[Wikipedia-l] Galleries on Wikipedia vs. galleries on Wikimedia Commons

[Erik Moeller]

Stan-
> I think it's worth suggesting that people take a look, but the
> commons is not really ready for primetime; while there's been a
> lot of energetic image dumping, not so much effort has gone into
> organization or cross-reference support. My experience so far has
> been to be confronted with piles of random uploads of monster
> pictures, sort of like some horrible museum where if you express
> interest in something, the docent grabs you and shoves you up
> against the painting, and you have to walk back and forth with
> your nose to the wall in order to view it. :-)

First, let me emphatically encourage everyone to upload the highest  
resolution version of any image you have which still includes useful  
information. It is of paramount importance for future print editions to  
have high resolution versions of our most important images. Scaling  
existing images down for display reasons is bad, bad, bad.

The CVS HEAD version of MediaWiki automatically scales down any super- 
sized image on the Image: description page and provides a link to the  
full-size version. Until this goes live, the huge image display on Image:  
pages has to be considered a temporary inconvenience.

As for organization, the development version also contains a feature that  
shows the thumbnails of images on Category: pages. That makes it quite  
easy to create image galleries. In the future, I would also like it to be  
possible to dynamically include captions from the image description pages,  
so that when no caption is provided, and the image description page  
contains one, it is used.

> It also seems that there is not a consensus as to whether the
> commons is a bare repository for editors to draw upon, versus
> something that you want to send readers to. It would be unfortunate
> to move a gallery there and then have somebody delete it because
> "that's not what the commons is for."

Well, that's why we should make a decision on this matter now. I'll go  
with my proposed policy for now. In any case, useful information is  
unlikely to be deleted outright - that's what Transwiki is for.

Regards,

Erik