ;-)

> There is so much features that are needed for a media gallery, that soon
> the dev team will be overhelmed. What will happen when the community
> will want dublin core metadata, EXIF automatic parsing, e-commerce,
> XML-RPC, multiple fields search, ogg tags parsing, videos preview ...

Each of these features must be judged on its merits. As you pointed out on  
wikitech-l, the template system provides us with a direct path towards  
metadata. An existing gallery system is not an option as this is not what  
we are trying to create here. Users are encouraged, for example, to edit  
captions as they see fit, or to replace images with higher quality  
versions. We want to use all the cool features a wiki gives us - recent  
changes, diffs, page histories, and so on.

Wikis are something fundamentally new. Old software concepts do not apply.  
We need to instead think about how we transfer the benefits of the wiki to  
different applications. For example, there's no reason not to have a  
specific editing template associated with a namespace, so that all pages  
within that namespace have certain defined fields, and still allow diffs  
and versioning. As for galleries, a <gallery> tag that accepts a list of  
images seems like the best solution. For the actual gallery generation we  
may be able to use some existing code.

MediaWiki, in my vision of it, should eventually be capable of  
intelligently dealing with a wide range of media and enable massive online  
collaboration on them (it could interface with network-enabled purpose- 
specific applications like Inkscape or the GIMP to allow several people to  
work on the same image at the same time). The fundamental core idea of the  
wiki is not just "a page that anyone can edit", but "a way for people to  
collaborate on content without barriers."

There's indeed no need to hurry. While I find the early launch of the  
Commons somewhat suboptimal, I am sure that it will evolve together with  
the software.

Regards,

Erik