Proposal talk:Make Commons more accessible to the average visitor

Take this even farther

I like the way this proposal is going, but IMHO we need to think even bigger: We should start asking ourselves whether MediaWiki is really the right software to host a media library. We are seeing so many hacks and gadgets that probably we will have more JavaScript code than PHP code. The category/gallery system in its current form is not really an optimal way to organize the images. We have no way of storing and crawling meta data. The total openness of MediaWiki allows vandals to access vital licensing information. This has lead to images having their licensing information removed. We have had users change licenses retroactively and all of this has often been noted several weeks, months or even years after it happened. The problem with MediaWiki is that it is organized as individual pages without any link between them. This works fine for text projects: Say you are interested in a certain subject. You just go ahead and add the 3 to 10 pages covering the main aspects of your subject to your watchlist and you know when something changes. Those pages also usually have links to similar subjects, so you find stuff that is linked to what you are interested in. Let's look at how this works at Commons: You don't have a way of being notified when new media files relating to a certain subject are added. All you can do is periodically check the categories and hope that people put their newly uploaded stuff in there. If they don't you have no way of ever finding it. Even if you find something, it is plain impossible to add all the images to you watchlist. You won't realize when someone vandalizes the image. Now what I'm thinking about is something like Flickr, though much more customizable and much more open. We should still have pages that are free to edit for everyone and we should still have community discussion about deletions, but we should limit access to some features: Licenses should not be revokable, new licenses should only be added by uploaders, OTRS permissions should only be added by OTRS volunteers, meta data should be stored in the database and (most importantly) should be searchable. We need to allow people to perform advanced search operations without having to go through the API. All of this would require massive hacks to MediaWiki itself, so I don't think that patching it or creating an extension is a solution to this. IMHO we need to write this from scratch or maybe adopt another free software which provides some of this functionality. Regards, --ChrisiPK 22:33, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Agree, that would be best in the long term. It always baffles me how many hacks are used on Commons (e.g. text-based voting when every other site in the world has actual voting buttons). -- JovanCormac 06:04, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not very familiar with Commons. Is there a facility to tag images and all the other media? --Bodnotbod 18:39, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

No, there are no tags. There are categories, but they don't offer the free and easy advantages of tagging. There is, however, a brand new image annotation feature that lets users add comments to particular areas of an image.--ragesoss 20:37, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

...which is once again yet another JavaScript hack to provide functionality which should have been built in the software from the start. Regards, --ChrisiPK 23:56, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Agree with this and I would love it if they used the same for all language wikipedias too, as navigating through the image dir's on there is horrendous and yet essential - especially in the Fair Use directories of e.g. w:en:Category:Logos. No-one seems to give two hoots about maintaining these areas which we should all be keeping an eye on for potential copyright issues., most probably because it's such a pain in the arse. 84.66.25.206 00:10, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

I am happy to see this proposal. In addition to the Ford Foundation grant, I would like to draw your attention to m:Multimedia Usability Project Meeting October 2009. --pfctdayelise 07:05, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:12, 3 September 2009 (UTC)