On 31 July 2015 at 06:48, Juan de Vojníkov juandevojnikov@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I would like to ask, if the ease of media handling (images, photographs on Wikimedia Commons) is a priority for Wikimedia Foundation? If not, could it be a priority? Recently we have seen a big step done for editors = VisualEditor. Contributors have no longer study "wikicode" to be able to contribute. That removes one of the technological barriers and it looks its a priority for WMF.
While part of contributing to Wikipedia is still contributing by images. I am from Wikimedia Czech republic. We run many projects based on media harvest or organizing *low barrier media harvest activities* to bring new users to Wikipedia.
As our newbies are not technologically skilled and not native English speakers, there is a big technology block to contribute to Wikipedia with ease:
- there is no app for mobile phones and tablets for image upload
I don't think having a custom mobile app for uploading files is really the key problem.
The quality of media capture on non-specialist mobile devices, and especially the general pattern of use for them, is not so good that encouraging people in general to upload them for use in Wikipedia articles is a good idea. Yes, you *can* take good, educational, useful photos with a mobile device, but in general people do not, and when we enabled uploads on the mobile desktop we got a lot of very low-value photos, almost all of which were deleted (and the users understandably didn't stay around). The old tickets at https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/mobile/cards/920 and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T53559 for example have some off-handed comments about this being the "Selfie Apocalypse".
The hard thing is not grabbing the media file from the user's device, but helping users understand what media is appropriate, what is expected, what is good, and what won't get immediately deleted by the wiki's community. We don't just want to trap people into making a one-off upload contribution – we want to encourage people to join the community and stay, taking several photos, not just one. :-) I've got some ideas about how we can gently coax people into understanding this without scaring them away, but I'm sure others have better plans.
2) newbies are lost, when they click on "Upload image" and they are
transferred from Wikipedia to Wikimedia Commons
- Wikimedia Commons is in English - foreign language for our participants
5) Wikimedia Commons environment is still pretty "techy"
- Insert metadata, takes a long time:
e.g.: you have an image of a cathedral in Des Moines, IW. 3 or 4 times you have to insert same information: a) to file name (*Des Moines, cathedral.jpg*), b) to file description (*en:** Cathedral in Des Moines, Iowa, USA*/*es:* *La catedral de XY en Des Moines, Iowa, EEUU*) and c) to the category (*category:Des Moines* or *Churches in Des Moines*, *category:Cathedrals in Iowa*).
[Answering these three together.]
Yup, that's why our main work in Multimedia right now is making it possible to upload a media file from whichever wiki you're on , and do so whilst you're editing. We're looking to make adding the information as simple and painless as possible, without letting people upload files without enough information for the community to triage and ensure are as high quality as possible.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91717
is the overall work, and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T40030 will be the integration into VisualEditor (we'll do it for users writing in wikitext as well, of course).
- biggest language barrier are categories, which are in English only, we
need to insert name of the category in our mother tongue
That is true. The long-term hope in this area is using Wikibase (the software behind Wikidata) to add proper structured data to Commons. This would mean that we could replace categories named in a single language with 'tags' named in all languages, which would make it both easier to contribute to Commons and better to find existing media already on Commons for the majority of our readers and editors who do not speak English.
You can see some thoughts on this at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Multichill/Commons_Wikidata_roadmap
Could we do something for those, who contributes with their media to
Wikipedia? Could we do it in one or two years?
Absolutely. Or, at least, I hope so. :-)
Yours,