[Foundation-l] A heads up

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Magnus
Manske<magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Gerard
> Meijssen<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hoi,
>> OK, there are *many* pictures of a marc'h on Commons... Now pretend that you
>> cannot find what this is in English. Try to find it on Commons.
>
> Noone disputes that this is a problem. And if we had an unlimited
> number of volunteers fluent in all languages adding descriptions to
> images, it would easily be fixed. But if that were the case, we
> wouldn't have this discussion in the first place.
>
> Image descriptions are, first and foremost, limited by the languages a
> user (who is willing to write these descriptions) speaks. Of all these
> languages, the user will (if he has time and ability to write one or
> two descriptions) chose maybe his native one, and the one that will be
> useful for most people - English. (And yes, more people speak Chinese,
> but few Commons editors do).
[snip]

I have tried to advance the idea that some amount of description
translations should be a requirement for featured/quality images on
commons (also geocoding, as applicable and possible), with the notion
that providing great metadata is part of what commons offers at it's
best and that we'll get more translations if we make sure our high
profile images have them (ModelBehavior).

Sadly, no one else has seemed to like the idea.

I've made sure that descriptions are provided in multiple languages on
my own featured images, for example
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ferrofluid_large_spikes.jpg