[Foundation-l] A heads up

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Annotating material is important at the same level as providing citations in
our text. Annotation provides provenance and why should we believe the
"truth" in a picture on Commons. Even the Commons picture of the year has
been heavily photoshopped. It is only a credible picture because of the
annotation.

Adding annotations like GIS info is great, even important, we should aim to
get this information but we should not make it compulsory. Anyway, dealing
with language and searching is a much more pressing issue but it does not
need to be solved in a serial way.

NB there is no multi lingual solution when it does not involve searching
pictures in that language. Because the problem with language is first and
foremost finding the pictures in Commons.
Thanks,
      GerardM


2009/7/16 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>

> 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
>
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