Commons-l November 2010

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

15 participants
9 discussions

What do you like of the various Flickr upload tools
by Bryan Tong Minh 04 Jan '11

04 Jan '11

Hi all, As most of you probably know, I wrote Flickr upload bot back in May 2007 because there was a lot demand for uploading free images from Flickr to Commons. And apparently people find it useful, since as of September 2010, over 80k images have been uploaded via this bot. In addition over 50k images have been uploaded via a similar bot by Magnus Manske. Unfortunately as you may know, every other day those tools break (mine more than Magnus'). Both have an annoying authentication mechanism, which requires you to do extra stuff to be able to upload (either post a token to a file page, or use TUSC). Both problems would be solved if there was a MediaWiki extension to handle this task. I eventually plan to write a MediaWiki extension that does such a thing and get it enabled on Commons. Therefore, I need to know what you like and dislike about those tools, so that I can take this feedback into account when writing this extension. Don't expect to see something in the short term though, but I hope that in the mid-long term we will have such an extension on Commons. -- Bryan

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Wikidata
by José Emilio Mori Recio 29 Nov '10

29 Nov '10

Hello. I'd like to absolutely and strongly support the Wikidata project idea (I've suscribed just to write this, so you can imagine). I've been thinking about it before I knew I wasn't the first one. Apart from the strategy proposals, there are more on Meta, and works in that direction (data templates) on de.wiki and en.wiki, at least. In es.wiki I'm trying to open the same way, but only a global project would make sense. A real database implementation could cost a great effort, so maybe an easier "global templates" solution (in the same way Commons is available for the rest of the projects) should be considered, as there could be useful global templates apart from the data templates. Anyway, I think Wikidata is definitely something we must have. Answering to Michael Peel, if some concrete definition is needed about what Wikidata should be, I'd be glad to help in the process. I wrote more about that subject in the WMF list a few months ago (http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/058688.html), but with no luck. So, my question is: What is needed in order for this to be real? Should I/we/someone make an official proposal to someone or some group? José Emilio, -jem- in the projects

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Restricted uploads proposal
by Erik Moeller 25 Nov '10

25 Nov '10

We need to find a way to support source file uploads to Wikimedia Commons to ensure continued re-usability of all content. This is my proposal, based on earlier discussions on wikitech-l and commons-l. I'd appreciate your feedback/edits: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Restricted_uploads Thanks! Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Wikidata
by John Vandenberg 24 Nov '10

24 Nov '10

It looks like a solution to bug 4547 is on the horizon. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4547 See also [Wikitech-l] Reasonably efficient interwiki transclusion http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/197322 This will be very useful for templates which Commons has developed, especially language related templates, however I am concerned that people are also planning on using Commons as a repo for Wikipedia infoboxes, and including the *data* on Commons rather than just the template code. e.g. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Peter17/GSoc_2010#Interest This centralisation of data makes sense on many levels, however using Commons as the host of this data will result in many edit wars moving to the Commons project, involving people from many languages. Even the infobox structure can be the cause of edit wars. I think it is undesirable to have these Wikipedia problems added to Commons existing problems. ;-) Tying Wikipedia and Commons closer together is also problematic when we consider the differing audience and scope of each project, especially in light of the recent media problems. If the core templates and data used by Wikipedia are hosted/modified on Commons, it will be more difficult to justify why Commons accepts content which isn't appropriate on Wikipedia. A centralised data wiki has been proposed previously, many times: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/historical http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata_%282%29 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiDatabank Non-WMF projects, such as freebase, dbpedia, etc., have been exploring this space. Isn't it time that we started a new project!? ;-) A wikidata project could use semantic mediawiki from the outset, and be seeded with data from dbpedia. A lot of existing & proposed projects would benefit from a centralised wikidata project. e.g. a genealogy wiki could use the relationships stored on the wikidata project. wikisource and commons could use the central data wiki for their Author and Creator details. -- John Vandenberg

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Re: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l] Wikidata
by aude 22 Nov '10

22 Nov '10

On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 5:31 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 8:24 AM, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote: > > > >> Could this be part of dbpedia? > > > > dbpedia is about collating the information available on Wikipedia and > providing that as a database for others to use. This is about having a > central information store that can be edited to add information. Whilst > dbpedia could seed wikidata, they're very different projects in the way they > would operate. > > I agree. > > > In my opinion, the Wikimedia Foundation should very seriously look into > starting something like wikidata. I don't suppose there's a facilitator that > could be hired that knows about Wikimedia sufficiently to facilitate an > on-wiki discussion and formation of a comprehensive proposal to start this > project, including bringing together the various people interested in this > project? > > +1 Definitely want to see this implemented for Wikimedia. We had a bunch of related strategy proposals calling for us to do something like this: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Data.wikimedia.org http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Data-driven_content http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Structured_Data more... We have our own data like coordinates that would be great to share across projects. Seeing governments and organisations (e.g. http://data.worldbank.org/, http://data.gov, http://data.gov.uk/ ...) jumping in on doing *open* data, we have an opportunity make use of it for infoboxes, charts, etc. Then, there's geodata from OpenStreetMap and elsewhere... -Katie (@aude) > As it is the first new project in quite a long time, having a WMF > staff member assigned to it would be brilliant. > As this would/should involve the first deployment of semantic > mediawiki by WMF, it would be good for that someone to already > experienced with semantic medawiki. > > -- > John Vandenberg > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l >

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Office Hours with Executive Director Sue Gardner, today 18:00 UTC
by Steven Walling 10 Nov '10

