On 12/13/06, Timwi timwi@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.