This isn't directly related to the board meeting, but I want to pause for a moment to share some ideas. Not all of them are mine, quite a bit of this is directly from the chapters.
The Swedish chapter had the idea to declare 2009 The Year of the Picture, to put a concerted effort into adding images to the Wikimedia Commons, along with using more illustrations in Wikipedia and elsewhere. I think this is absolutely a great idea. Making better use of visual material in our projects also fits in with the ongoing effort to improve quality. I applaud the efforts of all the chapters in this area, and I encourage anyone who can to join in. You may recall that the German chapter recently secured the release of a large number of images from their federal archive, and several other chapters are also working on free image collection projects. Hopefully our April meetings of chapter representatives, in conjunction with the board, will be an opportunity to develop more ideas and strategies. And of course, you don't even need to have a recognized chapter to get a group together and organize photo expeditions, as for example some of the people in the now-approved New York chapter have done. Commons is obviously an important part of any such efforts, as our repository for freely licensed media. Now because Commons is a project in itself, there has always been some tension around how separate and independent it should be from the other projects. Should it be considered to have its own community? (Yes, says Brianna, otherwise it would be no different from Photobucket.) How much should it take direction from the other projects in order to serve their needs? For that matter, should the other projects occasionally take direction from Commons as its participants do things like screen for copyright issues? Just how broad of a scope does Commons have? Our mission, fundamentally, is educational. That may sometimes be a limitation, where media that doesn't have serious educational potential should be avoided as a distraction, or things that detract from education can be edited out. However, the needs of education may be broad indeed, so I'd say that the scope of Commons could be broader - actually, maybe I should say deeper instead. Along those lines, I'll share some comments I made in an internal discussion on the subject. Speaking primarily from my experience working with images, I find it really restrictive to think of Commons as limited to those images actually needed for Wikipedia. I think perhaps we should approach it from the perspective of what a project like Wikibooks could use - Wikibooks not as it is, but as it could be. The actual art of matching illustrations to text requires having not just one passably suitable picture, but choosing the best for your particular purpose out of a range of similar options. It also is not a matter of taking the one platonically perfect picture and dropping it in every conceivable place, though given what's currently available that's often what we end up doing. To find a good illustration when you want one ultimately demands a vast library of images, many of which might never be used otherwise because nobody has called for the particular combination of features they provide. I deal with this regularly in a professional capacity, this is what stock photography firms are built on, and I can assure you that there is no adequate freely licensed stock photography resource in the world. Commons is the best there is, and it is barely usable, and then only sporadically. Maybe some people imagine we have too many pictures of people's cats and dogs, since those are popular subjects, but I'll say we don't have nearly enough even of that - and in particular we don't have enough variety. Suppose I wanted a picture of a dog and a cat together, a fairly mundane subject, for which I did at least find a category with 27 files at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cats_and_dogs. I suppose that's a start, but at a glance there's no way that provides enough options for what I might want, especially if I was particular about how they're posed or what breed they are. There are no doubt bigger gaps in our library, and arguably more important ones. But mostly we need to get more pictures and figure out ways to use them. --Michael Snow _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
