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The coming challenges for Wikimedia Commons
This is thought to be the three millionth file for Wikimedia Commons. We celebrated two million files on October 9, 2007. That was exactly a month after English Wikipedia reached two million articles. Currently, en.wp contains 2.47 million articles. (En.wp is three years older than Commons, but the difference in absolute numbers is not so surprising. Probably most articles can be illustrated in some way, and many in a number of different ways.)
So, Commons is growing fast. Adding over 100,000 files per month. That’s well over 3,000 files every single day.
3M is a friendly warning. It’s another nice milestone but most of our current contributors probably were around for 2M, and a good chunk of them are likely to be around for 4M. The part that makes me wary is the rapid growth we’re facing, and how prepared we are to not only cope with that, but make the most of it.
In my talk at Wikimania, I finished with what I saw as the four big challenges facing Wikimedia Commons in the near future:
- Usability
- Scope/censorship
- Project relationships
- Partnerships.
Partnerships:
There is an excellent post at the Powerhouse Museum’s “Fresh and New(er)” blog about their experience with three months of contributing to Flickr’s “The Commons” project. Compared to the kind of great statistics (and, it must be said, control) that Flickr offers, Wikimedia Commons offers zip. Although we are taking a lot of excellent content from Flickr, we currently give those authors and institutions next to no information about how we use their image. (In fact for a good long time we didn’t even have a regular practice of leaving the author a comment to let them know we’d copied their image.)
Of course, according to the licenses we accept (PD, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) we don’t have to notify the authors or collection owners of anything. But it would be damn nice if we could. It might go a long way in making instutions feel more comfortable upon discovering their content let loose in Wikimedia Commons.
Which is why we need to create and offer institutional stats reports. What we do after that, I’m not too sure, but it’s a start.
Project relationships:
Here I mean the relationship between the Commons community and each community of each other Wikimedia wiki. If I ever see another project get so annoyed that they threaten to (or actually do) tell their users to stop uploading to Commons and just upload locally, then I will consider that the Commons community has massively failed. Luckily I haven’t seen too much sign of this for a while. I think perhaps we are much better integrated with other communities now than we used to be, and that will definitely continue with SUL (Single User Login). SUL should mean more participation from non-regular users, I think, so it will definitely be interesting to compare the activity levels on Commons 6 months before and 6 months after SUL.
I would like to see an automatic move-to-Commons functionality in MediaWiki. I would like to see more communities choosing to turn off local uploads. (As a listener in my talk pointed out, that probably means more communities need to choose to reject fair use.)
Usability:
If you talk to me for long about Commons, you will soon find out I have a list of feature and bug requests as long as my arm. Major functionality required includes file rename capability, increased file size limit, bulk uploading, format transcoding on upload, global Whatlinkshere, search improvements (incl. specific template fields), category improvements, i18n improvements, write/upload via API, integrated workflow processes, integrated feeds and geo-info. Yeah, a bunch of stuff!
(I am glossing over here how tech improvements are going to make sorting and searching a trillion times better, somehow…)
Now having worked a bit on the most recent incarnation of our upload form’s interface, and now having used it a bit, I’m sad to say: it still pretty much sucks. It’s still way too freaking long and picky, with requirements that are annoying when all you want to do is upload.
So, um, it’s not all just lack-of-tech that makes the Commons user experience pretty disappointing. It’s also the Commons community effort (and this definitely includes me) to desperately request every conceivable useful piece of information right at upload.
I think there’s a few reasons for this:
- It’s hard to correct mistakes, so we try to pre-empt them with warnings. (e.g. renaming files, hence lots of warnings about choosing a descriptive filename)
- It’s not as straight-forward to add information after uploading as it is at upload-time. (Afterwards, you have to deal with template syntax, rather than a nice database-like form. This generally reflects the Commons community’s wish to have an underlying database-like structure rather than free-form text.)
- The Commons community is obsessive and loves metadata. (This results in a rich experience for the later image browser, but a generally poor one for the image uploader. Unfortunately we lack good methods of obtaining such data apart from asking for it.)
- The Commons community is vigilant against copyright infringements and copyright fraud. Having your content deleted is about the most crushing thing that can happen to you on a wiki, so we try to annoy you so much that you don’t upload in the first place… unless you’re really, really sure.
Yeah, see how that’s not a great strategy, there?
So our usability problems boil down to two things: Missing functionality, and the balance of discouraging copyright violations against ease of access.
If we were able to handle copyvio deletion more agilely (maybe each file has a tab “flag as copyvio”? and then admins can view that queue of flagged files?), it may be that we would feel comfortable lowering the barrier of ease of access.
