Dear all,
Wikimedia Commons hosts a lot of images (and some other files) from OA
publishers (e.g.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=…
), and I am wondering whether that could be streamlined a bit.
Some issues that possibly stand in the way:
(1) It is not clear what percentage of such files from suitably
licensed papers would be of use in pages that use media hosted at
Commons (either at Wikimedia or via InstantCommons). If that
percentage is low, then the costs of hosting the unused files may
outweigh the benefit of having the used ones, though the ease of
automated upload (and possibly gardening) could shift the balance
quite a bit.
(2) Every publisher (and often journal) organize their files
differently, which the upload scripts would have to take into account.
Would this mean that multiple bot accounts would have to be requested
as per
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Requests ? If
so, some means of enforcing common standards would be necessary.
Not sure whether RCom-l is the right place to discuss that, but I
thought I'd give it a try, since working on standards is part of our
mission.
Thanks and cheers,
Daniel
--
http://www.google.com/profiles/daniel.mietchen