[Foundation-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

[David Moran]

I think of the problem as more of a systemic one, and I don't see a ready
way around it.  I consider myself a moderately active user on commons, and
the thing is that Commons has no payoff.  At Wikipedia, there can be the
satisfaction of an article well written, an obscure fact well sourced, &c.
The content is (usually) interesting and engaging and begging for your
participation.  Commons, by contrast, is a forum for content that is ALREADY
COMPLETE.  It needs no participation, only handling.  Commons editors are
more or less just shepherds and custodians, tagging, categorizing,
sourcing.  I don't say this disparagingly.  I myself hope to become a
Commons admin one day.  But the difference in incentive, in intellectual
remuneration, is vast.

FMF




On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 6:19 AM, Ting Chen <wing.philopp at gmx.de> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> how about thinking about a channel between commons admins and local
> admins, for example a subpage under the Request for Administrator
> Attention (or some similar page), so that in case a non-english-speaking
> user is doing something odd, at first the local admins can be consulted.
>
> Ting
>
> Finn Rindahl wrote:
> > 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.
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> foundation-l mailing list
> >> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>