What is the FoP handling on images to be ?
Is everything going to be done in the moderation queue and all the workload will fall to Commons, or will the app do some useful work such as allowing the user to label their images as building, 3D work of art (sculpture) etc, to ease the moderation work (and similarly, will they be able to note that the image has personality rights issues, trademark issues etc).
Hi @Nick First off, it is really good to hear from someone who is active on Commons. I don't think we have good answers to these except that creating unwanted work for the Commons community is not acceptable. The whole idea here is to add value to the community without creating a moderation/curation nightmare. If you see @BethNaught's comment here you can see that there seems to be a strong resistance to having much/any moderation in the app that doesn't also appear in the desktop wiki queue. I would very much like to explore if there is any overlap: where readers can add value and use the scale of other readers/app users to police without creating more work or tarnishing the quality of the project.
The point of this consultation is really to identify if there are any ways you could imagine a large population of interested readers helping commons or other wikis, given that they have limited context. We think that images represent a very obvious starting point since image uploads on phones are easier than desktop for a casual user and identifying "is this an image of a mountain" seems like something most people could do. We even thought that readers might be able to rate image quality (it would take many users per picture) and you could then use that in search or other discovery mechanisms. Copyright and FoP are areas where casual readers cannot be expected to understand and so I am not sure how we should handle that aspect. Any ideas welcome. Also, how do you think we could reach and hear from other Commons users?
I think the best option is to let Commons know when there's next an Office hours chat (or something similar) on IRC.
I had a chat with several interested users yesterday evening on IRC, and all who participated (very informally) had similar thoughts about what we might want added to the app, and how it would work.
We think allowing a user to take photographs and to then obtain information about the photographs they select to upload/submit to Commons would be more helpful than having users wade through pages of copyright, freedom of panorama, personality rights and trademark data before they can take photographs/videos.
We thought after images have been taken, getting some basic information from the user would then be easiest - so the user selects if the photograph they've taken a picture/video of is of a building, a statue, if there are other people clearly visible etc. This will aide correct categorisation as much as helping us screen for copyright issues.
The app then does some automatic categorisation for 'us' on Commons based on what simple choices the user has selected - for example if they take a picture of Cloud Gate ('The Bean') in Chicago, during upload they tap that the photo is of a 3D artwork (or sculpture etc) and it's automatically categorised into a holding category such as whilst similar works from the UK would go into or something similar.
I'm sure Commons would be quite happy hosting a protected page with settings for the maintenance categories and relevant data on freedom of panorama etc, which the app could use during the upload process.
It seems Aunt Flo has stripped out a couple of example categories I mentioned.
To clarify and make part of my message make sense:
The app then does some automatic categorisation for 'us' on Commons based on what simple choices the user has selected - for example if they take a picture of Cloud Gate ('The Bean') in Chicago, during upload they tap that the photo is of a 3D artwork (or sculpture etc) and it's automatically categorised into a holding category such as Category:Possible non free 3D artwork images (USA) whilst similar works from the UK would go into Category:Possible free 3D artwork images (UK) or something similar.
We do have GPS coordinates for many monuments already tagged, that can be used in accordance with the phone's GPS. At the very least we would welcome admin categories based on the category selected, and location file is uploaded in. At the very least they can be suggestions to the uploader.
So a file uploaded near the Eiffel Tower could reflect that it is near the Eiffel Tower, reflect that it is in France etc. In the special case of the Eiffel tower, it would be helpful to know if it is night or day. Day images are copyright free (too old) while night images (when lights are turned on) are copyrighted. All this would populate different backlogs for us to process.
Perhaps such rules can be created on commons for the software to read/process as suggested by Nick.
Thanks, both! This is really interesting, both with respect to getting more feedback (I didn't know IRC was a preferred mode) and how we could use what a "naive" user does know, combined with gps or other data, to more easily moderate the content. As a side note, @Nick, is there a way I could view the IRC archive for this chat?
I'm afraid I don't have a useful log - it was a spread out conversation over a couple of channels and over a couple of hours with lots of unrelated chatter in between.