Yes, this is definitely an issue. My recollection was that the "unwanted content" issue was seen as secondary to the debates about placement, but it's many years ago ;-)
Agree entirely on testing and having a sense of the cost-benefit ratio. One feature of the old system was that it predominantly went on BLPs - which are a magnet for easy "looks free" content like publicity photos. I wonder if the proportion of acceptable material would be higher if, eg, we trialled placeholders on towns and villages with no photos, or buildings? - Andrew. On Tuesday, 18 September 2012, Risker wrote: > On 18 September 2012 14:00, Andrew Gray > <andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk<javascript:;>> > wrote: > > > On 13 September 2012 12:10, Yaroslav M. Blanter > > <pute...@mccme.ru <javascript:;><javascript:;>> > > wrote: > > > > > Btw it occurred to me that we never (to the best of my knowledge) tun a > > > Wikipedia banner asking to donate pictures. Smth like to take a World > > > Heritage site article without illustrations, or a town, and to say that > > this > > > is easy to illustrate in several clicks - just to donate pictures. Or > > about > > > "your town". > > > > Enwiki used to have a system where articles about people without images > got > > a placeholder - "No picture available! Can you donate one?" - but it was > > taken down a few years ago, partly due to community dislike of it and > > partly due to technical problems. > > > > I believe a number of those technical issues have since been resolved, so > > it might be worth thinking about trialling it again on a small scale... > > > > > My recollection is that that one of the key reasons the English Wikipedia > community stopped using the image placeholders was the fact that we were > receiving a very significant number of non-free images, including obviously > commercial ones that people were claiming they owned, and we wound up > deleting a lot of images that were 'donated'. I like the idea of inviting > people to contribute images for *select* articles, but not *every* article > without an image. But we should really make sure that we're getting some > statistical information if we trial this again, to ensure that what we are > getting is helpful and not a "copyright" timesink. It would be a shame to > return to the old days when everything operated on the assumption that > there were always warm bodies around to clean up these kinds of messes. On > many projects, that is no longer the case. > > Risker/Anne > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org <javascript:;> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l > -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
