Critical issues presentations/File management on Wikimedia Commons

Submission no. 74

Title of the submission

File management on Wikimedia Commons

Author of the submission

• Jan Lochman

Country of origin

Czech Republic

Topics

Projects, Technical

Keywords

• Wikimedia Commons
• file management
• file documentation
• English
• barier

Abstract

VisualEditor is a big step towards the new user experience on Wikipedia. Unfortunately negative experience comes from the file management on Wikimedia Commons which is time consuming and available only for those who operate good English. Three or more times you have to add the same information, but only in different format: file title, file description and file category. E.g. if you have a photograph of a bridge in London, the title of the file will be “London, XY bridge.jpg”. Then you will add the same information to the file's description: "XY bridge in London, UK."" and then to categories: "category:Bridges in London", etc. This is a time consuming activity not just for newbies but also for older contributors. And the question is, if it is necessary, because if the active contributors had more free time, they could potentially contribute with more free pictures to illustrate Wikipedia.

Other barrier are categories. While you can create your language categories, you cannot add them to Wikimedia Commons’s category system properly if you don't know the language. We may not expect that newbies will be so motivated as to spend hours trying to figure out how to place their category into the tree.

Result

Not accepted