User:Pfctdayelise/Fun and profit

Wikimedia Commons for Fun & Profit (wm2008:)

Wikimedia Commons is one of Wikimedia's fastest growing projects, gathering content and contributors from across the Wikimedia spectrum. But what changes in a wiki when the "basic unit of contribution" is a file upload rather than a text edit? This talk will take a look at some of the unique factors in its makeup, including technical innovations, quality initiatives and policy evolution. It will cover the relationships between Wikimedia Commons and the other Wikimedia projects, perennial disputes, special partnerships, and easy ways Wikimedia contributors can get involved. Finally we will consider what the future holds, and ways the community can adapt to meet those challenges.

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This talk is a presentation of the current state of the Wikimedia Commons wiki and community, with a brief historical overview and survey of what the future holds. Wikimedia Commons is the central media repository for all the Wikimedia projects, as well as a free-content media project in its own right. As such it is usually the project Wikimedians are most likely to encounter after their "local wiki" such as Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Commons is growing fast. After hitting two million files in October 2007 it is likely to be nearing three million by the time of Wikimania (July 2008).

This talk will discuss

• Overview of policy development (and which policies have been determinedly *not* developed, and why)
• How the challenges of multilingualism in a single wiki are managed
• How the concept of "ownership" differs compared to text-based projects
• Technical limitations of MediaWiki for media content, and improvements in recent years
• Various toolserver and JavaScript community-developed "workaround" technical solutions
• Overview of some major disputes and ways they were resolved (or not), including content censorship, "categories vs galleries", naming, format and colour disputes
• Special projects and partnerships including Pearson Scott Foresman, Picture of the Year, Wikipedia Takes Manhattan
• Regular processes including Featured Pictures, Quality Images, Valuable Images

Suggestions, hints and input

If you want to make sure I mention something, be sure to let me know :)

Few suggestions of things to mention:

• Progress

• new upload form which although can be quite annoying to more experienced users, should improve quality of image meta data.
• addition of Valuable Images project

• Tools needed

• search engines capable of searching specific fields in {{Information}} template
• better Wiki to Commons transfer tools. For example: Push for commons is good but it is using outdated version of Commons Helper. It produces metadata on commons with 4 or 5 mentions of original upload which is fine for transfering user-generated images but seems silly and actually a problem in case of PD-old or similar licenses, where the emphasis is not on preserving the uploader information but in ensuring that proper source /author info is present.
• We need a way to annotate images, by placing text and links on top of the image, and be able to see it with and without annotation.

• Potential challenges in the future:

• As more of the images are moved from Wikipedias to Commons there is less people in the Wikipedias interested in maintaining their collections. In some categories all images that could be moved to commons were already moved and what is left has licensing problems, but there much fewer people tending to images on the Wikipedias.
• Multilingual aspect of the Commons is still a problem. Uploading images to Polish Wikipedia is/was much easier for people not knowing any english than uploading them to Commons. The same about viewing images. Ideally all 'not-logged-in' users would have a language bar on top of every page that would switch all links, licenses, buttons and templates (like {{Information}} to local language. Users with accounts can pick a language for all their pages.
• There is still a lot old very poorly documented images on commons, like 13k images in Category:PD tag needs updating and probably much more that should be in that category.

I hope you can use some of this. --Jarekt 13:28, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Pink_CC

Hi Eloise, I recently ceated Template:Pink_CC to create some balance of "donation to" vs. "PR by" WP. In case that idea fits to "fun+profit", just use it. Its development is documented on User talk:WeHaWoe/TestSite. --WeHaWoe (talk) 19:51, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Rather profit than fun?

Unfortunately, above quoted template might be misused (as anything).

A questionable case is Margret Hofheinz-Döring (and category). That artist's only daughter and heiress, German galerist Brigitte Mauch, is not very much welcome to deWP. See de:Margret Hofheinz-Döring or let someone with some basic German have a look at article's talk page and history. She tries to sell her mother's heritage at ebay at a very low price. Of course she tries to use WP as a "platform" of PR.

On the other hand, the artist which is not very much renowned but anyways "present" seems to have been turned down due to her time (Nazi+postwar Germany), thereby getting less than due respect.

On the third hand, it might not do harm, but possibly might even be useful to WP, that she uploads a lot of her mother's pictures. I became involved by "kind of" stumbling over her in some talk page, and still am uncertain what to think about... --WeHaWoe (talk) 19:51, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Similar

Image:07-1998-04.jpg (another artist, who is alive. I started to rename that file, but also start feeling unconfortable...) --WeHaWoe (talk) 13:45, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

No fun, but: whose profit?

An example of obviously misusing WP might be added, too:

A few days after SUL was available to anyone (I did not / =up to now, do not participate), someone created accounts with my nick WeHaWoe, obviously just to create havoc and to be banned (all those accounts, as far as I see, were created on may 27 and 28): http://toolserver.org/~luxo/contributions/contributions.php?user=WeHaWoe&blocks=true&lang=

To be more precise: The person, as far as I see, created the account and did just ONE edit, which was, replacing the mayor image of some (unspecific?) WP article by Image:Shavevulva.jpg, therefore being banned immediately in most cases.

I was told by a (German) sysop (whom I trust) that I'd have to ask in every single WP project to (possibly) repair that, which, of course, is far from practicable.

So, if future improvement of WP would be able to prevent such, there might be by far less "noise" for operators, thereby implicitely augmenting "fun". --WeHaWoe (talk) 10:09, 25 June 2008 (UTC)