[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Commons reaches 2 million files

[Brianna Laugher]

On 16/10/2007, Samuel Klein <sj at laptop.org> wrote:
>
> > I am happy to relay that Wikimedia Commons now has over two million
> > files. This is around 11 months after we reached one million. Since
>
> This is really exciting.  Any stats on how quickly audio and video
> filetypes are growing?

None to hand. Having a regular breakdown of filetype would be an
interesting thing to watch. I would guess or hope that Ogg uploads
will increase now that they can be easily used. (Although having said
that we have always had a decent number of pronunciation files and
Spoken Wikipedia files.)
Last time I checked SVGs were about 7% of total uploads which is
pretty cool IMO. I was going to say Oggs are probably less than that
but thinking about pronunciation files, I'm not sure.

> Is there a list of outstanding feature requests for active commons
> users?  A place for gathering problems that don't yet have good solutions?

I think my list from August is still current for me, at least:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/32980/
Please read this link for a fuller explanation of the items below.

Big ticket items:

0. SUL. In the works.
1. Integrated Mayflower search. Mayflower is complete, I think this
would just take some dedicated time (but of course things are never
that easy).
2. Backups. I am told Wikimedia has backups now so hopefully this can
be crossed off.
3. Multilingual tagging system (ie categories). This would be a huge
messy change that would potentially affect a lot of parts in
MediaWiki, so I think this will only happen with a dedicated
developer.
4. Structured data. Maybe partially solved by things such as Semantic
MW or Wikidata but would take some dedicated time to make acceptable
to core MW.
5. Move/rename images functionality. Maybe an easier task as something
that is hopefully more isolated.
6. Rating system.Travis contacted me about this so I hope we can get
something going here.
7. Improved category handling (eg all subcats on front page, print
total# of items in cat, sort by params other than alphabetical,
'auto-flatten' subcats). These are all individual things which could
be picked away at by those interested.
8. Multilingual support. [Hopefully for categories solved with item 3]
Making languages "stick" for anon users. Fixing RTL interface.
Translating templates "automagically" like MW system messages. I'm
guessing these are all capital D Difficult problems.

Medium ticket items:
9. Playback support. Greatly improved thanks to OggHandler, would be
nice to have the same for OO files, Midi and... maybe that's it? any
other file formats we can't display...
10. Category RSS - solved thanks to Magnus+toolserver. InstantCommons
- don't know what its status is.
11. Global native MW Checkusage, CommonsTicker functionality. I guess
the reason we don't have global native checkusage is because of
performance reasons. These are maybe relatively easy to write as
isolated things.
12. Enable ImportFreeImages extension. (auto-Flickr import)
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8854 This extension has
been enabled at Wikia but awaits review before being enabled here. We
have since worked around it with toolserver+bot but it is less than
ideal.

Small ticket items:
13. Ability to move images from another Wikimedia wiki to Commons
(worked around with toolserver, bots to some extent). Maybe
Special:Import just needs some tweaking? Maybe not /too/ hard?
14. User upload gallery function. Difficulty: relatively easy. (work
around: toolserver)
15. Bulk upload function. Difficulty: ? (work around: user-created
programs and scripts that have varying degrees of success and
portability)
16. Auto-resize galleries according to window size. Difficulty: easy?
(workaround: site JS)
17. Category and gallery Flickr-like 'previews'. Difficulty: at the
difficult end of easy (workaround: site JS)
18. "Fotonotes" Difficulty: maybe a fun problem, difficult in itself,
but relatively isolated (although how these things get recorded in the
DB could be interesting)
19. Upload form flexibility. (such as ability to create
purpose-specific forms) Difficulty: moderate.

We also have an incomplete list of bugs which could provide some nice
bite-sized problems as well as some monsters like the above:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bugs

An item I did not write in this list is that of "copyright checking"
or "workflow" or something. I somewhat doubt that 5k images every day
each get eyeballed by even one other person than the uploader. That is
worrying. Patrol is not quite the right tool. Stable will not quite be
the right tool. I don't know what the right tool will quite look like
but I guess this is another "dedicated" difficult problem.


cheers,
Brianna


-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
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