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> Discussions please. (Not denial that this problem is a problem, thanks.)

If you want to encourage discussion, don't start by restricting the
discussion to only people that agree with you. You won't get any
useful results that way.

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2008/12/6 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>:

>> Discussions please. (Not denial that this problem is a problem, thanks.)

> If you want to encourage discussion, don't start by restricting the
> discussion to only people that agree with you. You won't get any
> useful results that way.


Are you speaking hypothetically, or don't you think this is a problem?


- d.

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2008/12/6 David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>:
> 2008/12/6 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>:
>
>>> Discussions please. (Not denial that this problem is a problem, thanks.)
>
>> If you want to encourage discussion, don't start by restricting the
>> discussion to only people that agree with you. You won't get any
>> useful results that way.
>
>
> Are you speaking hypothetically, or don't you think this is a problem?

I'm speaking hypothetically, I know very little about the subject in question.

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That might be a hell of a incentive to change. Before we talk about getting out the torches, I think we should see if we can make Commons functional. The incentive of being shuttered makes it more relevant to those who are in denial. I have made two suggestions on improvements. One is a training program with specific handling, i.e. no more we delete in 7 days, a different template that is more collegial. The second is to cross appoint administrators from underrepresented projects who agree to undergo a boot camp program. Thoughts?


________________________________
From: David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2008 1:00:29 PM
Subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

I speak as a big fan of and participant in Wikimedia Commons.

But: Is it time to deprecate Commons as a WMF service project? It's
clearly failing and the local "community" is actively hostile to
contributors from other wikis.

Commons appears to have forgotten it was created as a service project
for other WMF wikis. It's not doing the job any more.

Discussions please. (Not denial that this problem is a problem, thanks.)


- d.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se>
Date: 2008/12/6
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org>


Patricia Rodrigues wrote:

> That's a wonderful idea! But many times our main problem is the
> lack of manpower in different languages to actually address
> different users.

The more I think about this human side of the problem, the more I
think we should go back to local uploading. The forwarding to
Commons could be implemented by adding a "category:Suitable for
Commons" and a bot that scans this category. Then if the image is
deleted from Commons, the local copy would still exist.

If we want Wikipedia to scale from the narrow nerd community to a
wider society, including elderly, we need to greet them with
respect and in their own language. I don't see how we could
manage this on Commons, even if uploaded images were marked with
the uploader's interface language. We will always have the narrow
nerd community too, which can act as admins and an interface
towards the international community.


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Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Denying a problem is not necessarily discussion, but an attempt to keep things as they are. Although I could be wrong.




________________________________
From: Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2008 1:04:45 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

> Discussions please. (Not denial that this problem is a problem, thanks.)

If you want to encourage discussion, don't start by restricting the
discussion to only people that agree with you. You won't get any
useful results that way.

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Geoffrey Plourde wrote:

> That might be a hell of a incentive to change. Before we talk
> about getting out the torches, I think we should see if we can
> make Commons functional. The incentive of being shuttered makes
> it more relevant to those who are in denial. I have made two
> suggestions on improvements. One is a training program with
> specific handling, i.e. no more we delete in 7 days, a different
> template that is more collegial. The second is to cross appoint
> administrators from underrepresented projects who agree to
> undergo a boot camp program. Thoughts?

Maybe we are too fast to discuss solutions now, when we should
first discuss the problem. I brought this up on commons-l before
it spread to foundation-l. With the risk of making myself a
target for "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read), here's the problem
that I see:

Wikipedia in many languages is at a stage where the basic articles
are written (apple is a fruit, Paris is the capital of France) and
we need to recruit more people who know more areas, both academics
and people who lived through the politics of the 1960s. This
includes events such as Wikipedia Academy and also courses for the
elderly. We can't hope that these people are skilled in PHP
programming or fluent in English, as many people are on this list.
Some might be able to write good text, but not used to wiki
markup, and completely disabled in wiki template design. Perhaps
they should stick to scanning and uploading their old photos from
the 1970s.

We still have all kinds of vandalism on Wikipedia. If patrolling
is efficient and finds and reverts 95% of vandalism, it might also
spill over to falsely "fighting" 1% of beginner contributions.
We're scaring serious people away by our own mistake. This is
where we need to improve. It's like having a zero tolerance on
crime, without becoming a brutal fascist state. Within each
(small/medium) language of Wikipedia, this is quite easy. We all
speak the same language and we know each other.

