On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 16:47, Srikanth Ramakrishnan <
parakara.ghoda(a)gmail.com> wrote:
what amount of Back end work was done
Backend work is key for any photo / GLAM event Using Hisham's words, "its
not sexy stuff" :P. Its not about uploading 1000's of images, but the real
value is had only when they are used on relevant pages. At the very least
the file should have proper meta data so that some day some one will find
them useful.
2 Things are important when it comes to Photo events from the perspective
of Wikipedia.
1. Usage :-
Efforts must be made to use as many uploaded files as possible in the
articles. Yes, we can only tell others to upload the file to commons,
asking someone who is attending first photo walk / uploading to commons for
the first time to also add it on article may be little too much. So
Wikipedians must take onus in ensuring media uploaded is being used and not
unused.
Most of us fall for numbers which are visible at the outset and feel happy
about these kind of events.I would say Wikipedia Takes Mumbai 1 which added
only 89 files is successful than Wikipedia Takes Mumbai 2 which added 628
files after I check the usage stats[1]. You can also do an audit for the
event you organized / participated. The numbers are abysmally low for all,
which in some sense means the effectiveness of these events in terms of
tangible value to Wiki Projects are lesser (Of course there are other
benefits, like networking, community socializing etc etc)
If on goes by numbers visible at outset, TamilWiki Media Contest might be
most successful of all hunts with 15k files. It even fares well usage stats
with 51%, but if one goes little deeper the actual usage that was added
manually(Wiktionary auto adds pronunciation files, so excluding those) its
just around 20% (which is great for the kind of numbers, but
still). Wikipedia_Takes_Chennai is probably most successful event with 87%
usage, but jokes apart Malayalam_loves_Wikimedia_event_-_2011_April has
done well to get 28% (with 2157 images). [It is bound to be high, since the
ratio of Wikipedians : Newbies is high in Malayalam projects generally]
Of Course all these photo hunts will have same images, so its not possible
to get to 100%, but it should be atleast 40% for it to call a decent
success.
2. Naming and meta data :-
A. Categorize properly. (or Fix it)
B. English Description (or Add it)
C. Get the naming right. (or Fix it)
3 things that we see as leanings from Tamil media contest. Categorizing is
almost done with very few left uncategorized. The result of
which(categorization) is visible here when a Norwegian wikipedian uses
it[3] :) We do plan to fix 2 and 3 for large number of files over course of
next few months, any help welcome :)
Commons folks can give more tips here. TWMC report will have a detailed
section on learnings / best practices.
On a another note, I wonder why no one posted this to the list, but there
has been Marathi Photothon and some 1300+ media files were uploaded[4],
which is great, but just that they chose not to use commons and use the
local wiki instead (bad idea, some Norwegian wikipedian cant use those :( )
There were some wonderful shots of NH4 as well as some copyvios which I
found in a quick glance. Ideally only fair use images must be uploaded to
local wiki's and CC-BY-SA files are best uploaded to commons since projects
across wikimedia universe can use it.
Thanks for reading through.
[1]
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/glamorous.php
[2]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photo_scavenger_hunts_in_India
[3]
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Natkeeran#Found_a_picture_thanks_to_…
[4]
http://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:फोटोथोन_-_२०१२
--
Regards
Srikanth.L