Or, alternately, we grow ever more anal with upload requirements, and piss everyone off to the high heavens. :)
Anyway it looks like Commoners generally suffer from the same instruction creep as Wikipedians. That poor Uploadtext …
Scope/censorship:
Saving the most difficult for last.
Just as Wikipedia has WP:IS and WP:NOT, Commons has COM:SCOPE. The Project scope describes the boundaries of acceptable content for Wikimedia Commons.
The problem is, those boundaries tend to be pretty freaking wide, when you want to serve media for an encyclopedia in every single language, and textbooks and courseworks and dictionary definitions and all the rest of it, oh and mind your historical shortsightedness (what is pop-junk today may be sociology gold in 5, 10, 50 or 100 years).
If I read the Village pump, I see concerns raised regularly that Commons is not exactly being used in the way it was intended. Let me elaborate.
And according to wikistics (thankyou Melancholie), the most popular category, by page views so far this month, is Vulva (NSFW). The most popular image (that hasn’t been deleted) is Vagina,Anus,Pereneum-Detail.jpg (NSFW).
OK, these pages are graphic. Is it such a shock that they’re so popular? Is it necessarily a bad thing?
Although for each individual image you could probably mostly construct a more-or-less encyclopedic use for it, taken as a context-less whole, it’s hardly surprising that many users are, well, taken aback. Is this what was envisaged when the project was started?
And yet we are hardly going to delete sex- and nudity-related content wholesale (you’ll never be allowed to forget that Wikipedia is not censored!!) — so where and how can we draw a line?
After my Wikimania talk, one listener essentially suggested we introduce an adult-content filter. After thinking about it for a while, I think this may be a very good compromise. Such a filter amounts to a “warning” (or probably an account preference) before viewing potentially shocking/NSFW content.
If you have different opinions about what the major challenges facing Commons over the next 3-5 years will be (and their potential solutions), I’d love to hear them.
Wikimedia Commons for Fun & Profit; an interesting job in Sydney
…well, far more fun than profit :)
Happily my Wikimania talk is now over. Slides, abstract
Jure Cuhalev wrote up his notes which was very nice. :)
And now, a brief interlude from Liam Wyatt: you can work for him!
The Dictionary of Sydney is hiring.
If you are based in Sydney and have experience in multimedia researching, especially within a historical context, then I encourage you to look into a new job being offered by the Dictionary of Sydney.
The Dictionary is an online history project covering the whole Sydney basin. To find out more about the project, visit: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/
For the full details of the position, visit: http://positions.usyd.edu.au/ and search for position reference: 134833
Quick update from Wikimania
I have tons to blog about, but I thought I would quickly relay that Wikimedia Commons has now reached three million files. :) We’re still working out what we think the 3 millionth file was. Maybe this metro station.
I’m going to write notes at http://identi.ca/pfctdayelise , and I suggest others to do so using the tag #wikimania2008.
APIs: Ask, and ye shall receive
Wow. Wikis just gave me another lesson in awesome. I love it.
While thinking about the problem of Zemanta attribution strings, I mused that we really needed to develop a “Commons API”. There is a MediaWiki API for Commons, but there are more project-specific pieces of information we would like to provide. The big three are
- Deletion markers (warning to machines: don’t use this file)
- License info for a given file
- Author/copyright holder attribution string for a given file
So I made a bit of a start at Commons:API, thinking we could use the wiki pages to write psuedocode algorithms for the different problems. Already I knew at least I, Bryan and Duesentrieb had run across these problems before, and definitely others too. Therefore it made sense to combine our individual algorithms together and define a single, strongest-possible-permutation version and recommend others to use it. I imagined we could describe the algorithm in psuedocode and let people provide implementations in various programming languages. Versioning would kind of suck but hey, an imperfect solution is better than nothing.
However, a perfect solution is even better than both! I barely raised the topic when Magnus actually implemented it (warning: seriously alpha).
First, Magnus is one of my wiki-heroes. You could not ask for a more responsive developer, so it is just delightful when he chimes in on a “what if” discussion. Cool new shiny things are never far away. (Surely one of the strangest things to ever grace the toolserver is still Flommons, the “Flickr-like Commons” interface. Cut away the cruft!) And he is a lovely chap to boot. He tirelessly tweaks and prods any number of “what about…” or “why not move this here?” queries.
My pythonfu is not strong enough that I could code something like this up as he does, in half an hour, but I could probably practice and make some effort and manage it in a period of time. I recognise the neat or nifty factor in creating stuff that was previously just a “what if”. Programming rocks.