But as soon as it comes to image uploading, an area where the
elderly have decades of photos to contribute, we're sending our
beginners off to Wikimedia Commons. Even if the menues and most
templates are localized in every major language, this is not true
of the admin community there. If a beginner fails to fill out all
details of free licensing, their user talk page will receive an
image deletion request in English. Even if there is a translated
version of that notification, the user's explanation in a local
language might not be understood by the admins. If the user has
good credentials that are easily verified (retired schoolteacher,
museum manager, ...) and has built a solid reputation in the local
language Wikipedia, a Commons admin from another language might
not fully understand this.

Adding to this, a culture of deletionism and arrogance has
infested Wikimedia Commons in the last year or two. So many
copyright violations and half-free images are deleted, that little
attention is paid to the individual contributors. The focus is on
the image, not on the user. This system is also an open target for
abuse. Sometimes deletions are requested anonymously or without
substantial reasons, but this is not preceived as a problem. Only
copyright violations are preceived as a problem. Wikimedia
Commons might have a shortage of admins and other problems, that
need to be sorted out. But that's not my main issue.

My main issue is this: If we invest in recruiting newcomers and in
fostering our local admin community to receive and greet
newcomers, how can we get the best value from that investment?
Sending our beginners away to Wikimedia Commons and a whole new
set of foreign language admins doesn't seem optimal. That's like
pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

Either we should send newcomers and admins in pairs to Commons,
somehow stating that this new user account is a Swedish speaker
and that Swedish speaking admins can take care of any issues, or
we should allow local uploads again, so the newcomers can stay
within the Swedish Wikipedia. After images have been patrolled
locally, they can be forwarded to Commons by a system of bots, and
only the bot operators would have to deal with the international
admin community at Wikimedia Commons.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 11:31 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> wrote:
>
> But as soon as it comes to image uploading, an area where the
> elderly have decades of photos to contribute, we're sending our
> beginners off to Wikimedia Commons. Even if the menues and most
> templates are localized in every major language, this is not true
> of the admin community there. If a beginner fails to fill out all
> details of free licensing, their user talk page will receive an
> image deletion request in English. Even if there is a translated
> version of that notification, the user's explanation in a local
> language might not be understood by the admins. If the user has
> good credentials that are easily verified (retired schoolteacher,
> museum manager, ...) and has built a solid reputation in the local
> language Wikipedia, a Commons admin from another language might
> not fully understand this.
>
I can think of two solutions here. One is to simply have more
multi-project admins. Wikimedia ought to be one big community with a
commons goal. Unfortunately (but not unsurprisingly) Wikimedia has
been separated into many different islands separated by language
borders, which are very hard to open up. Commons was born as a
multilingual project, but in that aspect has failed I believe.

Another solution is to make image uploading much more transparent.
Uploading from the local wiki should be possible without needing to
browse to Commons. I cannot see unfortunately how we should handle
messaging in that case, but it would certainly make it easier to
communicate and monitor users.

I do not believe that returning to local uploading is a solution. It
will simply mean that the problem of categorizing images, deleting
copyright violations and similar will move to local projects where
obviously less attention will be paid to them.

> Adding to this, a culture of deletionism and arrogance has
> infested Wikimedia Commons in the last year or two. So many
> copyright violations and half-free images are deleted, that little
> attention is paid to the individual contributors. The focus is on
> the image, not on the user.
That is certainly true. I have noticed myself that if you patrol new
uploads for some time your threshold for deleting or marking as bad
image is going down. It is then time to stop doing that for a while.

What I am wondering is how we can change the focus from the image to
user. What fundamental changes should be made for this?

> This system is also an open target for
> abuse. Sometimes deletions are requested anonymously or without
> substantial reasons, but this is not preceived as a problem. Only
> copyright violations are preceived as a problem.
Every system where anybody can make edits is inherently an open target
for abuse. The question is how we deal with abuse. I actually
currently do not know how we handle this. Do you have any examples?


Bryan

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i would agree that decentralizing the image upload appears to be the best process.




________________________________
From: Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2008 2:31:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

Geoffrey Plourde wrote:

> That might be a hell of a incentive to change. Before we talk
> about getting out the torches, I think we should see if we can
> make Commons functional. The incentive of being shuttered makes
> it more relevant to those who are in denial. I have made two
> suggestions on improvements. One is a training program with
> specific handling, i.e. no more we delete in 7 days, a different
> template that is more collegial. The second is to cross appoint
> administrators from underrepresented projects who agree to
> undergo a boot camp program. Thoughts?

