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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I would prefer work done on the usability of Commons. Not solving the issues
means that we will never get a repository of images that because of its
composition offers a non biased view of the world.  Once people who do not
speak English share in the benefits of Commons and are able to find images
as well as anyone else we will have largely overcome the bias because once
these people profit from Commons, they are likely to upload to Commons as
well.

Policies and stuff are evolved and determined by discussion,.Commons needs
the adoption of the idea that these other languages need to be supported as
much as English is. Once this idea has been adopted, software can be adopted
or developed that gives Commons relevance in the rest of the world.
Thanks,
     GerardM

2008/12/8 Judson Dunn <cohesion at sleepyhead.org>

> 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
>
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