Dear Commons-l and Cultural-partners-l,
This is an invitation going out especially to the Europeans...
In June *Europeana* will be hosting a series of API-related Europeana
hackathon roadshows <http://version1.europeana.eu/web/api/hackathons> called
"Hack4Europe" in London, Barcelona, Poznan and Stockholm in the week 6 – 12
June. Each hackathon will have up to 30 developers from the hosting country
and the surrounding area. The goal is to come up with prototypes to
"showcase the social and business value of open cultural data". The four
best projects will be awarded special prizes during the Digital Agenda
Assembly on 16 – 17 June in Brussels.
It would be fantastic if a Wikimedia project could be one of those winners!
At their first Hackathon in the Netherlands last month the winner in the
"distribution and engagement" category was our very own Maarten Dammers with
a Commons Batch Upload tool:
http://version1.europeana.eu/web/api/hackathon-prototypes#feeds
Europeana is already a very good friend of ours in the "GLAM" space having
been able to introduce us to many cultural institutions who are interested
in donating to Commons. They recently they published the "European Public
Domain Calculator <http://www.outofcopyright.eu/about_calculator.html>" and
previously the "Public Domain
Charter<http://www.version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/public-domain-charte…>"
and were involved in the development of Creative Commons' "CC-O [public
domain dedication] <https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23830>".
More about Hack4Europe here
http://version1.europeana.eu/web/api/hackathonsand on twitter at
#hack4europe <http://twitter.com/#%21/search?q=%23hack4europe>
Sincerely,
-Liam / Wittylama
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
Hoi,
When you are uploading pictures the UploadWizard will provide the new
default interface. It has a much more intuitive interface and, you can
upload 10 pictures at a time.
Enjoy !! It is in my opinion a big step forward.
Thanks,
GerardM
Hi,
We’re planning to make a change on May 9, 2011 [1]: We’ll replace the
link in the Wikimedia Commons sidebar that currently points to
Commons:Upload with a link to Special:UploadWizard (in all languages).
If all goes well, we'll also invite Wikimedia wikis to begin changing
their Commons upload links to Special:UploadWizard.
If you haven't tried the UploadWizard yet, go to
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard
to test it.
We’ve a made it easier to get back to the old form from
Special:UploadWizard, and added an invitation to help with
localization.
NOTE: We still need lots of additional translations, so if you can
help with that, please do so on translatewiki.net.
Sign up for translatewiki:
http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:FirstSteps
Translation group:
http://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=ext-uploadwi…
Current status:
http://translatewiki.net/wiki/User:Multichill/stats
The quality, status and up-to-dateness of translations of the old
upload form is very mixed. By switching all languages immediately to
UploadWizard and working with translatewiki.net, we're hoping to
accelerate the process of getting solid localizations across the
board. We apologize for the short term inconvenience this may cause.
[2]
The old upload process will remain indefinitely available. There’s no
reason to remove it. This is purely a change to the default process
we’re exposing to the world. We feel we’ve fixed all the obvious bugs
that we know about (there are some annoying bugs that we do know about
left, but they’re not showstoppers). The best way for us to find the
remaining bugs is to have people actually use it as their first upload
experience and to continue to receive and process feedback.
As a reminder, here’s what UploadWizard gets us:
- Up to 10 files can be uploaded in one batch. We are hoping to expand
this feature set to allow for parallel uploading, multi-file
selection, and more.
- Some metadata is automatically extracted and pre-filled.
- You can see thumbnails before you’re completing your upload.
- Error cases should be handled in a clear and understandable interface.
- Less clutter due to systematic learning design as opposed to mixing
instructions and process.
- Much, much friendlier to new users as validated by our usability studies.
Major remaining gotchas:
- If your entire upload takes longer than 25 minutes, it fails. Very
annoying, we know. Not entirely trivial to fix but we know how and
we’ll get to it soon.
- Thumbnails for some file formats (video and audio, for instance) are
not shown during the upload process. This should not affect the
success of the actual upload.
- Right-to-left support is far from perfect and consistent.
Suggestions for improvement are most welcome. If you speak an RTL
language, please hammer the wizard and tell us is if it's a
showstopper issue for you -- we don't think that's the case, but we
need your input.