Maybe we are too fast to discuss solutions now, when we should
first discuss the problem. I brought this up on commons-l before
it spread to foundation-l. With the risk of making myself a
target for "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read), here's the problem
that I see:

Wikipedia in many languages is at a stage where the basic articles
are written (apple is a fruit, Paris is the capital of France) and
we need to recruit more people who know more areas, both academics
and people who lived through the politics of the 1960s. This
includes events such as Wikipedia Academy and also courses for the
elderly. We can't hope that these people are skilled in PHP
programming or fluent in English, as many people are on this list.
Some might be able to write good text, but not used to wiki
markup, and completely disabled in wiki template design. Perhaps
they should stick to scanning and uploading their old photos from
the 1970s.

We still have all kinds of vandalism on Wikipedia. If patrolling
is efficient and finds and reverts 95% of vandalism, it might also
spill over to falsely "fighting" 1% of beginner contributions.
We're scaring serious people away by our own mistake. This is
where we need to improve. It's like having a zero tolerance on
crime, without becoming a brutal fascist state. Within each
(small/medium) language of Wikipedia, this is quite easy. We all
speak the same language and we know each other.

But as soon as it comes to image uploading, an area where the
elderly have decades of photos to contribute, we're sending our
beginners off to Wikimedia Commons. Even if the menues and most
templates are localized in every major language, this is not true
of the admin community there. If a beginner fails to fill out all
details of free licensing, their user talk page will receive an
image deletion request in English. Even if there is a translated
version of that notification, the user's explanation in a local
language might not be understood by the admins. If the user has
good credentials that are easily verified (retired schoolteacher,
museum manager, ...) and has built a solid reputation in the local
language Wikipedia, a Commons admin from another language might
not fully understand this.

Adding to this, a culture of deletionism and arrogance has
infested Wikimedia Commons in the last year or two. So many
copyright violations and half-free images are deleted, that little
attention is paid to the individual contributors. The focus is on
the image, not on the user. This system is also an open target for
abuse. Sometimes deletions are requested anonymously or without
substantial reasons, but this is not preceived as a problem. Only
copyright violations are preceived as a problem. Wikimedia
Commons might have a shortage of admins and other problems, that
need to be sorted out. But that's not my main issue.

My main issue is this: If we invest in recruiting newcomers and in
fostering our local admin community to receive and greet
newcomers, how can we get the best value from that investment?
Sending our beginners away to Wikimedia Commons and a whole new
set of foreign language admins doesn't seem optimal. That's like
pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

Either we should send newcomers and admins in pairs to Commons,
somehow stating that this new user account is a Swedish speaker
and that Swedish speaking admins can take care of any issues, or
we should allow local uploads again, so the newcomers can stay
within the Swedish Wikipedia. After images have been patrolled
locally, they can be forwarded to Commons by a system of bots, and
only the bot operators would have to deal with the international
admin community at Wikimedia Commons.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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2008/12/6 Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh@gmail.com>:

> I can think of two solutions here. One is to simply have more
> multi-project admins. Wikimedia ought to be one big community with a
> commons goal. Unfortunately (but not unsurprisingly) Wikimedia has
> been separated into many different islands separated by language
> borders, which are very hard to open up. Commons was born as a
> multilingual project, but in that aspect has failed I believe.


Relations between Commons and en:wp are clunky at the best of times,
so it's certainly not just a language issue at all.

It's Commons forgetting it's a service project or Commons admins
actively working against being a service project, because they want to
be regarded as a completely independent project.


- d.

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I guess I'm one of the Commons admins "actively working against being [just]
a service project" for the various other wikimedia projects. I don't want it
to be regarded as a "completely independent project" though. There's two
reasons why I do that.

1. Wikimedia Commons serves a purpose on it's own, in being the project
where we (wikimedians) make free media files avvailable to the public.
That's well within the aim of WMF, just like wikipedia is bringing free
encyclopedic content etc.

2. For Commons to be able to serve the other wikimedia projects in a
satisfactory manner, there has to be a lot of committed volunteers doing the
(most often) tedious task of maintaining the media files, among other things
ensuring that the content indeed is free and that the files are marked an
categorised so that others easily can find them. Most of these volunteers
are the "commonsadmin", who in my opnion has one of the most ungrateful jobs
in the wikimedia world. If there was more active admins, we could have done
our job better - especially when it comes to take the necessary time to
communicate with the other users who need help. The only way as I see it to
actually get volunteers to work at Commons is to build a "community feeling"
at commons like in other projects. If I only pop by Commons to fix something
upon a request from another user at Norwegian Wikipedia - that's well and
good but not something that will motivate me to spend and hour or two
working on a backlog or actively look up some new Dutch user to see if I can
help them learn how to best upload images at commons.