Secondly, I love how responsive a wiki community can be. Sure, for every five ideas you might have, four will garner a lukewarm response at best, but every now and then one will strike a chord and get some momentum. “Build it and they will come”; wikis can also obey “name it and they will build it”. [Of course, I’m hardly the first person to suggest Commons needs an API.]
Thirdly, thinking about the other Wikimedia projects — and indeed a good many third-party MediaWiki installs — it is obvious that all the projects may like the chance to define their own API. If nothing else, to define the “deletion markers” and the featured content (rather like another of Magnus’ tools, Catfood – category image RSS feed).
So, what does that suggest… that suggests wiki users need a flexible method of defining new parts of the API. Special:DefineAPI? Probably not, too subject to change.
Extensions can define API modules. So perhaps we should develop Extension:WikimediaCommonsAPI? If every project wanted to do this it may get a bit messy, but most projects wouldn’t bother I imagine.
Again we run up against the need for Commons to have a more structured database, rather than just store all information about an image in a big text blob.
At any rate, I hope we can set the current “pre-alpha” API up as a serious toolserver or svn project with multiple contributors. Wikimedia Commons is lucky to have attracted a relatively techy community of contributors, with a number of people MediaWiki- or toolserver- savvy. Let’s see how we go.
Zemanta - Wikimedia Commons for bloggers
I learned today of a Firefox extension called Zemanta which you can use in conjunction with a supported blogging platform (currently, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad). It will
suggest pictures, links, articles, and tags related to your blog postings. Using proprietary natural language processing and semantic algorithms, Zemanta compares the words in a blog post to their pre-indexed database of other content in order to suggest related items which will display next to your blog post.
The articles Zemanta suggests come from 300 or so “top media sources” as well as the other blogs of Zemanta users. The images suggested come from Wikimedia Commons, flickr, and stock photo providers like Shutterstock and Fotolia.
In their FAQ they say All content that we are suggesting is copyright cleared – either clearly licenced as Creative Commons, or approved by stock providers.
I am happy to see such a service provided. I did think there was a space for it some time ago. If they do it right, then hey, win-win.
As I don’t have a Blogger, Wordpress or Typepad blog, this is a request: if you have one of these blogs, please try it out and let me know what it’s like.
Specifically
- Where are the images hosted? Are they hotlinking from Commons, hosted on their own servers, or they do some voodoo and a local copy gets uploaded as part of your blog? Are there options about file sizes?
- Can you get SVGs?
- When you use it can you easily see which source the image results are from? Is it possible to restrict them to only use one image source?
- Does it seem that they are indexing all of Wikimedia Commons, or only Creative Commons-licensed content? (try to find and insert a GFDL image, or public domain)
- What is the attribution like? Are they able to extract the author information? Do they provide an automatic link back to the Wikimedia Commons page? Do they provide the license name and link?
Some interesting recent Featured Pictures
While watching the latest featured pictures arrive at Wikimedia Commons, I noticed a few types that are new for us. While we have always had some pretty outstanding nature/architecture photography, SVG diagrams and arthropod/plant macros, these ones below represent an expanded repertoire.
Weeki Wachee spring
1947, by Toni Frissell
This is an unusual restoration of a historical photograph, because it is more notable for its author than its subject matter. In this way it is more like a restored art piece than the photographs which have been making their way across FP lately. The impressive and prolific work of Adam Cuerden and Durova have greatly expanded our collection of historical and art works — previously a weakness of our collection, now becoming something of a niche strength.
Mahuri
CC-BY-3.0 by Niabot
Definitely a first: an SVG of an anime character. Hopefully there won’t be too many to follow, but it does show the breadth of experience of our contributors.
Asteracea poster
CC-BY-SA-3.0 by Alvesgaspar and Tony Wills
A new presentation style for a familiar subject. In a similar vein, there is a mustard collage. I do like these posters. Is there a name for this style of work? I am sure more will turn up, so we should collect them.
To pot the red
CC-BY-SA-3.0 by Michael Maggs
I don’t know what you’d call this style of photograph but they are few and far between at Commons. [This nomination only just scraped by in FPC. I will not be too surprised if it scrapes out again soon…]
I remember a few months ago, searching for a photo of a person using a mobile phone. There were hundreds of photos of all kinds of models of mobile phones, sitting all on their lonesome on a desk or table. I don’t think I found even one that showed a person using a mobile phone.
I suppose this points to one of our greatest content weaknesses, which is that of portraits. Simple people.
