Today I attended yet another workshop where a brave volunteer tried to explain the usefulness of Wikimedia Commons to teachers/scientists. During the following exercise, a very computer literate senior geneticist tried to access wikimedia.org and landed on the Wikimedia Foundation website. After this mistake was corrected, she soon found category:genetics, but from there couldn't find anything about DNA. Category:DNA exists, but is hidden some levels down. The immediate subcategories to Genetics are not the obvious ones to a geneticist.
People who are very excited and want to learn, constantly run into these stupid mistakes. Can we please get rid of the name Wikimedia? The M-and-P confusion is among the very worst. Call it "Wikipedia Foundation". Rename Commons to be "Wikipedia Pictures". These two simple changes would save sooooooooooo much time. Yes, I know Wikimedia is more than just Wikipedia, that it also covers Wikisource, Wikibooks and all the other side projects. I also know that Commons is more than just pictures. I've been with Wikipedia since May 2001. But the everyday struggle of having to explain M-and-P is taking all the fun out of it. Is it really worth that? Now, the second part. Finding pictures in Commons is really hard. It seems that categories and textual descriptions are added by the uploader, and rarely modified or enhanced by others. Finding a map of bird migration paths across Europe might be easy, but finding a plain and simple map of Europe is hard. Images that appear directly in top categories (such as Category:Maps of Europe) are a very random mix, and not the most useful generic maps of Europe. The "next 200" navigation is a total disaster, that not a single newcomer understands. Anything that is beyond the first 200 (e.g. subcategories that start with M-Z) are not found. Is there any topic category on Commons that is actively maintained for easy searching, i.e. where subcategories are well defined and where new images are systematically monitored and recategorized with enhanced descriptions? If I could find such an example, perhaps it could provide inspiration for other topics where a specialist with some extra time (or a grant application) could improve the actual usefulness of Commons. -- Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
