On 10/14/11, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@yahoo.com wrote:
Ryan,
Creating galleries would mitigate the problem for these half-dozen searches (though not eliminate it, as users would still have the option of searching Commons rather than navigating to a Commons page).
But it's like the story of the Dutch boy trying to plug a hole in the levee with his finger.
We arnt one dutch boy. We are legion dutch boys (and an increasing number of girls) taking turns to plug the metaphorical hole in the levee, and we scan the wall for new holes. And we build houses and windmills at the same time.
We massively distribute tasks while we wait for the developers to create permanent fixes or create preventative tools.
(Searching for "levee" in Commons brings up an image of a naked Suicide Girl called Levee in third place.)
Its a thumbnail for !@#$ sake, and anyone who finds that image offensive should turn off their internet connection.
I am sure you'll be appalled that libraries include nude pictures in their search results, often when searching for something else.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/picture/result?q=contemporary+north+america+20th+cen...
fix the metadata.
create a gallery page.
create a category and populate it.
etc
p.s. abstract art offends me. Can we please remove media related to John Levee's from the Commons search results for the term 'Levee'. ;-)
We should be under no illusion that we can find all search terms whose results violate the principle of least surprise, presenting adult images for everyday search terms.
New such situations arise on a daily basis, each time someone uploads an explicit file that has a plausible search term in its name and description (try searching Commons for "eating", and then search for "drinking"; or try finding images of Prince Albert).
The ordering of the search results isnt ideal. Have you raised a bug?
It puts too much weight on the filename, which isnt good because recommend against rename, so the current search results are gamable by the uploader.
We should simply offer safe search, like Google does.
Google provides safe search. They need to convert 'the internet' into a search results page that their customer wants to see, and the Internet has a whole lot of stuff that 99% of the world never wants to see.
Wikipedia provides encyclopedic information.
Commons provides a depository of media, and if you search for keywords in the metadata you'll see thumbnails of the matching media.
-- John Vandenberg