Most of our Featured Pictures of people are historical portraits, or pictures of activity, or “exotic” travel photography. There are relatively few that would show the everyday life of the photographer or their family, even though these are the photos we would have the most time to practice and perfect.
Maybe in another six months, or a year, or two, the situation will change, and I will be able to show off some loving attention paid to the very domestic and everyday situations that surround our excellent photographers.
Links for 2008-03-18
- Not the Wikipedia Weekly has arrived at Episode 3., in four parts. The first three parts are mostly talking to Sue Gardner, the WMF Executive Director. The last part contains some excellent discussion with Mark Pellegrini about scientists, journals, copyright, Wikipedia, free science and free culture.
- MediaWiki Easter egg hunt: There’s a SUL pilot coming up! (I confess I stumbled across something SUL-like in my Commons prefs last week, and now it is gone.)
This is a preview of what the Commons upload form may look like one of these days… if I have anything to do with it :)
Things to note:
- separate fields for separate pieces of info
- pop-up tooltips (one pointed at), providing extra information about what info is expected, without crowding out the form
- categories are added via HotCat, which means you don’t have to know the name of the category before you start uploading (!)
- the license preview is also provided via a tooltip, so you don’t get the annoying “jump” of the default form (licenses also tend to take up rather a lot of space, and a tooltip can be dismissed, unlike a preview)
- there’s now a preview button for the whole page (unfortunately not the actual image — that will require MediaWiki hacking directly — but all the text)
I love this form :) Try it yourself, if you’re logged in at Commons.
Wikimedia Commons goes 3D
I have subscribed to the RSS feed for the Featured Pictures category, so I frequently have the latest and greatest pictures from Wikimedia Commons weaved among the more mundane feeds on my feed reader. There are some really spectacular finds, and today’s latest caught my eye.
This is an anagylph image of Oxalis triangularis or “Love plant” (note Wikipedia, Wikispecies and EOL all fail to have a page on this species so far).
What does anaglyph mean? It means get out your red-and-cyan 3D paper glasses, baby! :D
Commons even has a category of such images – 270 and counting. Wow.
This picture is by Richard Bartz, one of Commons’ most prolific FP photographers. It’s licensed CC-BY-SA-2.5. He has a well-deserved spot on the Meet our photographers page.
As far as I know, it is the first anaglyph FP. A cool milestone. I love when a project is so big that you can get a great surprise by some activity going on in earnest in another corner that you had no idea about.
Links for 2007-02-04
- OggSearch: Slick toolserver-based search specifically for Ogg audio and video on Commons. It also uses the plugin player so you can play directly from the results – without visiting the Commons page. Bryan = awesome. :)
- Seems like Commons finally has a media move/rename bot. About time…
- Durova has been working on a really cool encyclopedic image restoration project. Give her kudos, ideas and help! This kind of thing is a shining example of Wikimedia culture at its best.
- The Signpost has a useful brief WMF overview of 2007
- Wikitravel has announced Wikitravelpress. Congratulations to Evan and the communities he has facilitated.
- OMG, there’s a new skin! It’s pretty nice. I’m tempted to swap…
- Sue has started a trial of sending her reports to the Board to foundation-l as well. Awesome. See her report for late December. I have to say that since my last post about the institutional feeling at WMF being one that was closed and swirling with change, it has changed dramatically in the four odd weeks since then, largely thanks to how the Kaltura discussion was handled, this post from Sue and numerous initiatives from Florence. It’s very heartening. Although change is still very much in the air, it now feels so much more right.
Commons POTY results
That’s it! The 2007 results are in. As with last year, the winning image dominated voting in the first round and was a clear leader in finals voting as well.
This year’s winner has much less of a “wow” factor than last year’s Aurora Borealis. It marks the first time for a Wikimedian to win this honour (although, an absent one).
Full results are available here.
Copyvios flow in, copyvios flow out
Much of the work at Wikimedia Commons revolves around identifying and removing copyright violations. So it is unusual to find that someone copyio’ed our content rather than the other way round.
Few days ago I got e-mail from London. The guy e-mailed me that he saw my image of a puffer fish at the posters advertising Kleenex in London tube. I asked him, if he could take an image of this poster and he was kind enough to do it for me. He e-mailed the image of the poster to me. There was my fish at this poster all right. I felt “all puffed up” and I e-mailed to Kleenex for the explanations. Today they called me. They admitted they took my image from Wikipedia and they told me that the artist, who did it, was told that Wikipedia is the place to get free images. [..] They apologized, they are going to pay me 700 Pound sterlings, send me the copy of the poster and a letter with the admission they violated my copy rights. My main condition was that I did not want them to punish the artist, who I sure, has not had a bad intention and took my image by mistake.