Finn Rindahl




2008/12/7 David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>

> 2008/12/6 Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh@gmail.com>:
>
> > I can think of two solutions here. One is to simply have more
> > multi-project admins. Wikimedia ought to be one big community with a
> > commons goal. Unfortunately (but not unsurprisingly) Wikimedia has
> > been separated into many different islands separated by language
> > borders, which are very hard to open up. Commons was born as a
> > multilingual project, but in that aspect has failed I believe.
>
>
> Relations between Commons and en:wp are clunky at the best of times,
> so it's certainly not just a language issue at all.
>
> It's Commons forgetting it's a service project or Commons admins
> actively working against being a service project, because they want to
> be regarded as a completely independent project.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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>
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Finn Rindahl wrote:

> I guess I'm one of the Commons admins "actively working against
> being [just] a service project" for the various other wikimedia
> projects.

This was David Gerard's wording and not mine. Overly general and
harsh descriptions are not productive.

> If there was more active admins, we could have done our job
> better - especially when it comes to take the necessary time to
> communicate with the other users who need help. The only way as
> I see it to actually get volunteers to work at Commons is to
> build a "community feeling" at commons like in other projects.

You need a community feeling among admins, so they can learn to
know and trust each other and collaborate against individual
admins who abuse their rights (which surely will happen
occasionally). And you need to foster a community feeling between
admins and regular/occasional/beginner users. But I doubt that
the latter is possible. If it fails, I wouldn't blame you.

The problem is that many users don't feel at home in Commons.
Many of them just upload a few images as part of writing Wikipedia
articles. Having to enter Commons is more of a necessary evil,
just like we all have to learn some wiki markup.

Consider this recent comment from one user: "I don't understand
the title: 'Please link images'. All my pictures are linked to
articles in the Swedish Wikipedia." This user didn't categorize
his images on Commons, and received a complaint for this from a
bot. He has no interest in categorizing images on Commons, he
only wanted to illustrate his articles.

Maybe he should just upload the images locally to the Swedish
Wikipedia, where they are used, and someone else, with a primary
interest in Commons, should forward them to Commons and categorize
them there.

This is how we normally distribute tasks among users within each
language of Wikipedia: One person creates an article, another adds
wiki markup, a third adds categories. But once you upload an
image, you need to go out through the door, across the street,
into the Wikimedia Commons building, and there you have to feel as
part of a new community which doesn't fully speak your language,
and each image must be categorized and correctly licensed and
attributed (including the incomprihensible distinction between
"source" and "author"), or else all your actions will be reverted.

Commons was set up in 2004. It was a great idea and has served
its purpose well. But as we recruit new users, less experienced
users who we have to actively recruit, this is not a vehicle for
the best possible user experience and productivity.


--
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Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Hello,

how about thinking about a channel between commons admins and local
admins, for example a subpage under the Request for Administrator
Attention (or some similar page), so that in case a non-english-speaking
user is doing something odd, at first the local admins can be consulted.

Ting

Finn Rindahl wrote:
> I guess I'm one of the Commons admins "actively working against being [just]
> a service project" for the various other wikimedia projects. I don't want it
> to be regarded as a "completely independent project" though. There's two
> reasons why I do that.
>
> 1. Wikimedia Commons serves a purpose on it's own, in being the project
> where we (wikimedians) make free media files avvailable to the public.
> That's well within the aim of WMF, just like wikipedia is bringing free
> encyclopedic content etc.
>
> 2. For Commons to be able to serve the other wikimedia projects in a
> satisfactory manner, there has to be a lot of committed volunteers doing the
> (most often) tedious task of maintaining the media files, among other things
> ensuring that the content indeed is free and that the files are marked an
> categorised so that others easily can find them. Most of these volunteers
> are the "commonsadmin", who in my opnion has one of the most ungrateful jobs
> in the wikimedia world. If there was more active admins, we could have done
> our job better - especially when it comes to take the necessary time to
> communicate with the other users who need help. The only way as I see it to
> actually get volunteers to work at Commons is to build a "community feeling"
> at commons like in other projects. If I only pop by Commons to fix something
> upon a request from another user at Norwegian Wikipedia - that's well and
> good but not something that will motivate me to spend and hour or two
> working on a backlog or actively look up some new Dutch user to see if I can
> help them learn how to best upload images at commons.
>
>
> Finn Rindahl
>
>
>
>
> 2008/12/7 David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>
>
>
>> 2008/12/6 Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh@gmail.com>:
>>
>>
>>> I can think of two solutions here. One is to simply have more
>>> multi-project admins. Wikimedia ought to be one big community with a
>>> commons goal. Unfortunately (but not unsurprisingly) Wikimedia has
>>> been separated into many different islands separated by language
>>> borders, which are very hard to open up. Commons was born as a
>>> multilingual project, but in that aspect has failed I believe.
>>>
>> Relations between Commons and en:wp are clunky at the best of times,
>> so it's certainly not just a language issue at all.
>>
>> It's Commons forgetting it's a service project or Commons admins
>> actively working against being a service project, because they want to
>> be regarded as a completely independent project.
>>
>>
>> - d.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
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>


