Wikimedia Commons for Fun and Profit – Brianna Laugher [Wikimedia 2008 notes]

What is Wikimedia Commons:

 

• Central resource for Wikimedia
• Wiki – anyone can edit, be bold, etc.
• Media – it’s not text, it’s especially images
• Multilingual – all the languages inside the single wiki
• Free Content – all the files are availalbe under Free Licenses
• Community – lots of people who consider this their “wiki home”

 

It’s a rapidly growing project – 3 million+ files!

 

Wikipedia has now single user login, so they’re expecting to increase their database even more.

 

Technical problems

 

Solved:

 

• Single user login
• Inline video player
• Thumbnails in search results
• Email notifications of talk page changes

 

Wish list for the future:

 

• Global Whatlinkshere (check-usage) – it’s important to help administrators and keep copyright infringement out
• Automatic transfer
• Move/rename images – a move tab. Now you need to use bots to do that.
• Integrated workflow – like having a way if someone already checked the file
• Write (upload) via MediaWiki API - 
• Category display/sorting options
• Category i18n
• Batch uploading
• Upload form customisability
• Searching template fields as a database
• Improved Right-To-Left interface display
• Multilingual interface for non users
• A/V format conversion on upload
• Integrated image editing (esp. SVGs)
• Integrated geo-stuff – as part of MediaWiki, not templates
• Automatic user upload gallery
• Category/user feeds
• File rating systems
• [.. and a few more .. ☺]

 

Commons API

MediaWiki has an API, but the community builds structure in the wiki (templates, categories).

How can register user reliably determine a file’s license and author.

 

Mangnus – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Magnus_Manske – has create a tool for that: http://toolserver.org/~magnus/commonsapi.php

 

Quality processes

 

• Featured pictures
• Quality images
• Valued images

 

A way to encourage people to contribute and recognize their contribution.

 

Cheerleading, partnerships

 

• Picture of the day
• Picture of the year
• Meet our photographers
• Meet our illustrators
• Pearson Scott Foresman – educational publisher donated illustrations (in paper); now they community is tagging and categorizing them and adding other meta-data
• Wikipedia Takes Manhattan – people took photos of Manthattan, lots of high quality pictures of important buildings and places
• (PGIP)

 

Policies and guidelines

GFDL (for text)

It’s a central repository

They want high quality images and meta-data

It’s a volunteer project

[and lots of other information that was too fast to present]

 

Major challenges

Usability – too much warnings, quite scary to upload file

Scope/censorship

Project relationships – all the communities need to work together; some local wikipedias are already requiring people to upload to commons directly

Partnerships – it’s hard to make good connections with institutions on volunteer base

 

Wikimedia Commons, readers’ view / Censorship

Top views show pictures related to sexuality. There is currently a proposal in working that require files to be realistically useful. The problem is that the project doesn’t want to be historically short-sighted.

Hot topics: Violence, Nationalism, Religion, Sex!