[Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture

[Andre Engels]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 8:05 AM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote:

> I deal with this regularly in a professional capacity, this is what
> stock photography firms are built on, and I can assure you that there is
> no adequate freely licensed stock photography resource in the world.
> Commons is the best there is, and it is barely usable, and then only
> sporadically. Maybe some people imagine we have too many pictures of
> people's cats and dogs, since those are popular subjects, but I'll say
> we don't have nearly enough even of that - and in particular we don't
> have enough variety. Suppose I wanted a picture of a dog and a cat
> together, a fairly mundane subject, for which I did at least find a
> category with 27 files at
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cats_and_dogs. I suppose
> that's a start, but at a glance there's no way that provides enough
> options for what I might want, especially if I was particular about how
> they're posed or what breed they are.

I think this comes back to something I already talked about when
Commons only just started - we don't need the umptieth picture of a
dog, but we do want more pictures of specific dog breeds (although as
things are now, we're pretty much over-stuffed with the more popular
dog breeds too), of dogs doing specific things, of dogs in specific
situations etcetera. However, this takes more than just getting more
pictures. It's also important that they are described well (George W.
Bush talking is "just another Bush picture", but if you know where he
is speaking at what occasion it becomes much more), and that they are
findable.

-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com