LOL. I’m pretty sure taking the time to read the license would have been cheaper than £700.
Commons POTY Finals voting begins
Well. After 31,000 votes were cast by over 650 users, I’m sure glad we didn’t count by hand this year. :)
The votes are in, the sockpuppets are discounted, and the finalists are decided. Twenty-eight worthy finalists await your consideration.
Voters cast, on average, about 48 votes. Over a third of voters chose each the tower, the squirrel and the turtle. Water strikes me as a strong theme, being present in 13 (nearly half) of the finalists.
Works by Wikimedians also dominate. Only four of the works are by non-Wikimedians: two from Flickr (the car and the NYC night shot), one (the mosquitoes) is from a Public Library of Science biology article, and one (the firefighting) is from our old friends at the US Air Force. So the odds seem good that this year’s winner wil be by a Wikimedian.
Of the 14 images created by Wikimedians, no less than three photographers have two entries:
- Malene Thyssen has the brown bear and the Egeskov castle
- Luc Viatour has the two cool green plant shots
- David Iliff has the Colosseum and the Palace of Westminster
It is no coincidence that seven of the Wikimedian photographers are featured on the Commons Meet our photographers page!
As with Round 1, eligible Wikimedians can get a voting token at the Voting page. Unlike Round 1, in the final you can only cast one vote. You can also optionally leave a comment about the image you vote for. The comments are collated for the presentation of the final winner, as seen in the 2006 results.
Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year competition now open
I am happy to announce that the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year competition for 2007 is now open!
There are a huge 514 images in contention, all of which became Featured Pictures (FP) during 2007. This is the second year the competition has run. The 2006 competition had around 350 images, so there has been a very impressive growth in the FP process during 2007.
When the competition was first proposed in late 2006 I was quite sceptical. But when I saw how much everyone enjoyed it, and what a good opportunity it was to demonstrate some things that Commons is doing really well, I was converted. It sounds shallow to say that it is a feelgood exercise for Commons but if people from other wikis come and spend some time looking at our images, and feel impressed or enjoy the experience, it can only be a good thing that they will take that good feeling about Commons back to their wiki.
So, I put a lot of effort into organising this one. As a result I am a core committee member and have dealed myself out of the right to vote. And we have complete translations and committee members in a dozen or so languages, and I am so indescribably happy that Japanese is one of them. I really hope it will encourage more Japanese speaking Wikimedians to participate at Commons.
So anyway, the point is that I CAN’T VOTE and therefore YOU MUST TAKE PART ON MY BEHALF so I can experience vicarious joy. :)
Round 1 is open for a week. Any Wikimedian with > 200 edits in a single account is eligible to vote. I will probably post a couple more times about it before it is over, so for now, all I can say is please vote and please enjoy it. :)
Guest blogging
Today I am guest-blogging at the WMF fundraiser blog, Wikimedia Commons: The Power of Free Content Media. I am not sure if I am happy with the piece or not. Maybe there are too many leaps of logic. Maybe not. I was happy to find natural ways to give links to all the Wikimedia projects except for Wikispecies. :)
I considered writing something more “promotional” but it seems a bit pointless when 99.9999% of the world has never heard of Commons. It’s certainly useful within the Wikimedia community, but for the outside world it seems best to let the success become self-evident.
The other thing is that Commons is seriously unusable. :( I can’t in good conscience encourage non-Wikimedians to flock there. I sincerely hope that at least some of my software requests will be implemented in 2008.
The first couple of posts in the fundraiser blog got hundreds of comments. Seriously, 405... that’s insane. It seems to have died down significantly now, which might mean the novelty has worn off, or people are just busy with their holidays now. The voices who responded on the blog seem very different to the voices that I typically see on talk pages on Wikipedia, so it seems like the blog was maybe an outlet for people who appreciate Wikipedia but don’t feel able or are unwilling to contribute to it by editing.
Top 10 software extensions Wikimedia Commons needs in 2008
The end of the year is typically a time for reflection and planning. Planning is much easier than reflection :) so here’s my list of the top ten MediaWiki extensions that Wikimedia Commons (hereafter, just “Commons”) needs.
#0. SUL
Ah, SUL. No acronym brings wry grimaces to the face of a Wikimedian better than this one, and perhaps no issue better demonstrates the consequences of the Wikimedia Foundation’s shoestring budget. Bug 57, Single user login, unified login, CentralAuth — whatever you call it, it should mean that an account created at any Wikimedia wiki allows one to log in at any Wikimedia wiki. Promised since at least 2006, you can currently take part in the testing at test.wikipedia, so there is progress. The full spec is on meta at Help:Unified login.
