in the past "99% unproblematic" was true, because most of the things were
obvious and standard (panorama of towns, ancient portraits), it's not nowadays.
You can upload tons of unproblematic pictures because they are easy to find, but you
don't need them really. So they mostly clutter the workflow. There are a lot of images
of kittens that we can upload, good luck categorizing them. Of course, you can switch to
very specific projects like "documenting all small rivers" but the core issue
are also high-quality upload. And everything is potentially problematic there: the right
of an important person to privacy, the right of the manufacturer of an instruments, how
creative is the lighting of an object? if I upload an image of a town it's probably a
very nice one, taken by a competent photographer who clearly show them on line as well.
You are in a dimension where you need to study, learn, ask around, find a balance. Instead
we have people acting randomly and superficially, because they do not care about the
long-term effect of their actions.
This impacts the maintenance of course, because very specific issues requires
sophisticated categories, processes and metadata. The effort there is quite high, you are
always the first one to arrive. the first one to clean up,the first one to explain to a
third party. If you add on that more unnecessary stress than required, people reduce this
job as much as they can as a necessary balance. But that job has an important effect in
the overall maintenance, so at a certain point you start to see the effect when it is not
there.
It's not a big surprise, we tried to explain this fact for years, but the community is
designed to ignore these aspects and encourage other work attitudes. It's just like
that.
Il lunedì 18 maggio 2020, 15:28:51 CEST, Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt(a)gmail.com> ha
scritto:
To be fair, in most cases to use Commons for uploading files is totally unproblematic as
soon as one has basic understanding of copyright. I am pretty sure 99% of my uploads can
not be deleted (I had my files mass-nominated for deletion, once with the claim they are
not mine, and once with the claim they are holiday photos and out of scope, but both cases
admins were reasonably enough to speedy close the nominations). Of course there are always
potentially problematic cases, for example I can imagine for one could start requiring
"publication" dates for painting, which is copyright paranoia but some people
take it seriously etc. But if one uploads something sufficiently far from the grey area it
normally should be ok.
(I am still a Commons admin, but I reduced my admin activity to a minimum and I am not
planning to increase the activity level).
Best
Yaroslav
On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 3:12 PM Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello Alessandro,
Thank you for your post and its insight. I recognized the same with me: I
only make use of Wikimedia Commons in lessons if I have enough time. Also I
would introduce it only to students with a solid knowledge of English.
Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
schrieb am Mo. 18. Mai 2020 um 13:08:
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.
This is a great observation! And this phenomenon contributes to the
on-going chaos, to the work-around-culture you need to adapt to if you want
to make use of Wikimedia Commons. :-(
Kind regards
Ziko
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…
).
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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