- There are a number of other known cases where uploads will stall and
the user has no option to fix the problem. It happens much less often
than it does with the old upload form, and we believe the most
important bugs (e.g. title blacklist related failures) will be
squashed as part of this release. There is a link to provide feedback
right in the subtitle of the page – if you do have a problem, please
report as much detail as possible!
How do we know the new process is much improved? Through qualitative
studies of the upload interface. See the report on the multimedia
usability project for details and videos:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_usability_project_report
We’re also continually user-testing the software through quick and
cheap user-tests using usertesting.com -- we’ll share our first batch
of test videos soon.
Please continue to add your thoughts & comments to the feedback page,
and we’ll aim to respond in a speedy fashion.
I'm very excited about this change and I hope you are, too. :-) We've
received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback regarding the
UploadWizard experience, and while there are still lots of ways in
which we can do better, we hope you'll agree that it's a huge step
forward.
All best,
Erik
== Notes ==
[1] We may choose to push the date forward a bit if we run into
deployment issues.
[2] There's a subheader in the UploadWizard which takes you back to
the old upload form. To ensure that at least the link to the old form
is translated into your language (if you're an administrator or can
find one), you can edit the following user interface message in your
language (add "/language code" to the URL, e.g. "/pl" for Polish):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Mwe-upwiz-subhead-alt-upload
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Example for the impatient:
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Commander?pane1=cat&cat1=Museums_…>
(currently limited to Commons logged-in users only; tested in Chrome,
Firefox, Safari; wide screen is advantageous...)
A complete rewrite of the toolserver demo, the new Commons Commander
runs as JavaScript directly on Commons as a faux Special Page. All
operations use the official API, so actions will be logged as if you
had performed them manually. The given URL includes a test mode
(discernable by the big "TEST MODE" in the page heading), so you can
play without fear of breaking things. To use the "real thing", try:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Commander?withJS=MediaWiki:Comman…
Commander uses the namegiving Norton Commander two-pane view. Many
functions of the old Commander have not been reimplemented yet, but
the big ones are working: Browsing files (with "eternal scroll"), and
adding files to categories. For the latter, is you have a category
pane open, just drag files onto the category pane, done (except in
test mode, of course). If you drag files from one category into
another, you will move the files by default (remove them from the
"source" category and add them to the "target" one). To just add
("copy"), keep the ALT key pressed. Just like you do with files on
your computer.
You can select multiple files, then drag one of them to move/copy all.
When you select files on a category pane, the parent- and
sub-categories get copy- and move-functions to click (might become
drag'n'drop later...).
There is more to come, like search and renaming files, but I'd like to
share this early version with you.
To permanently add the Commander to your Commons experience, add
importScript('MediaWiki:Commander.js');
to your http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/vector.js
page. That way, you also get toolbox links on user and category pages,
to browse and organize the respective contents with the Commander.
For the geeks, source is here:
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/commcomm/wpinclude.js
(I could just copy it to Commons, but developing in a textarea is a pain...)
Cheers,
Magnus
P.S.: As always, feedback is welcome!
Dear Wikimedians,
Wikimedia Commons is happy to announce that the 2010 Picture of the Year
competition is now open. We're interested in your opinion as to which
images qualify to be the Picture of the Year for 2010. Any user registered
at a Wikimedia wiki since 2010 or prior with more than 200 edits as of 1
January 2011 (UTC) is welcome to vote. Check your eligibility now.[1] If
you meet the criteria, you are able to vote.
Nearly 800 images that have been rated Featured Pictures by the
international Wikimedia Commons community in the past year are all entered
in this competition. From professional animal and plant shots to
breathtaking panoramas and skylines, restorations of historically relevant
images, images portraying the world's best architecture, maps, emblems,
diagrams created with the most modern technology, and impressive human
portraits, Commons features pictures of all flavors.
For your convenience, we have sorted the images into topic categories. Two
rounds of voting will be held: In the first round, you can vote for as many
images as you like. The first round category winners and the top ten overall
will then make it to the final. In the final round, when a limited number
of images are left, you must decide on the one image that you want to become
the Picture of the Year.
To see the candidate images just go to:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2010/Galleries
Wikimedia Commons is interested in hearing your opinions on our featured
images of 2010. The deadline for first round voting is the 4th of May at
23:59 (UTC).
Thanks,
Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year committee
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2010
[1]
http://toolserver.org/~pathoschild/accounteligibility/?user=&wiki=&event=16