Shyamal
English Wikipedia User page Alternate upload account - especially for Commons App which fails 2FA in some versions
| Userboxes | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
- Gallery
- SVG files
- Insect images
- Uploads to Wikimedia Commons Usage
- 48 GB of storage! I am ready for my laptop disk and mobile phone failure!
- Summary - in 2023 - I had 20718 files (52.58% in use down from 54.45% in 2022 and 55.37% in 2021). Average "Multiplicity of usage" (or the number of places on Wikimedia Projects where usable images are displayed) 192019/10893=17.62 (in 2023) - 198781/10549 = 18.84 (in 2022) - which sounds good, better the average GLAM project funded by the WMF.
- 31 January 2024 21531 images of which 11283 have been used 190380 times. (52.40% usability)
- 8 June 2024 21748 files of which 11439 used 195185 times (52.60% usability)
My approach
editPlease note that I do not and will not attempt to classify images to all possible and existing categories or by adding them to pages. I however ensure that they belong to at least one suitable category and include the description which has the keywords needed for a searcher to find the image. In all likelihood the image will also be in use on a relevant page on the English wikipedia.
It is particularly unfortunate that Commons has a completely chaotic system of categories. For instance there is "Category:Bird family Y" and "category:Birds of Location X" and then there are passing users who create "category:Birds of Location X belonging to family Y" - this is clearly non-scaleable. I think temporal, geographic, conceptual classes need to be kept apart and no combinations should be made (eg:prefer India, 1887 as two categories rather than India in 1887). Categories should be "atomic" - similar to Codd's rule.
I believe that spatial categories, especially those used for organisms, should not be done with named entities or textual labels - we ought to have either points, bounding rects or polygons and all searches some polygons and points can be mapped to names on Wikidata so that spatial search on commons is meaningful.
Note to compulsive category hierarchy maintainers: Some categories like "unidentified insects of xxx" are not at all useful when insects (or other such groups) are already identified to genus - chances of identifying them to species are almost zilch.
- Postscript - see Commons_talk:Structured_data
I have no way of influencing Wikimedia Commons administrators and established users to understand that Categories such as "Insects of India", "Insects of Karnataka" etc are downright ridiculous - the photo may have been taken in that named region but unless you really know that a species is restricted to those boundaries, that is a completely useless category. Probably ok to use from but there is no way to get that edgeways to the powers-that-be here.
Also, folks importing organism images from Flickr that are lacking location information, just know that your drudgery is meaningless ...
Mediawiki feature wishlist
editSVGs with within commons image linking ability - SVG has a feature to link raster images in it - Mediawiki would do well to allow images from commons to be linked. This would allow annotation, clipping and some nice features. The rsvg rasterizer however may need to support this further. Even better would be a Commons- online SVG editor to produce some of these annotated images. It might however raise some legal eyebrows in some contexts:- we allow some copyrighted content as part of freedom of panorama and using a clip region to isolate the copyrightable part could lead to some hitherto unheard of legal issues.
Note that "virtual" clipping is now possible via en:Template:CSS_image_crop
Bookmark
editDone till
Ibis 1922- PZSL 1903 2