https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27500
Gregory Maxwell <[email protected]> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |[email protected] --- Comment #6 from Gregory Maxwell <[email protected]> 2011-02-18 19:46:00 UTC --- Hi, I was asked, as one of the authors of the prior commons procedures, to comment here. It's alleged upthread by Neil Kandalgaonkar that the prior process arose without consideration. This is a mistaken impression which could have been dispelled with only a moments research into the origin of the existing uselang wizard workflow. A key and explicit criteria behind the design developed by our community was _always_ to place high prominence on the mandatory criteria such as licensing and metadata. The reason behind this is simple: A large part of the value of the commons repository is its purity. There are a great many other image repositories out there, some much larger than commons, but most are stuff full of fraudulent licensing claims and incorrectly described media. The commons community would rather forgo some useful contributors in the short term— trusting that our repository will continue to grow regardless and will eventually replace these lost works— in exchange for keeping the repository clean as it's very difficult or often impossible to obtain licensing status or meta-information after the uploader has completed their part of the process. It appears the that the planning here has neglected to understand how the commons community— the creators and maintainers of this shared repository— understand its value, and that disappoints me greatly. Usability is important, but it is meaningless if it must remove our unique value in the process. The discussion above and on the FAQ makes it sound like the process is being guided by people who regard usability as an end in and of itself. '"Traps" currently in use on Commons aim to identify unfree content; we would like to empower users to make that choice consciously'. There isn't much of a "choice" here. Certain things are permitted, other things are not. Some of the restrictions stem from the laws and regulations of the various places we serve and operate from and we have no control over them (other than our decision to abide by the law and decision to include improved lawfulness of our collection as one of the values we offer our users). I'm skeptical of your ability to actually study the effectiveness of tutorials except in-situ, as in a study environment people will be more likely to read the instructions than someone who is simply acting with a simple goal ("get this image posted") in mind, especially when the instructions ultimately tell the person "sorry, you can't post that image". We know from experience that instructions have value but that value is bounded. The traps exist not to reduce choice, as there was no choice to begin with. They exist to gauge understanding. If the tutorial is very effective then the traps should have no effect. Concern about the traps is easily viewed as a lack of confidence in the processes ability to educate new contributors. However, I don't really share all of the concerns opposing the new ordering specifically. We know from experience on commons and the larger Wikipedias that the workflow which allows people to submit material only to later find it deleted when they failed to meet some obscure criteria creates a lot of ill feelings. I expect the revised ordering to cause this on commons, but we _already_ had a significant problem with that due to people simply clicking until the upload completed (and thus the trap options). The fact that we warned them a lot might ease our on conscious but I doubt it makes anyone less angry. So, I think that the reodering will likely be a null effect. People will continue to upload material which doesn't meet the requirements, we'll continue to delete things once they've been uploaded and continue to piss people off who didn't read the instructions carefully. I could even argue that getting the upload out of the way first will encourage fewer people to push through the forms blindly, the results will be interesting. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
