[Foundation-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

[Finn Rindahl]

I guess I'm one of the Commons admins "actively working against being [just]
a service project" for the various other wikimedia projects. I don't want it
to be regarded as a "completely independent project" though. There's two
reasons why I do that.

1. Wikimedia Commons serves a purpose on it's own, in being the project
where we (wikimedians) make free media files avvailable to the public.
That's well within the aim of WMF, just like wikipedia is bringing free
encyclopedic content etc.

2. For Commons to be able to serve the other wikimedia projects in a
satisfactory manner, there has to be a lot of committed volunteers doing the
(most often) tedious task of maintaining the media files, among other things
ensuring that the content indeed is free and that the files are marked an
categorised so that others easily can find them. Most of these volunteers
are the "commonsadmin", who in my opnion has one of the most ungrateful jobs
in the wikimedia world. If there was more active admins, we could have done
our job better - especially when it comes to take the necessary time to
communicate with the other users who need help. The only way as I see it to
actually get volunteers to work at Commons is to build a "community feeling"
at commons like in other projects. If I only pop by Commons to fix something
upon a request from another user at Norwegian Wikipedia - that's well and
good but not something that will motivate me to spend and hour or two
working on a backlog or actively look up some new Dutch user to see if I can
help them learn how to best upload images at commons.


Finn Rindahl




2008/12/7 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>

> 2008/12/6 Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh at gmail.com>:
>
> > I can think of two solutions here. One is to simply have more
> > multi-project admins. Wikimedia ought to be one big community with a
> > commons goal. Unfortunately (but not unsurprisingly) Wikimedia has
> > been separated into many different islands separated by language
> > borders, which are very hard to open up. Commons was born as a
> > multilingual project, but in that aspect has failed I believe.
>
>
> Relations between Commons and en:wp are clunky at the best of times,
> so it's certainly not just a language issue at all.
>
> It's Commons forgetting it's a service project or Commons admins
> actively working against being a service project, because they want to
> be regarded as a completely independent project.
>
>
> - d.
>
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