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".
Thats interesting. I thought most of Commons users are skilled Wikimedians and that would not happened. So it surprise me, that the crap came. But on the other side you have skilled contributors, who would be happy for easier and faster ways of upload and metadata edit.
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. :-)
Thats what our programmes focuses. We got some contributors form WLM, who now contributes under other programes. When students contribute, its never a single contribution, they have to come with a bunch and/or collection of pictures related a topic, which could be described in Wikpedia.
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.
Well, dont be shy and let us know.
- 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
- 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).
Thats nice to hear and it is deffinitely a great work. Unfortunatelly old
editors does not like new features - both of your groups Multimedia and VE needs kind of specialist to promote your great work!
- 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
Well, it would be better to have it faster.
Juandev