Why is this relevant to Commons? Because it’s the most likely wiki that editors are likely to use after their “home wiki”. SUL can reasonably be expected to indirectly promote uploading at Commons for Wikimedians, as another barrier to doing so is removed. (Spare a thought especially for the Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedians, who have disabled local uploads entirely.)
#1. Image search
AKA inbuilt Mayflower. Mayflower exists, is open source, and rocks the socks of everyone who uses it. All that’s needed is for some bright spark to specialpage-ize it, and then a little fairy dust to have that as the default search engine/page to be used within Commons.
If you need to be convinced, it’s easy: default MediaWiki search vs Mayflower
#2. Multilingual categories/tagging
Commons is a multilingual project, but since category redirects don’t work as desired, any given category can only work if everyone uses the same name. The category needs to “work”, so that a visitor can go there and expect to find all the media relevant to that concept. But the redirect/alias bizzo also needs to “work”, so a user can tag /categorise their files using their native language.
The urgency of this task is the great shame of a multilingual project having to enforce a single language description on its users. Seriously uncool.
#3. Rating system
Someone did contact me about making progress in coding this up, but I haven’t heard a progress report lately, so it’s definitely something I need to follow up. As Commons grows, it becomes the case that for any given query there may be dozens or even hundreds of relevant files. So having a rank-by-quality or rank-by-average-rating option in the search engine can make a dramatic improvement to the search results.
People love rating stuff, so hey, free data on quality. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any other image database that has a rank-by-rating option but I would be pretty surprised if no one had done it yet.
#4. SVG editing as text
#5. SVG display – pick language labels
#6. SVG display – animated SVGs
These three are naturally related, and arise from the project that’s currently occupying my thoughts (if not my time). SVGs are like the wiki version of an image, as I recently said, because they are so easy to edit. You can open a SVG in a text editor and twiddle with it and save it, and you’ve got a brand new SVG.
But, that’s kind of annoying if MediaWiki wants you to download the file first, and then re-upload it again. Instead, it would make more sense to be able to edit an SVG in a wiki page — exactly the same in fact. Have the edits be recorded in the image history just like text page revisions. It would be a little bit tricky because you would still want to retain the ability to upload a new version of the file, but is surely doable.
From there, it should only be a small hop-step-and-a-leap to a special page extension that allowed one to easily translate text labels inside SVG diagrams.
Take for example this diagram of a biycle. There are currently five different files: Bicycle diagram-en.svg, Bicycle diagram-es.svg, Bicycle diagram-fi.svg, Bicycle diagram2-fr.svg, Bicycle diagram-pl.svg. But there is no need to have five different files. Instead, it would be better to condense all the labels within a single document and extend the image syntax to allow something like this:
[[Image:Bicycle diagram.svg|thumb|language=en]]
So the main part of this request is for the image syntax extension. A tool could be hacked up fairly easily for easy label-translating on the toolserver, I think, although of course it would be preferable within MediaWiki natively.
Lastly, animated SVGs! They’re possible, although admittedly I’ve only ever seen one in existence. GIFs are just so crappy. :( Would be awesome to be bleeding edge on this one.
#7. Gallery preview
Gallery preview exists as JavaScript (and you can install it on Commons now via Special:Preferences > Gadgets), but it would be great to have as a default behaviour. It’s just so nifty! And it encourages browsing around more than the category links at the bottom of the page, I think.
#8. InstantCommons
The idea of InstantCommons is to let any MediaWiki wiki use Commons media as easily and transparently as the Wikimedia wikis do — that is, ‘‘as if the media were uploaded locally’‘. Such a feature would be of immediate interest to Wikitravel and Wikia, both non-Wikimedia projects, and really be a huge leap forward in Commons’ success at sharing free content.
Current status is unknown, but there’s some code in SVN.
#9. Native CheckUsage
As a consequence of #8, this one becomes much more pressing. CheckUsage exists on the toolserver and tells you in which projects a Commons image is being used. Indirectly that tells you how many people you’re likely to piss off if you delete the image without delinking it first.
This is basic necessary functionality for the Commons community. It would be like if you removed the ability to unblock users. We have the ability to do the damage, but we also need the ability to survey the scene and minimise it. So, it is an uncomfortable situation that we rely on half-hacked-up tools for such a critical task, and it would only be moreso the case if InstantCommons was enabled.