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I think of the problem as more of a systemic one, and I don't see a ready
way around it. I consider myself a moderately active user on commons, and
the thing is that Commons has no payoff. At Wikipedia, there can be the
satisfaction of an article well written, an obscure fact well sourced, &c.
The content is (usually) interesting and engaging and begging for your
participation. Commons, by contrast, is a forum for content that is ALREADY
COMPLETE. It needs no participation, only handling. Commons editors are
more or less just shepherds and custodians, tagging, categorizing,
sourcing. I don't say this disparagingly. I myself hope to become a
Commons admin one day. But the difference in incentive, in intellectual
remuneration, is vast.

FMF




On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 6:19 AM, Ting Chen <wing.philopp@gmx.de> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> how about thinking about a channel between commons admins and local
> admins, for example a subpage under the Request for Administrator
> Attention (or some similar page), so that in case a non-english-speaking
> user is doing something odd, at first the local admins can be consulted.
>
> Ting
>
> Finn Rindahl wrote:
> > I guess I'm one of the Commons admins "actively working against being
> [just]
> > a service project" for the various other wikimedia projects. I don't want
> it
> > to be regarded as a "completely independent project" though. There's two
> > reasons why I do that.
> >
> > 1. Wikimedia Commons serves a purpose on it's own, in being the project
> > where we (wikimedians) make free media files avvailable to the public.
> > That's well within the aim of WMF, just like wikipedia is bringing free
> > encyclopedic content etc.
> >
> > 2. For Commons to be able to serve the other wikimedia projects in a
> > satisfactory manner, there has to be a lot of committed volunteers doing
> the
> > (most often) tedious task of maintaining the media files, among other
> things
> > ensuring that the content indeed is free and that the files are marked an
> > categorised so that others easily can find them. Most of these volunteers
> > are the "commonsadmin", who in my opnion has one of the most ungrateful
> jobs
> > in the wikimedia world. If there was more active admins, we could have
> done
> > our job better - especially when it comes to take the necessary time to
> > communicate with the other users who need help. The only way as I see it
> to
> > actually get volunteers to work at Commons is to build a "community
> feeling"
> > at commons like in other projects. If I only pop by Commons to fix
> something
> > upon a request from another user at Norwegian Wikipedia - that's well and
> > good but not something that will motivate me to spend and hour or two
> > working on a backlog or actively look up some new Dutch user to see if I
> can
> > help them learn how to best upload images at commons.
> >
> >
> > Finn Rindahl
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > 2008/12/7 David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>
> >
> >
> >> 2008/12/6 Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh@gmail.com>:
> >>
> >>
> >>> I can think of two solutions here. One is to simply have more
> >>> multi-project admins. Wikimedia ought to be one big community with a
> >>> commons goal. Unfortunately (but not unsurprisingly) Wikimedia has
> >>> been separated into many different islands separated by language
> >>> borders, which are very hard to open up. Commons was born as a
> >>> multilingual project, but in that aspect has failed I believe.
> >>>
> >> Relations between Commons and en:wp are clunky at the best of times,
> >> so it's certainly not just a language issue at all.
> >>
> >> It's Commons forgetting it's a service project or Commons admins
> >> actively working against being a service project, because they want to
> >> be regarded as a completely independent project.
> >>
> >>
> >> - d.
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>
> >>
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> >
>
>
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On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 1:59 AM, David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/12/6 Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh@gmail.com>:
>
>> I can think of two solutions here. One is to simply have more
>> multi-project admins. Wikimedia ought to be one big community with a
>> commons goal. Unfortunately (but not unsurprisingly) Wikimedia has
>> been separated into many different islands separated by language
>> borders, which are very hard to open up. Commons was born as a
>> multilingual project, but in that aspect has failed I believe.
>
>
> Relations between Commons and en:wp are clunky at the best of times,
> so it's certainly not just a language issue at all.
>
> It's Commons forgetting it's a service project or Commons admins
> actively working against being a service project, because they want to
> be regarded as a completely independent project.
>
Please provide an example of what you call "actively working against
being a service project".


