Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-08-15/Serendipity

The thing you have to remember is that even stationary things like buildings and monuments change over time. You have to think of a photograph as not just an object, but as an object-at-a-point-in-time. So if there's been no photograph for the past 5-10 years, I'd say it's still valuable to have a photograph at this point in time. What about during various times of day, or particular seasons? These are all valuable records. So don't be so easily dissuaded from taking photographs. - kosboot (talk) 17:44, 15 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Yes, places change, but when every place on my list is being photographed by others, and some of them are even taking requests, I don't ever need to tackle that work myself. If I could expect or notice any changes, of course I could request another photo or seek one out myself. My efforts are better spent doing things others won't, like this new article: Frederick W. Schumacher mansion (among scores of others!) I can see the same thing happening in most other cities, and especially all cities larger than Columbus, if Wikimedians connect with photographers like I have. ɱ  (talk) 18:40, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * User talk:Ɱ: The Frederick W. Schumacher mansion all of the citations are bare URLs, and most of them are dead links because they were dynamically generated for a logged-in user. A double uh-oh. Maybe they still work for anyone with the proper credentials? If not, the cites are unverifiable because they lack metadata and would thus necessitate deletion per WP:V, making nearly the entire article unreferenced, and thus vulnerable to deletion at AfD. Or, same issue in the future if the links stopped working for logged-in users (inevitable with time), without proper metadata, they are unverifiable. Highly recommend addition of including registration or similar.  --  Green  C  04:47, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * GreenC, I'm still writing the article. Cool your jets. ɱ  (talk) 05:17, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Done, and I have emailed NewsBank in years prior, asking for a more friendly URL. They don't want to do anything, they view it as a database needing a login, not something to integrate into the larger web. Hopefully someday they'll see the value in the latter idea. ɱ  (talk) 17:43, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The article does also read quite a lot like [the author's] city of Columbus, Ohio has a 2020 census population of 905,748. 1234qwer1234qwer4 14:06, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

I like this, contributing in a way that leverages for the greatest good. It is very efficient and scales well, one person can make a bigger impact. Also this idea of pictures through time is interesting. It's hard to sustain when only one person is the photographer, but community effort could keep such a project going indefinitely, and for many places. -- Green  C  04:58, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Just wanted to leave a quick note thanking for you writing this article and bringing this method of contributing to Commons more to my attetntion. Take care. &mdash;The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 20:17, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

We don't often get as good a discussion of Wikiphotography as this one. Jim.henderson (talk) 23:24, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Yes, https://flickr2commons.toolforge.org/ and the future Commons:Flickypedia are awesome projects to migrate photos to Commons. Especially with the new limitations added by Flickr since 2019 that automatically delete older images, we have to hurry with these migrations. Taking photos yourself can be expensive and time consuming, migration provides an easy mechanism to contribute lot of photos of various places and topics to Commons in short time. - Vis M (talk) 20:32, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Yet there are most likely too many such images worthy of inclusion for this process to be fully performed manually, and if it somehow was – that is, if somehow enough people decided to volunteer for this job–, it would seem like quite a waste of editors' time compared to the possibility of using bot imports. 1234qwer1234qwer4 14:04, 31 August 2023 (UTC)