I keep using Commons/OTRS with newbies, but I warned them how dysfunctional it
can be. it's not really about doing things properly but how they look a certain
way to people with a certain mindset. Addressing issues of copyright has
limited correlation with what people who know superficially the summary of a
guideline think copyright is.
Years ago I used to teach newbies how to create Commons categories as well.
unfortunately I had to teach them also Wikidata until they asked me why better
categorization using structured data were not possible. it was already 2016 and
teaching manual categorization was starting to sound ridiculous, so was also
showing the "controlled" chaos of confusing standard about used languages and
pattern in the category tree.
I tried to explain these facts to some established Commons users but you know
how they behave... at that point I realized that when they were talking about
"complication for newbies" they were mostly talking about themselves and their
rigid vision. So, like many people, I gave up.
Nowadays if I can spend part of a class to teach how to create Commons
categories I mostly ignore that option. I teach how to create rich WIkidata
items, and when they upload an image I tell them to put a nice description,
coordinates or a generic category of the administrative entity and use the
image with P18. You have all you need from Wikidata to quickly set up a solid
categorization if you really want to do so, it's just overall attitude. Slowly,
some form of automation has started to appear, so fine with that so far,
Of course we do a lot of work in any case, for example I pushed for better
categorization from Wikisource upload, and when Wiki Loves Monuments arrives in
my area we are very accurate, despite 5000-10000 new images we provide a lot of
commons categories through Wikidata. But even in that case, we do it at our own
risk. We create empty categories where we known they will be filled soon
because photographers tell us so, but we risk them to be deleted.
In the end, it's more like inducing order from other projects than caring
about the order on Commons because there clearly can't be with people acting
the way they do. They are also not caring for it: if you spend your time
starting unnecessary deletion procedures instead of cleaning up categories or
description, you obviously have your priority, so we also have ours.
About the main page, we need to focus more on media files IMHO, and of course
search is complicated but I am sure metadata can improve it.
A.
Il lunedì 18 maggio 2020, 11:33:46 CEST, Robert Myers
<robert.my...@wikimedia.org.au> ha scritto:
Well some people do, but it is when they get trolled by other contributors
and/or overzealous Admin comes along and deletes the file. They quickly
lose interest, in turn telling other people not to bother.
I just had another lot of photographs tagged by a troll, in which an Admin
deletes (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=File:Rachel_Priest_after_the_Sydney_Thunder_vs_Adelaide_Strikers_WBBL_game_at_Robertson_Oval.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=File:Abandoned_farm_house_in_Hillgrove_01.jpg).
These have been on Commons for two + years, using the same camera gear I
have used over the years. If it is enough for me to give up on the project,
it would be the same for any other user but for a newbie it is something
that would make me run for the hills (depart quickly as possible)!
On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 1:07 PM Benjamin Ikuta <benjaminik...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>
> Anecdotally, it seems people sometimes don't upload their photos to
> Commons because they don't realize that the scope of Commons is much
> broader than that of Wikipedia.
>
> Has there been, or should there be, any research into this, or why people
> don't contribute more broadly?
>
> ~Benjamin
>
>
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