Hear hear. Great post. On Feb 23, 2011, at 9:40 AM, Paul Houle wrote:
> On 2/23/2011 10:04 AM, Eusebius wrote: >> Now that's constructive. >> I would love to see something like that on Commons. But surely this is >> not the first time this is suggested, and this has been rejected for a >> reason? >> > Commons has a different purpose than Flickr. > > On Flickr I feel free to post pictures of my son, my woodstove and > the dollhouse village that's down the road from my house. A few percent > of my pictures are photos of notable named entities that would be > suitable for Wikimedia Commons, but the rest aren't. I upload my > photos to Flickr because it's easy for me. > > For me, a big part of Web 3.0 is about 'union communities' that > combine CC content from different communities. I've got a 'machine' > (Ok, people + software system) that, if you put money in on one side, > it locates named entity images in Flickr, unscrambles the metadata egg > and captures and tags images with very high precision. Based on a naive > scaling, if you put 10% of Wikipedia's 2011 budget into it, it could > harvest more images than are already in Commons. The quality of images > is better than you find in Commons, however, you'd find that you just > can't find images for all the topics in Wikipedia that are CC in Flickr. > > Many of the best contributors to Wikipedia Commons are great > Pokemon collectors but lousy photographers. I can think of people > who've traveled all over England and other countries photographing > things but I want to scream at them... "Clean your goddamn lens!" > People in Flickr are more serious about photography (probably own a > DSLR, have something better than the kit lens, and keep it clean) but > they're not so interested in "catching them all." > > If you wanted to encourage a 'game mechanic' in Commons, I think > you'd want to make it first of all a friendly competition to 'catch them > all' and secondarily a competition to get better quality photographs. I > think the ideal Commons photographer would be a person who's interested > in some specific category (say going to concerts and snapping pictures > of musicians or taking pictures of birds.) To support this there's a > need for tools that make it clear where the holes are, both in the > sense of "We don't have any pictures of X" or "We'd like to get better > pictures of X". > > Another big trouble with Commons, IMHO, is that the majority of > contributors have empty user pages. To take an example, > > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Billy_Hathorn > > has taken at least 1,717 pictures (for which my system could > unscramble the metadata egg) used in en.wikipedia but has a blank User > page. Here's a guy who's made a major contribution to Commons, but > he's got no recognition, we aren't told anything about what he likes to > photograph, the fact that he's a real MVP, where he lives, what he > looks like, what his social media id's are, what kind of gear he > uses, nothing. Now sure, he (or any of us) could put something on his > User page, but he hasn't. > > On a site like Flickr, you've got a photostream which gets filled > out automatically so you automatically get some recognition for the hard > work you're doing. Here you've got a guy who should be getting a lot of > credit and he's not. > > _______________________________________________ > Commons-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l -- David L. Sifry 415 846-0232 (Mobile) Blog: http://www.sifry.com/alerts Photos: http://flickr.com/photos/dsifry _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
