[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

[David Gerard]

I speak as a big fan of and participant in Wikimedia Commons.

But: Is it time to deprecate Commons as a WMF service project? It's
clearly failing and the local "community" is actively hostile to
contributors from other wikis.

Commons appears to have forgotten it was created as a service project
for other WMF wikis. It's not doing the job any more.

Discussions please. (Not denial that this problem is a problem, thanks.)


- d.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>
Date: 2008/12/6
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


Patricia Rodrigues wrote:

> That's a wonderful idea! But many times our main problem is the
> lack of manpower in different languages to actually address
> different users.

The more I think about this human side of the problem, the more I
think we should go back to local uploading.  The forwarding to
Commons could be implemented by adding a "category:Suitable for
Commons" and a bot that scans this category. Then if the image is
deleted from Commons, the local copy would still exist.

If we want Wikipedia to scale from the narrow nerd community to a
wider society, including elderly, we need to greet them with
respect and in their own language.  I don't see how we could
manage this on Commons, even if uploaded images were marked with
the uploader's interface language. We will always have the narrow
nerd community too, which can act as admins and an interface
towards the international community.


--
 Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
 Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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