Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-09-03/News and notes


 * While Wiki Loves Monuments is a great idea, the opportunity to improve outcomes by helping participants paying more attention to quality seem to have been missed again. If only people could stop chasing numbers, learn from past experience and be more targeted on quality. A quick look to some of the new images reveals stuff like: "Monument nr. 1", "Monument n.r 3", copyvio, watermarked copyvio. -- ELEKHHT 21:18, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Het Elekhh,
 * There are two different points you tackle. Quite rightly, you point to copyright violations and non-monumental uploads. Of course you always get several of those, and you also get them through regular uploads. That is no big problem, and as you can see already, they are taken care of by the regular Wikimedia Commons deletion procedures. These 'bad photos' do not decrease the quality of the great and awesome photos I have also seen.
 * The second point you mention is quality. I guess you're partially referring to 'megapixel quality' which is perhaps not always the case. Personally, I'm happy with every decent photo. If we get a few crappy photos for every decent photo that is acceptable to me - as long as those crappy photos don't end up in the encyclopedia. I think that currently the filters we built in for that are pretty solid.
 * The question is primarily, what approach do you take. Do you want to prevent them to be uploaded in the first place then it would also mean that as a side effect you would probably stop several great images to be uploaded too. So I prefer to take the approach we have at Wikipedia too. Assume good faith, assume people will upload good pictures, and act in specific cases if proven otherwise. I hope that answers to your worries. effeietsanders 21:49, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Sorry, it doesn't. And I wasn't referring to megapixels. I was referring to badly exposed, blurred, wrong WB, poorly described, poorly composed, etc images. I am talking about the reticence of organisers to provide preliminary information about image quality, as they seem too afraid that would deter participation. This is the result of seeing success as number of uploads (BIG counters everywhere), and not number of useful uploads. I couldn't find any evaluation of the 2011 WLM in terms of usefulness. So is this news item focused on total number of uploads ("extraordinary 168,208 free images") as an indicator of success. But how many are actually used in articles? How many are featured quality? -- ELEKHHT 22:25, 4 September 2012 (UTC)


 * The old discussion about quality versus quantity. The contest awards best photos, isn't that enough? Of course you will get some bad photos, some very nice ones, and a lot of regular ones. I hope you can create a Wiki Loves Featured Pictures of Monuments contest, and get as many participants as Nupedia and Citizendium. And you forget that in places like India people don't have very good cameras. You can see bad photos in every Wikimedia Commons day, this is not an issue of WLM. Regards. emijrp (talk) 12:10, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
 * In case you misunderstood, the issue of WLM is simply asking for more photos, instead of more useful photos. The reticence to improve on this I find remarkable. Until then for me as a Wikipedia editor WLM makes at best no difference, as I haven't come yet across a single WLM image I could use in an article. Instead in categories of popular monuments is much harder to find the good images among the hundreds. Anyway, this is just repeating the discussion from last year. Seems that the consensus is that is all fine. -- ELEKHHT 23:59, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I am very sorry to hear that you find all Wiki Loves Monuments pictures useless, but it looks to me that you haven't been looking too closely; see Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2011/Highlighted pictures for a list of 2011 Wiki Loves Monuments pictures that were highlighted by the Commons community (468 quality images + 18 valued images + 12 featured pictures isn't that bad, and I bet the list isn't complete). odder (talk) 08:18, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I appreciate that finally somebody replies to some of the issues raised. But to set it clear I haven't stated that "all Wiki Loves Monuments pictures [are] useless", that's a misrepresentation. I haven't noticed the page which was relatively recently created (March 2012), and I think as far metrics goes,would have been relevant for the reader to know that about 500 images are outstanding in some way in terms of technical quality. I would be even more interested in the number of WLM2011 images in use. -- ELEKHHT 01:59, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
 * A quick count with the GLAMorous tool reports that of the 168,000 images uploaded as part of Wiki Loves Monuments 2011, 6,385 different images are used 8,962 times in the (main) namespace on all Wikimedia projects. For the English Wikipedia alone, 1,280 different images are used 1,580 times in total in the article namespace; but please remember that none of the countries participating last year use English as their official language, and the images are much more heavily used on the local Wikipedias than here (especially on the German, Dutch and French Wikipedias). Besides that, some Wikipedias have their lists of monuments located in other namespaces than the main one (Project, Wikiproject, etc.), so the total usage of the files might be higher. odder (talk) 21:18, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that's an excellent tool! So that's a 0.8% usage rate for the English Wiki and 3.8% usage for all Wikimedia projects. I think that is consistent with the argument that there is scope for improvement. -- ELEKHHT 22:26, 8 September 2012 (UTC)


 * So why did UK drop the ball and is not participating in the contest? They even have a WMF local chapter... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 16:04, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Mebbe they thought they had contributed enough & took a break this year? (ISTR the British Isles have extensive articles on local sites & landmarks.) Some countries that should have been encouraged to participate include Greece, Turkey, & Egypt -- & to combat the chronic issue of systemic bias Japan, Korea, China, Eritrea, Ethiopia, & Peru. -- llywrch (talk) 16:32, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I would like to stress that the international team encouraged a lot of countries from the very start. I personally would have loved to have Egypt on board – however, if you remember the political situation this summer, there were more basic problems than building and motivating a Wikipedia community and converting monuments lists there. We also have to appreciate that despite of a small or missing local community (which is one of the main reason for not taking part for some countries), some communities might have different priorities and need to choose their project engagement economically in terms of human resources. --elya (talk) 17:24, 5 September 2012 (UTC)


 * The main reason for no UK participation is that existing coverage of "monuments" in the UK is already very strong for a number of reasons (e.g. Geograph), making it far more difficult to determine a competition metric. Many Geograph uploads are still uncategorised, additionally. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 21:33, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but this isn't right. The main reason for the UK not participating is that there hasn't been enough involvement and interest from the local volunteers (also involved with Wikimedia UK), which is a basic requirement for a Wiki Loves Monuments competition. Organising a contest like that requires a lot of effort and time, and you cannot do that without local involvement; see FAQ for more information on that. odder (talk) 08:10, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I believe the reason Australia is not yet involved is at least partly related to the complexity and unreliability of monument listing. Tony   (talk)  08:15, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Hmm, it's interesting; I generated that overview by rereading the WMUK-l posts relating to WLM, but now I come to looking at the notes of the meeting I can accept there was some desire (but not the manpower) to overcome that and related issues. I'd contend, though, that already having reasonable coverage already was a significant demotivating factor, although you are probably better placed to know than me. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 18:47, 7 September 2012 (UTC)