I keep using Commons/OTRS with newbies, but I warned them how dysfunctional it can be.
it's not really about doing things properly but how they look a certain way to people
with a certain mindset. Addressing issues of copyright has limited correlation with what
people who know superficially the summary of a guideline think copyright is.
Years ago I used to teach newbies how to create Commons categories as well. unfortunately
I had to teach them also Wikidata until they asked me why better categorization using
structured data were not possible. it was already 2016 and teaching manual categorization
was starting to sound ridiculous, so was also showing the "controlled" chaos of
confusing standard about used languages and pattern in the category tree.
I tried to explain these facts to some established Commons users but you know how they
behave... at that point I realized that when they were talking about "complication
for newbies" they were mostly talking about themselves and their rigid vision. So,
like many people, I gave up.
Nowadays if I can spend part of a class to teach how to create Commons categories I mostly
ignore that option. I teach how to create rich WIkidata items, and when they upload an
image I tell them to put a nice description, coordinates or a generic category of the
administrative entity and use the image with P18. You have all you need from Wikidata to
quickly set up a solid categorization if you really want to do so, it's just overall
attitude. Slowly, some form of automation has started to appear, so fine with that so
far,
Of course we do a lot of work in any case, for example I pushed for better categorization
from Wikisource upload, and when Wiki Loves Monuments arrives in my area we are very
accurate, despite 5000-10000 new images we provide a lot of commons categories through
Wikidata. But even in that case, we do it at our own risk. We create empty categories
where we known they will be filled soon because photographers tell us so, but we risk them
to be deleted.
In the end, it's more like inducing order from other projects than caring about the
order on Commons because there clearly can't be with people acting the way they do.
They are also not caring for it: if you spend your time starting unnecessary deletion
procedures instead of cleaning up categories or description, you obviously have your
priority, so we also have ours.
About the main page, we need to focus more on media files IMHO, and of course search is
complicated but I am sure metadata can improve it.
A.
Il lunedì 18 maggio 2020, 11:33:46 CEST, Robert Myers
<robert.myers(a)wikimedia.org.au> ha scritto:
Well some people do, but it is when they get trolled by other contributors
and/or overzealous Admin comes along and deletes the file. They quickly
lose interest, in turn telling other people not to bother.
I just had another lot of photographs tagged by a troll, in which an Admin
deletes (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=File:R…
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=File:A…)jpg).
These have been on Commons for two + years, using the same camera gear I
have used over the years. If it is enough for me to give up on the project,
it would be the same for any other user but for a newbie it is something
that would make me run for the hills (depart quickly as possible)!
On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 1:07 PM Benjamin Ikuta <benjaminikuta(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Anecdotally, it seems people sometimes don't upload their photos to
Commons because they don't realize that the scope of Commons is much
broader than that of Wikipedia.
Has there been, or should there be, any research into this, or why people
don't contribute more broadly?
~Benjamin
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