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