Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Annotate

This page is to discuss the proposal of adding the ImageAnnotator to Wikipedia.

=Proposal= This has been first discussed here and later Village_pump_(technical)

 (Add a description of it here. Stress that it will be hidden by default) 

ImageAnnotator as currently used at Wikimedia Commons
ImageAnnotator written by user:Lupo was first introduced on Commons in June 2009. Since then over 14 thousands images were annotated. Under current rules annotations are visible to everybody but only logged-in users can add annotations to the images. Some links of interest:
 * Commons:Category:Images with annotations all the images using annotations
 * Commons:Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator Gadget help page
 * Commons:Commons:Image annotations Official guideline for the use of annotations
 * Commons:MediaWiki:Gadget-ImageAnnotator.js Source code

Image annotator functionality can be divided into three separate capabilities:

Annotations in file namespace
Addition, storage and display of the notes in the file namespace.
 * See Commons:Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator documentation
 * See an example

Inline display of annotations
Inline display of annotations defined in file namespace in other namespaces (including article aka gallery namespace).
 * See commons:Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator for documentation.
 * See here for examples.

Local annotations
Local annotations which allows addition, storage and display of the notes on pages in other namespaces. For example that allow storage of notes inside articles. On commons it is mostly used at pages discussing images, like Commons:Featured picture candidates to point to the discussed regions without littering file namespace with annotations useless to other users.
 * See commons:Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator for documentation.
 * See Commons:Featured picture candidates for an example.

Proposed activation at Wikipadia
For evaluation purposes, see Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator on how you can activate this feature for you.

Annotations in file namespace

 * 1) Activate display of annotations defined and stored at Commons in the file namespace at Wikipedia.
 * 2) Activate addition, storage and display of the notes for files hosted at Wikipedia.

Inline display of annotations
To be discussed after activation of other components. Most likely all annotations stored in file namespace on Wikipedia and on Commons should not be by default displayed in the articles. However ability to selectively turn on annotations for specific image(s) in the article could be valuable.

Local annotations
This feature can be very useful for adding annotations to images in the articles while keeping the text of the annotations under full control of Wikipedia project.

Disputed points
These points are disputed:
 * Should the annotations be the same as the ones from Commons (This is the default behavior of the gadget), or should they be locally added annotations, different on each wiki?
 * Description/Clarification here

Optional extras
Here are some more proposals on how to improve it. (If we're going to install it, why not improve it on the way?)
 * Grouping of annotations, ability to show only certain groups
 * This would allow an editor to choose which groups of annotations would be shown, thereby reducing clutter.
 * Lots of work and lots of user interface changes. Unlikely to be implemented by me in the forseeable future. Lupo 08:51, 5 March 2010 (UTC)