Bryan

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Is there not a record of what projects actually link to commons material? If
not, why not

On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 12:16 PM, David Moran <fordmadoxfraud@gmail.com>wrote:

> I think of the problem as more of a systemic one, and I don't see a ready
> way around it. I consider myself a moderately active user on commons, and
> the thing is that Commons has no payoff. At Wikipedia, there can be the
> satisfaction of an article well written, an obscure fact well sourced, &c.
> The content is (usually) interesting and engaging and begging for your
> participation. Commons, by contrast, is a forum for content that is
> ALREADY
> COMPLETE. It needs no participation, only handling. Commons editors are
> more or less just shepherds and custodians, tagging, categorizing,
> sourcing. I don't say this disparagingly. I myself hope to become a
> Commons admin one day. But the difference in incentive, in intellectual
> remuneration, is vast.
>
> FMF
>



--
Dennis C. During

But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully
believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest
animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions ? -- Charles Darwin
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On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 8:57 PM, Dennis During <dcduring@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there not a record of what projects actually link to commons material? If
> not, why not
>

There is none because nobody made one.

There is of course Duesentrieb's checkusage, but that only works per image.

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Hoi,
When you indicate that the relation between Commons and en.wp is clunky, you
will acknowledge that the policies re images of the English Wikipedia are
rather different. This prevents a common understanding about procedures and
policies. So I will grant you that it is not only language that makes for
rocky relations. However, people who can read / write English are the ones
that have the necessary ability to get value out of Commons, they are the
only ones who really benefit from the project

The big argument for Commons at the time was the ability to share pictures
between the various projects. When you analyse the use of pictures, I do not
doubt that many projects use the same pictures even when quality
alternatives exist. As a whole this is boring. There have been many
initiatives that I do qualify as sensible. When Commons cannot host a
picture under its doctrines it now delinks pictures from other projects. It
now even allows other MediaWiki projects (outside of the WMF) to share
pictures. I think Commons is indeed providing the service it can provide
within its restrictions and its means.

When Commons is to do a "better" job, it is important to realise what it
currently can and cannot do. In my opinion, the lack of usability is why
Commons does not have 25 million pictures. The consequence of the lack of
usability is that fewer uploads are done from people who do not communicate
in English, Commons is consequently not the resource for worldwide education
that it could be.
Thanks,
GerardM

2008/12/7 David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>

> 2008/12/6 Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh@gmail.com>:
>
> > I can think of two solutions here. One is to simply have more
> > multi-project admins. Wikimedia ought to be one big community with a
> > commons goal. Unfortunately (but not unsurprisingly) Wikimedia has
> > been separated into many different islands separated by language
> > borders, which are very hard to open up. Commons was born as a
> > multilingual project, but in that aspect has failed I believe.
>
>
> Relations between Commons and en:wp are clunky at the best of times,
> so it's certainly not just a language issue at all.
>
> It's Commons forgetting it's a service project or Commons admins
> actively working against being a service project, because they want to
> be regarded as a completely independent project.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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Cite: <i>Adding to this, a culture of deletionism and arrogance has
infested Wikimedia Commons in the last year or two. </i>
I think on the whole i can agree with this. And it is not limited to
copyright violations. Commons has turned celf-centered more and more over
the past years.

Out of disgust over its bad organization, i have limited my presence on
commons as much as possible. But one of the last times I logged on, there
was a poll or vote which looked like it was designed to limit voting to hard
code commonists: volunteers had to do at least 20-50 edits a month to be
able to vote. I think it is ridiculous that a small bunch of hard core
volunteers try to lock out those of who are actually contributing the media.
Luckily it was stopped, but mainly on technical grounds, not because it is
ethically incorrect to lock contributors out.

(But may be I am prejudiced, once an enthousiastic supporter of commons, i
nowadays avoid it as much as possible in wiki contexts - which forces me to
use it regularly, much to my charin).

A good question is of cource: why are flickr, webshots and picassa so much
more popular than commons? And: can we create a free alternative that can
compete with them?

Sometimes i wonder if some wikia like organization could do a better
service, with a wider scope of images - if i would try to upload my holiday
pix on commons they would speedily get deleted as "not encyclopedic". But
while some are not encyclopedic, many would qualify for free usage, such as
cities, panoramas, and even some people pix.

