[Foundation-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When you indicate that the relation between Commons and en.wp is clunky, you
will acknowledge that the policies re images of the English Wikipedia are
rather different. This prevents a common understanding about procedures and
policies. So I will grant you that it is not only language that makes for
rocky relations. However, people who can read / write English are the ones
that have the necessary ability to get value out of Commons, they are the
only ones who really benefit from the project

The big argument for Commons at the time was the ability to share pictures
between the various projects. When you analyse the use of pictures, I do not
doubt that many projects use the same pictures even when quality
alternatives exist. As a whole this is boring. There have been many
initiatives that I do qualify as sensible. When Commons cannot host a
picture under its doctrines it now delinks pictures from other projects. It
now even allows other MediaWiki projects (outside of the WMF) to share
pictures. I think Commons is indeed providing the service it can provide
within its restrictions and its means.

When Commons is to do a "better" job, it is important to realise what it
currently can and cannot do. In my opinion, the lack of usability is why
Commons does not have 25 million pictures. The consequence of the lack of
usability is that fewer uploads are done from people who do not communicate
in English, Commons is consequently not the resource for worldwide education
that it could be.
Thanks,
        GerardM

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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