[Wikimedia-l] commons promotion

[Risker]

On 18 September 2012 14:00, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:

> On 13 September 2012 12:10, Yaroslav M. Blanter
> <putevod at mccme.ru<javascript:;>>
> wrote:
>
> > Btw it occurred to me that we never (to the best of my knowledge) tun a
> > Wikipedia banner asking to donate pictures. Smth like to take a World
> > Heritage site article without illustrations, or a town, and to say that
> this
> > is easy to illustrate in several clicks - just to donate pictures. Or
> about
> > "your town".
>
> Enwiki used to have a system where articles about people without images got
> a placeholder - "No picture available! Can you donate one?" - but it was
> taken down a few years ago, partly due to community dislike of it and
> partly due to technical problems.
>
> I believe a number of those technical issues have since been resolved, so
> it might be worth thinking about trialling it again on a small scale...
>


My recollection is that that one of the key reasons the English Wikipedia
community stopped using the image placeholders was the fact that we were
receiving a very significant number of non-free images, including obviously
commercial ones that people were claiming they owned, and we wound up
deleting a lot of images that were 'donated'.  I like the idea of inviting
people to contribute images for *select* articles, but not *every* article
without an image.  But we should really make sure that we're getting some
statistical information if we trial this again, to ensure that what we are
getting is helpful and not a "copyright" timesink.  It would be a shame to
return to the old days when everything operated on the assumption that
there were always warm bodies around to clean up these kinds of messes.  On
many projects, that is no longer the case.

Risker/Anne