On 2/23/2011 4:32 PM, David Sifry wrote:
> Hear hear. Great post.
>
Something I realized about
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Billy_Hathorn
is that the page has some history, and that Billy once had a
template on his user page regarding the deletion of one of his messages.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Billy_Hathorn&oldid=43839853
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Billy_Hathorn&oldid=43839853>
To be fair, that message was visible for just an hour, because
somebody moved the template to the talk page.
So you've got this guy who's a hero (he's uploaded thousands of
useful images) but he looks like a zero (the only time anything was on
his page, it was a mention of an image that was a candidate for
deletion.) If the page that had the mention of the deletion candidate
also had some recognition of the thousands of useful images he'd added,
he couldn't complain that he was being maligned.
Another issue is that it's difficult to cite a photograph by "Billy
Hathorn". Personally I'd like to say
This picture was taken by <a
href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Billy_Hathorn";>Billy
Hathorn</a>
if I was using one of his images under creative commons on a web
site. As it is, that URL tells me nothing, except that he's uploaded
pictures to commons. Maybe I'm just too obsessed with named entities
and linked data, but I think a link is a much stronger statement of
identity than a name, and I think that link ought be 'deresolvable'...
that is, we should get some idea who this guy is -- both so he can get
the recognition he deserves, and also so his photographs are better
documented.
As it is, I feel sheepish sending people to a link that's
authoritative yet useless. It makes me feel bad about the "quality
signal" I'm sending when I link people to an empty page, both about my
own site and about commons.
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