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

[Patricia Rodrigues]

I'd love to know how many English native speakers know what is this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Rami%C4%99_urabiaj%C4%85ce_kombajnu_chodnikowego.jpg
Uncategorized, used in an article on pl.wikipedia without interwikis, and described only in Polish. I'm guessing some sort of drill, but for all I know it could be a work of art.

Sorry, but the language difficulties go both ways.

You are asking for Commons to be absolutely multilingual now, that people are instantly and magically warned of deletion requests across projects, when in the end it's managed by a software that is not handling multilingualism in a straightforward way, taken care of by a couple of hundred people that have to put up with all the crap (to not use a stronger word) from hundreds of other wikis, that are beginning to put deletion requests for things that should be deleted straight off so that the uploader actually has time to read through it, that have their actions being questioned on two mailing lists because we don't work hard enough (?) to be fluent in ten different languages and sapient in 200 different copyright laws... sorry but Lars was criticizing things that I think he has right to criticize and at the same time he was giving out ideas to improve things. People who are just bashing for the sake of it better come and try to work ten days in a row on
 Commons and see the crap we have to go through.

If I have to delete one more image of an African minor prostitute taken by so-called artists, I'm going to scream. You come and see what we have to deal with everyday, then start complaining how bad the whole thing works.

There are a few people working hard in making Commons a bit more appealing to pt users: there's a specific Commons tutoring program for pt users on pt..wikipedia (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutoria/Commons), there's a local page for local admins to list images with potential problems (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Páginas_para_eliminar/Registros), and following Lars first e-mail I asked the local community for some feedback on what could be improved in usability (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esplanada/geral#Wikimedia_Commons_e_a_sua_rela.C3.A7.C3.A3o_com_os_demais_projetos_Wikimedia). I got *excellent* feedback about things that could be made clearer and will start working on specific documentation to help pt users. And I'll continue to nag devs to solve bug 5925 https://bugzilla..wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5925 which is nothing of importance to most people but has actually makes some difference for non-English users.

Yes, I am angry now. I suggest you start woking more on multilingualism on Commons and complaining less. I apologize for being human.

Patrícia