#10. ImportFreeImages
This one’s a gimme. The extension exists, it’s already had a decent workout on Wikia, all that’s needed is some code review and a switch-flick.
ImportFreeImages allows the user to search Flickr and transfer an image locally all within MediaWiki. Because Flickr enables Creative Commons licensing, it is a major source of freely-licensed media. But there are two problems. One is that Flickr also allows non-free licensing, so we have major headaches in teaching people the fine distinction between tiny icons. The second is just that it’s annoying to have to manually save the image locally, upload it again, make sure you copy all the relevant author info and so on, and asking people to do that leaves a lot of room for mistakes.
So ImportFreeImages saves all those problems, and because you can restrict which licensed-images you want it to show from Flickr, you can solve the licensing confusion as well. It acts as a filter on Flickr, and just makes the whole thing a breeze for the user. So — awesome.
There are at least 55,000 images from Flickr in Commons at the moment. (Around 2.5% of the total.) It’s common enough, and causes enough confusion, that the community has built a plethora of tools to try and make it easier:
- Flinfo
- Flickr upload bot in conjunction with a toolserver tool
- FlickrReviewR bot trys to automatically confirm any Flickr licensing claims
- Trusted users double-check any that FlickrReviewR couldn’t automatically confirm
(The main reason Commons instituted the flickrreview system was because Flickr lets people change their licenses without any kind of historical display, which is seriously uncool, as far as trying to figure out if a stated license was ever valid goes.)
If we had ImportFreeImages, we could more or less forbid people from manually uploading Flickr images, and goodbye Flickr hassle!
So that’s my list. There are other things that I want, such as structured data, but I don’t really see it as likely to happen by the end of 2008. 2010, maybe. These ones all seem within reach (OK, with the exception of #2, but you have to dream big, right?). If there’s anything you think I missed, drop me a note and let’s hear it.
i has a serius biznis: lolwiki
There is a profound movement that in recent years has changed the way everyone uses and understands the web. I am talking, of course, about lolcats.
Lolcats have been around for a while, but I had my attention returned to them recently when I discovered LOLpols (politicians). Australia just had a federal election and the results are much to my liking, so I was feeling inspired.
(This is Maxine McKew, a “star recruit” who campaigned her butt off to win the Prime Minister’s seat, which is an impressive feat in anyone’s book.)
Let the lolcats be free!
Naturally Wikimedia needs lolcats to, um, illustrate internet phenomena. A couple of weeks ago I created Category:Lolcats and added its RSS feed to my feed reader.
CC-BY.
I am proud of this one because I think the cat really is investigating the sock quite thoroughly. :)
Now inspiration is spreading:
© Gurch, CC-BY-SA.
© bainer, CC-BY-SA.
© Gracenotes, CC-BY-SA.
Very clever. I wonder if we will end up with a lolcat for each major policy?
Tonight I realised the natural progression of this theme: the LOLjimbo.
CC-BY-SA.
Jimmy is a natural. And that, I suppose, could be considered an extension of lolgeeks. It never ends.
Playing within the rules: Free content communities and copyright
It is commented sometimes that Commons is a haven for a particular variety of wikilawyering known as copyright wikilawyering. It is one of the most irritating types of wikilawyering to be on the receiving end of (and I have, several times), because for Wikimedians there is no trump to the “non-free content” card. It can seem utterly petty and pointless.
But (although we don’t have to be jerks about it) we have no choice. There are two ways to protest the current copyright system: use the existing system to subvert the traditional conclusions from within the system; or fight through courts and parliaments to have the system changed. If you use Creative Commons, or like to think of yourself as part of the “free content movement” like Wikimedia does, then you are part of the former.
And if you choose to play the game, you have to play it better than anyone. You accept the limitations as soon as you deal yourself in, and you work within those parameters. And that’s why you learn about freedom of panorama and sadly find yourself applying it to all kinds of previously-thought-free scenes. Just as Wikiquette has “Assume good faith”, Free content has “Assume unfree content”. They play off each other uneasily at times.
The benefits of this approach, of playing the copyright game, are that anyone can do it, today, right now. They can give up some of their copyrights and let people copy their work as suits them. Fighting in courts and parliaments is expensive and difficult with no great hope or guarantee of victory.
It would be nice if our lawmakers would go back to the drawing board and write a new copyright that made sense in the era of the Internet, but all efforts to “fix” copyright since the passage of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 have only made things worse, granting more unenforceable exclusive rights to an ever-increasing pool of “authors” who have no need or desire to sue the people with whom they are engaged in the business of “culture” — holding conversations, publicly re-imagining the stories that make up their lives.
