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

[Judson Dunn]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> Commons provides no benefit except for sharing the same picture to people
> who do not read / write English. They cannot possibly find pictures and
> consequently for them Commons is useless. Add to this the extreme loads of
> work of the Commons admins resulting in an unfriendly attitude towards
> people who do not frequent Commons and those who do not speak English and
> you appreciate why Commons has only 3.600.201 media files.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>

Right, it's baffling to me why a non-english speaking wikipedia would
decide to be commons-only. Enwiki doesn't do it, and we speak english,
why would they? That a new user who doesn't speak english could
successfully upload an image to commons, and integrate it into their
local wikipedia is completely unlikely in my opinion.

I would also *very strongly* opposed making enwiki commons only for
different reasons. I do not support a degradation of people's rights.
Wikipedia servers should be placed in a country that is most legally
convenient, and we should follow those laws. Maybe that's the US,
maybe not. Playing to the most restrictive laws is a losing game, and
one I don't see any reason to play. It is very much the *game* that
exists on commons now.

Having said that, I don't see any reason to shutter commons, or even
talk in that direction. Wikipedia's should have their own images, some
of which can be moved to commons, by people that care. If commons
wants to be a repository who are in no way beholden to the other
projects, and not a service wiki for them I think that's their
decision to make. People should be aware of that change if it's what
they want to do though, so they can plan accordingly.

Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Users:Cohesion