I wish you health and happiness,
Teun Spaans


On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 11:31 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> wrote:

> Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
>
> > That might be a hell of a incentive to change. Before we talk
> > about getting out the torches, I think we should see if we can
> > make Commons functional. The incentive of being shuttered makes
> > it more relevant to those who are in denial. I have made two
> > suggestions on improvements. One is a training program with
> > specific handling, i.e. no more we delete in 7 days, a different
> > template that is more collegial. The second is to cross appoint
> > administrators from underrepresented projects who agree to
> > undergo a boot camp program. Thoughts?
>
> Maybe we are too fast to discuss solutions now, when we should
> first discuss the problem. I brought this up on commons-l before
> it spread to foundation-l. With the risk of making myself a
> target for "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read), here's the problem
> that I see:
>
> Wikipedia in many languages is at a stage where the basic articles
> are written (apple is a fruit, Paris is the capital of France) and
> we need to recruit more people who know more areas, both academics
> and people who lived through the politics of the 1960s. This
> includes events such as Wikipedia Academy and also courses for the
> elderly. We can't hope that these people are skilled in PHP
> programming or fluent in English, as many people are on this list.
> Some might be able to write good text, but not used to wiki
> markup, and completely disabled in wiki template design. Perhaps
> they should stick to scanning and uploading their old photos from
> the 1970s.
>
> We still have all kinds of vandalism on Wikipedia. If patrolling
> is efficient and finds and reverts 95% of vandalism, it might also
> spill over to falsely "fighting" 1% of beginner contributions.
> We're scaring serious people away by our own mistake. This is
> where we need to improve. It's like having a zero tolerance on
> crime, without becoming a brutal fascist state. Within each
> (small/medium) language of Wikipedia, this is quite easy. We all
> speak the same language and we know each other.
>
> But as soon as it comes to image uploading, an area where the
> elderly have decades of photos to contribute, we're sending our
> beginners off to Wikimedia Commons. Even if the menues and most
> templates are localized in every major language, this is not true
> of the admin community there. If a beginner fails to fill out all
> details of free licensing, their user talk page will receive an
> image deletion request in English. Even if there is a translated
> version of that notification, the user's explanation in a local
> language might not be understood by the admins. If the user has
> good credentials that are easily verified (retired schoolteacher,
> museum manager, ...) and has built a solid reputation in the local
> language Wikipedia, a Commons admin from another language might
> not fully understand this.
>
> Adding to this, a culture of deletionism and arrogance has
> infested Wikimedia Commons in the last year or two. So many
> copyright violations and half-free images are deleted, that little
> attention is paid to the individual contributors. The focus is on
> the image, not on the user. This system is also an open target for
> abuse. Sometimes deletions are requested anonymously or without
> substantial reasons, but this is not preceived as a problem. Only
> copyright violations are preceived as a problem. Wikimedia
> Commons might have a shortage of admins and other problems, that
> need to be sorted out. But that's not my main issue.
>
> My main issue is this: If we invest in recruiting newcomers and in
> fostering our local admin community to receive and greet
> newcomers, how can we get the best value from that investment?
> Sending our beginners away to Wikimedia Commons and a whole new
> set of foreign language admins doesn't seem optimal. That's like
> pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
>
> Either we should send newcomers and admins in pairs to Commons,
> somehow stating that this new user account is a Swedish speaker
> and that Swedish speaking admins can take care of any issues, or
> we should allow local uploads again, so the newcomers can stay
> within the Swedish Wikipedia. After images have been patrolled
> locally, they can be forwarded to Commons by a system of bots, and
> only the bot operators would have to deal with the international
> admin community at Wikimedia Commons.
>
>
> --
> Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
> Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Bryan Tong Minh wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 8:57 PM, Dennis During <dcduring@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Is there not a record of what projects actually link to commons material? If
>> not, why not
>>
>
> There is none because nobody made one.
>
> There is of course Duesentrieb's checkusage, but that only works per image.

Native support for usage tracking would be rather useful; I'm going to
bump priority on this...

- -- brion
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On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 1:00 PM, David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com> wrote:
> I speak as a big fan of and participant in Wikimedia Commons.
>
> But: Is it time to deprecate Commons as a WMF service project? It's
> clearly failing and the local "community" is actively hostile to
> contributors from other wikis.
>
> Commons appears to have forgotten it was created as a service project
> for other WMF wikis. It's not doing the job any more.
>
> Discussions please. (Not denial that this problem is a problem, thanks.)

I don't participate in Commons (photography's not really my thing).
But I *do* actively promote it as an awesome place to find free media.
I was under the impression that the project had some time ago moved
beyond simply being a technically convenient service project, and
everyone was pretty well agreed on that. Am I wrong? Is this about the
idea of Commons per se, or about issues with the individual people
involved?