10 Nov '10

Hi everyone, Today at 18:00 UTC will be IRC Office Hours with the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director, Sue Gardner. As usual it will take place in #wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net. You can find links to time conversions and a guide to accessing IRC at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours Reflecting on the past few chat sessions, we've noticed that the most productive (in terms of most questions answered, most participants etc.) have been the ones with a little bit of prep work on the topic. The recent fundraising session, Sue's on Pending Changes, and interviews with new Wikimedia staff have all been extremely helpful. That's why we'd like to try something a little different for Sue's Office Hours today. We're going to devote the first 30 minutes for a structured topic discussion. During that 30 minutes attendees can write their questions on the Meta page mentioned above, and simultaneously !vote on/discuss the proposed questions. The 3-6 top questions will be answered during the second half of the hour. This way we actually answer the questions that interest the attendees, rather than miss really valuable questions and discussion. We hope you'll try this experiment with us. We're trying to find some balance between a free-flowing discussion and some structure that allows deeper conversation about topics important to Wikimedia. Thanks, -- Steven Walling Wikimedia Foundation Fellow (wikimediafoundation.org)

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Licensing tutorial now published
by Guillaume Paumier 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

Copied from the associated blog post: http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/11/05/illustrated-licensing-tutorial-wi… ------------------------------------------------------------------ Free knowledge is the foundation of all Wikimedia projects: anyone is free to use, modify and redistribute the content for any purpose. But copyright and free licenses are very confusing for new users, especially when they want to contribute pictures and other media files. A new illustrated licensing tutorial will now guide new users through the basics of copyright and free licenses to make their first steps easier. You may remember that the Wikimedia Foundation unveiled a prototype of upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons (the repository of freely reusable media files used in all of our projects) a few months ago. The prototype was developed as part of the Multimedia usability project, a grant-funded, one-year project aiming to increase multimedia participation on Wikimedia websites. One of the main issues identified early on is that the current workflow of the upload process attempts to provide an advanced course in worldwide copyright when the user uploads a file. In reality, our research showed (unsurprisingly) that most users either gave up in front of the overwhelming instructions, or simply ignored them. Our approach was to separate the “educational” part of the upload page from the actual upload form. Copyright has proven to be one of the most unappealing topics to new users, who simply want to share their knowledge and artwork. For that reason, we created an illustrated Licensing tutorial in a comic-strip format. This licensing tutorial was developed with experienced Wikimedians, who had both the expertise on copyright and licenses, and the experience of guiding new users. They collaboratively improved the wording and suggested many changes to the illustrator. You will see that the tutorial features a new character, who was developed specifically for this project. We experimented with several others, but the puzzle-piece character was the one that worked the best. Although developed primarily for Wikimedia Commons, both the tutorial and the character are under a free license; we hope experienced participants will reuse them for similar tutorials and across help pages. The tutorial was created by Michael Bartalos, a freelance illustrator from San Francisco. Michael did an awesome job at illustrating complex topics without sacrificing readability or accuracy. I would like to thank him for putting up with our hands-on approach; it surely wasn’t easy to accommodate our requests and all the little details in wording, typography and graphics that Wikimedians are expert at. The tutorial is now available on Wikimedia Commons as an editable vector graphics file (SVG) to facilitate localization. It will be included in the Upload wizard’s interface when it is released at the end of November. In the meantime, Wikimedia translators are warmly invited to help translate and localize the tutorial. If you don’t feel comfortable creating the localized tutorials yourself, you can focus on the text. We’ll seek help from the Graphic Lab on Commons to create the localized artwork. Main links: * Licensing tutorial: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Licensing_tutorial_en.svg * Translation & localization: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_tutorial -- Guillaume Paumier Product Manager - Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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REMINDER: Fundraising Office Hours-Today!
by James Alexander 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

Hi again everyone! A quick reminder that the fundraising team will be having IRC office hours today, Friday November 5th, at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT, 18:00 EDT 23:00 CET) in the #wikimedia-office channel of the Freenode IRC network. If you are interested in what we have been doing recently I encourage you to take a look at the Meta fundraising portal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010 <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010> or join us on IRC in the #wikimedia-fundraising channel at any time. If you do not have an IRC client, there are two ways you can come join the chat using a web browser: First, using the Wikizine chat gateway at http://chatwikizine.memebot.com/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi. Type a nickname, select irc.freenode.net from the top menu and #wikimedia-office from the following menu, then login to join. Or, you can access Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/ , typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing #wikimedia-office as the channel. You may be prompted to click through a security warning, which you can click to accept. Please feel free to forward and translate this email to any list I may have missed and I hope to see everyone there! -- James Alexander Associate Community Officer Wikimedia Foundation

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Fundraising Office Hours
by James Alexander 03 Nov '10

03 Nov '10

Hi Everyone! With the Annual Fundraiser starting in less then two weeks the fundraising team will be having IRC office hours this Friday November 5th at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT, 18:00 EDT 23:00 CET orhere <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=11&day=5&year=20…> for more timezones) in the #wikimedia-office channel of the Freenode IRC network. If you are interested in what we have been doing recently I encourage you to take a look at the Meta fundraising portal athttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010 or join us on IRC in the #wikimedia-fundraising channel at any time. If you do not have an IRC client, there are two ways you can come chat using a web browser: First, using the Wikizine chat gateway at <http://chatwikizine.memebot.com/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi>. Type a nickname, select irc.freenode.net from the top menu and #wikimedia-office from the following menu, then login to join. Or, you can access Freenode by going tohttp://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing #wikimedia-office as the channel. You may be prompted to click through a security warning, which you can click to accept. Please feel free to forward and translate this email to any list I may have missed and I hope to see everyone there! -- James Alexander Associate Community Officer Wikimedia Foundation

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Commons-l November 2010