[WikiEN-l] Finding out what to take photos of

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 12/13/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
[snip]
> Take me as an example. I live in [[Cambridge]]. I'm not particularly
> interested in sight-seeing or architecture, so I know little about the
> sights and buildings in this city. However, I would be happy to take
> (free-license) pictures of something in this city and upload them to
> Commons (indeed I have already done so for some of the Colleges). The
> problem (for Commons/Wikipedia) is that I don't know, and don't have
> much interest or motivation in researching, what sights or buildings
> exist in this city that don't already have a free picture on
> Commons/Wikipedia.

I suffer from this too.. We have lists, but they aren't really
effective.  I tried making a list of articles for things near me which
don't have pictures.. but our category system makes doing so
difficult.

Sometimes I visit some place and think "surely we have a picture of
X".. only to later find out that we don't .. or that it's "fair use"
.. or that it's just a very poor picture and that I could take one
which is much better.

Or the reverse happens.. I'll be out in the woods and think "surely we
don't have good pictures of trail markers" and spend an hour building
a exhaustive collection only to find that the subject is
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_blazing well covered].

To an extent I think that we'll only be able to solve this by putting
up a good lightweight (wap perhaps) interface to our lists of needed
images so people can reasonably query them while in the field.

[snip]
> So, in summary: Commons or Wikipedia needs an organised index or
> catalogue of things that don't have a free picture. Ideally, there
> should be somewhere I can click to list the things in Cambridge that
> don't have a picture.

The prerequisite is correctly identifying things in Cambridge... which
is currently non-trivial because of semantic drift in our categories
and a lack of geocoding.