-- phoebe

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Hoi,
Commons provides no benefit except for sharing the same picture to people
who do not read / write English. They cannot possibly find pictures and
consequently for them Commons is useless. Add to this the extreme loads of
work of the Commons admins resulting in an unfriendly attitude towards
people who do not frequent Commons and those who do not speak English and
you appreciate why Commons has only 3.600.201 media files.
Thanks,
GerardM

2008/12/8 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com>

> On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 1:00 PM, David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I speak as a big fan of and participant in Wikimedia Commons.
> >
> > But: Is it time to deprecate Commons as a WMF service project? It's
> > clearly failing and the local "community" is actively hostile to
> > contributors from other wikis.
> >
> > Commons appears to have forgotten it was created as a service project
> > for other WMF wikis. It's not doing the job any more.
> >
> > Discussions please. (Not denial that this problem is a problem, thanks.)
>
> I don't participate in Commons (photography's not really my thing).
> But I *do* actively promote it as an awesome place to find free media.
> I was under the impression that the project had some time ago moved
> beyond simply being a technically convenient service project, and
> everyone was pretty well agreed on that. Am I wrong? Is this about the
> idea of Commons per se, or about issues with the individual people
> involved?
>
> -- phoebe
>
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Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> So I will grant you that it is not only language that makes for
> rocky relations. However, people who can read / write English are the ones
> that have the necessary ability to get value out of Commons, they are the
> only ones who really benefit from the project

An extension of that point is that it takes a somewhat greater skill in
English to participate in policy discussions.


Ec

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On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> Commons provides no benefit except for sharing the same picture to people
> who do not read / write English. They cannot possibly find pictures and
> consequently for them Commons is useless. Add to this the extreme loads of
> work of the Commons admins resulting in an unfriendly attitude towards
> people who do not frequent Commons and those who do not speak English and
> you appreciate why Commons has only 3.600.201 media files.
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>

Right, it's baffling to me why a non-english speaking wikipedia would
decide to be commons-only. Enwiki doesn't do it, and we speak english,
why would they? That a new user who doesn't speak english could
successfully upload an image to commons, and integrate it into their
local wikipedia is completely unlikely in my opinion.

I would also *very strongly* opposed making enwiki commons only for
different reasons. I do not support a degradation of people's rights.
Wikipedia servers should be placed in a country that is most legally
convenient, and we should follow those laws. Maybe that's the US,
maybe not. Playing to the most restrictive laws is a losing game, and
one I don't see any reason to play. It is very much the *game* that
exists on commons now.

Having said that, I don't see any reason to shutter commons, or even
talk in that direction. Wikipedia's should have their own images, some
of which can be moved to commons, by people that care. If commons
wants to be a repository who are in no way beholden to the other
projects, and not a service wiki for them I think that's their
decision to make. People should be aware of that change if it's what
they want to do though, so they can plan accordingly.

Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Users:Cohesion

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Hoi,
I would prefer work done on the usability of Commons. Not solving the issues
means that we will never get a repository of images that because of its
composition offers a non biased view of the world. Once people who do not
speak English share in the benefits of Commons and are able to find images
as well as anyone else we will have largely overcome the bias because once
these people profit from Commons, they are likely to upload to Commons as
well.

Policies and stuff are evolved and determined by discussion,.Commons needs
the adoption of the idea that these other languages need to be supported as
much as English is. Once this idea has been adopted, software can be adopted
or developed that gives Commons relevance in the rest of the world.
Thanks,
GerardM

2008/12/8 Judson Dunn <cohesion@sleepyhead.org>

> On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Gerard Meijssen
> <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > Commons provides no benefit except for sharing the same picture to people
> > who do not read / write English. They cannot possibly find pictures and
> > consequently for them Commons is useless. Add to this the extreme loads
> of
> > work of the Commons admins resulting in an unfriendly attitude towards
> > people who do not frequent Commons and those who do not speak English and
> > you appreciate why Commons has only 3.600.201 media files.
> > Thanks,
> > GerardM
> >
>
> Right, it's baffling to me why a non-english speaking wikipedia would
> decide to be commons-only. Enwiki doesn't do it, and we speak english,
> why would they? That a new user who doesn't speak english could
> successfully upload an image to commons, and integrate it into their
> local wikipedia is completely unlikely in my opinion.
>
> I would also *very strongly* opposed making enwiki commons only for
> different reasons. I do not support a degradation of people's rights.
> Wikipedia servers should be placed in a country that is most legally
> convenient, and we should follow those laws. Maybe that's the US,
> maybe not. Playing to the most restrictive laws is a losing game, and
> one I don't see any reason to play. It is very much the *game* that
> exists on commons now.
>
> Having said that, I don't see any reason to shutter commons, or even
> talk in that direction. Wikipedia's should have their own images, some
> of which can be moved to commons, by people that care. If commons
> wants to be a repository who are in no way beholden to the other
> projects, and not a service wiki for them I think that's their
> decision to make. People should be aware of that change if it's what
> they want to do though, so they can plan accordingly.
>
> Judson
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Users:Cohesion
>
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