[Foundation-l] The status of smaller languages on the Wikimedia Commons

[Daniel Arnold]

Am Freitag, 05. Mai 2006 20:52 schrieb Gerard Meijssen:
> It does not. At this moment there is nothing stopping people from taking
> content from Commons. People do. We are not responsible for this, as it
> is. The best we can do is what we do. Mind you InstantCommons is NOT to
> be used for Wikimedia projects. From a performance point of view,
> currently many installations use the pictures of Commons on a real time
> basis. This has an impact on our responsiveness.

It is completely different if we officially have InstantCommons. If people 
reuse Commons content now they know that they have nothing to say and thus do 
not complain inside Commons but if we have an InstantCommons they will 
complain like local Wikimedia wikis are doing right now an people like me 
somehow need to handle that huge amount of different wishes.

Don't get me wrong I want InstantCommons but please give us the time 
stabilizing the current Commons previous.

> The consequence of what you are saying is that our pictures are not Free
> to use.

Commons would be really free to reuse from a technical perspective if we would 
have an image dump file. So currently Commons is locked into one place 
ragardless of the license thing. A regular image dump is what we and our 
"customers" need for various tasks. But I don't complain. I know that there 
are technical issues that need to be solved previous so I am patient and do 
not demand things from developers that have currently a low priority on their 
agenda.

> Remember, Google is our friend :) We can even build in some functionality
> that helps the remote administrator to check Commons for issues.

A short site notice. *All* search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN...) do not index 
the images of *any* MediaWiki installation. They only index the thumbnails 
used in Wikipedia articles (generally namespace 0) but not the pages in the 
image namespace. Thus Commons is *completely hidden* from the internet for 
average users. For details see:
 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Googling_Images_revisited

So it would be very nice if the foundation could make this a high priority on 
their agenda and notify some important people that their robots do not index 
a huge amount of media files that are very important for their search engine 
quality.

> You do not get my point. When policies are to be changed, when the way
> things work are to be changed, this is when you should inform the
> communities in advance.

Well we didn't change our policies up to now. We also don't want to become a 
second en.wikipedia full of policies and thus want to keep the policy number 
as low as possible.

> Some careful marketing communication is what is 
> needed. Marketeers call it customer relations. And you /need /to inform
> your customers; when you do, you talk to all your customers when you
> don't you have to deal with them one at a time and you may find that
> customers do no longer give you their custom. Given how busy you are,
> you would not even notice.

Well one part of main current refactoring work is that wikipedians do not 
percieve Commons as a huge chaos and thus make everything wrong at uplaod (so 
pure customer relations). They should just see themselves afterwards how to 
do what without larger explanations. If my Commons reorganisation work 
doesn't explain itself I haven't done it right. The other one is quite 
simple: I am my own customer. I am doing the stuff for myself. I originally 
wanted to merge back the large number of image improvements of my WikiPress 
book about the solar system but realized that it is better enabeling at first 
others to do things perfect from the start and not running after them.

> Given your preference to limit your deliberations to your 
> intimi, I am afraid this will not instil trust in the very people who
> refuse to use Commons.

We Wikimedia Commoners did invent several key software features reducing the 
frustration of outsiders (CheckUsage, UserGallery, CatScan,  interface tweaks 
like checker background for transparency detection and direct tool 
integration and so forth) and do improve many pages and the interface a lot. 
Often a small but deliberatly change like 
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5716 can improve our project by 
an order of magnitude.

So unhappy wikipedians should start acknowleding that we can't build Rome in 
one day but do a lot in order to make them happy.

Regards,
Daniel Arnold / Arnomane