Creative Commons aims to do what Congress won’t or can’t do — offer an approach to copyright that helps those of us who don’t want deal that Disney and their pals have insisted on for every snatch of creativity. Creative Commons achieves this through a set of licenses, legal notices that set out permitted uses for creative works.
In explaining the benefit of Creative Commons, he also exactly highlights its weaknesses. Lawmakers have failed us (most jurisdictions worldwide now have ridiculous copyright terms). Creative Commons is a soothing non-answer to this failure.
It reminds me, in a strange way, of how the media promotes outrageous ideals of beauty for women, and many women feel it is their personal failure for not meeting these ideals rather than the extremity of the outrageous system in the first place. It’s the twisted system that needs your attention, not your personal behaviour.
I like Creative Commons. But I wish I had an angry noisy anti-copyright-system movement to go along with it.
News and notes from Creative Commons land
Virgin Australia has been hit with a lawsuit for its use of a photograph from Flickr in an ad campaign. The girl in the photo is underage and her-friend-the-photographer naturally didn’t get any kind of model release before licensing the photo CC-BY on Flickr.
Lawrence Lessig has a copy of the lawsuit on his blog which explains why Creative Commons has been named as a party in the lawsuit. It basically amounts to “they didn’t explicitly warn me something like this could happen”.
My thoughts are that I’m glad Virgin is being sued over this. They were jerks to use this photo in the first place. I understand that stupid multinational corporations can use works I license under CC licenses, but I’m happy they’re being pulled into line. I think CC being named in the suit is just misguided, but maybe it won’t hurt for the licenses to be tested in court. :) Is a URL without a username sufficient attribution?
Second thought. This confirms my belief that conscientious photographers should avoid CC licensing photographs of people. I would never CC license a photo of my friends. Famous people are fair game.
Third thought. I hope this inspires CC users to read up what they’re actually agreeing to. Like something interesting I discovered: the version 1.0 licenses have this clause:
By offering the Work for public release under this License, Licensor represents and warrants that, to the best of Licensor’s knowledge after reasonable inquiry:1. Licensor has secured all rights in the Work necessary to grant the license rights hereunder and to permit the lawful exercise of the rights granted hereunder without You having any obligation to pay any royalties, compulsory license fees, residuals or any other payments;
2. The Work does not infringe the copyright, trademark, publicity rights, common law rights or any other right of any third party or constitute defamation, invasion of privacy or other tortious injury to any third party.
Hm, well that makes all my CC-BY-SA-1.0 releases invalid, because I sure as hell never checked those things. And I sure as hell don’t intend to. Happily, CC seems to agree that those things don’t in fact belong in copyright licenses.
On the cc-community mailing list, there has been a killer thread about what “NC” (non-commercial, as in “this photo can be used for non-commercial purposes”) means (entitled “What does NC means?”). Many people are confused about this, and CC doesn’t seem in any rush to clear up the confusion. They seem happy with the poorly defined but vaguely comforting terms. Terry Hancock writes eloquently here about how NC and ND licenses betray the tradition that the “commons” part of the Creative Commons name lays claim to.
There seem to be plenty of people within CC culture who are pissed about this, but CC doesn’t seem willing to act to even encourage people towards freer license terms. They emphasise the clarity of “choice” to the individual licensor at the expense of benefit to the commons they purport to help create. It is kinda annoying.
I am starting to think we need a http://www.NCandNDarenotfree.org/ with arguments and polite form letters that people can send to probably-misguided NC and ND license users. Especially people who set site-wide licenses, like wiki administrators: these people need a clip around the ear if they choose a NC or ND license. Well, first they need a persuasive argument, then if they persist, the clip. It could be like GNU’s campaign to end Word attachments, Although they appear to have lost the war, but small individual battles are won each day.
And the last mention must go to the recent iCommons iHeritage event, celebrating South African Heritage day. They were uploading media to Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. There is probably still a bit to go as they were recording audio as well. I helped out a bit by creating some help files on Wikimedia Commons.
I’m sure there is much more content on Flickr. I can’t really blame anyone who chose to upload there instead of Commons. I suppose the good thing is our Flickr transfer service making copying them over nice and easy. :)
Spotlight on Wikimedia Commons
I wrote an article for the iCommons newsletter, which is probably due to come out soon, and in the meantime it’s been published on the iCommons front page. (I don’t quite know how the voting works but I suspect it got some behind-the-scenes tweaking to push it through…) In the meantime I thought it might be useful for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki , hopefully as a decent introduction for people who’ve never heard of the project.
I am nothing if not a diligent recycler!
