Are folks aware of the difficulties there have been with the uploading of Geograph photos to the commons? I would encourage serious study of the history of this effort, and the strong objections there have been, before going ahead with this.
I've not been involved in the discussions, but my personal experience of the early Geograph uploads is that it effectively destroyed the reasonably good categorisation of user uploaded photos, by overwhelming existing categories with poorly categorised, and often poor quality photos, many of which are unlikely to be of use on any project using commons. I personally sorted out the categorisation of many hundred geograph photos dumped in the top level of my city's categorisation, which made it unusable for practical purposes. It took many hours to sort this out, moving to the appropriate sub-category for a pile of mostly not very good photos, many really for not-so-nearby villages that should not have been dumped in the city category. This problem was addressed after a while by not automatically trying to categorise within the normal hierarchy, but creating an alternative Geograph grid-square hierarchy, that users are I believe supposed to manually recategorise, but I think little of that has been done. There are I think currently over 800,000 geograph photos, possibly well over a million, in the Geograph categories awaiting an initial ordinary category or category review: needing category review: 589387 needing categories by date: 806653 needing categories by grid square: 50,949 subcats, unknown number of photos Also most of the geolocation on Geograph photos is fairly inaccurate, which is easy to see of you fire up Google Earth with the WikiCommons layer enabled. Before these arrived most of the photos near my city had accurate geolocation, but not any more because of the Geograph images. (Though this will improve with new photos as GPS enabled cameras become common.) I was pretty fed-up with it, though I did not enter the discussions on Commons about this, which lead to the upload effort being abandoned. Just because there are millions of licence compatible photos out there, I see no compelling reason to load them all into commons if that reduces the average quality and utility. What I think we want is tools to very easily upload individual images/files when a commons user sees a good quality one on compatible sites that s/he wants to use. A more minor issue is that the Geograph upload project only uploaded 640x480 versions into commons, when Geograph in many case has higher resolution originals. I haven't studied this issue in depth, and am only reporting my experience with the Geograph upload. Here are some starting points for looking at the old discussions about this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Batch_uploading/Geograph#Indefinitely_on_hold http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Blocks_and_protections/Archive_7#GeographBot http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Batch_uploading/Geograph#Problem_with_geographic_categories http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive_29#User:BotMultichillT http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_Geograph_British_Isles_project_needing_category_review http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Geograph_Britain_and_Ireland Richard -- Richard Wendland rich...@wendland.org.uk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
