[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Commons and local wikis can finally grow together

[arnomane at gmx.de]

Hi,

Although this list is about the organisational part of the Wikimedia project I 
think it's right notifying you about a new technology (in fact it's 
technically nothing advanced but it just rocks IMHO :) that changes and 
improves heavily the communication between a central repository like 
Wikimedia Commons and Wikimedia projects that use it.

CommonsTicker is a tool witten by Duesentrieb for collecting critical events 
regarding media files on Commons and posts them to the wikis using the 
respective file. Given the Wikimedia Commons <-> Wikipedia problems 
highlighted on a recent flame war on this very list I don't overestimate it 
if I call it *THE solution* to these communication and quality problems. You 
can find its project page at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Duesentrieb/CommonsTicker

This technology *works right now* and has already started in the German 
language Wikipedia at:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CommonsTicker

This page sums up automatically all changes to Commons that are relevant to 
de.wikipedia and only those. So people can concentrate on the information 
that is improtant to them and don't need to filter and sort the large amount 
of maintenance information in Commons for themselves. And of course 
CommonsTicker is translateable and customizable in a large range by local 
projects.

So please spread the word and read

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Duesentrieb/CommonsTicker

in order to get as well a CommonsTicker for your Wikimedia wiki you are 
working at. This is crucial to the sucess of Wikimedia Commons becoming a 
true rival to Getty Images and the improvement of multimedia inside Wikipedia 
which deserves heavy improvement compared to other encyclopedias. The quality 
of illustration and multimedia is the only larger negative point of Wikipedia 
in all Wikipedia vs. traditional encyclopedias comparisons.

May be there no lack of interproject communication anylonger.

Have fun,
Arnomane - Wikimedia Commons