Archive:Media Assets Workgroup/Development

Have a media-related development idea? Want to pitch in in some way that will develop Citizendium's media assets? Great!

You can think of this page as a sort of "hub" of development activity for media.

If you think you can help, be bold. Also, coordinate with any others who are already working on the issue, to maximize productivity.

Mass Image Uploading

See User:ImageUploadBot for how to help.

Upload Wizard

NOTE: CZ Talk:Upload-Wizard pretty much uncovers everything that needs knowing about how to put together Upload Wizard elements.

The following are already-existing goals that folks can pitch in with, but don't let these limit you.

flinfo

How you can help:

1. Take the lead to customize flinfo to work with Citizendium. Requires some ability to understand php. The flinfo source code is GFDL and is available here. The goal would be to incorporate flinfo at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Special:Upload&uselang=flickr

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:HTMLets may prove instrumental in implementing flinfo, as well as making other areas of the Upload Wizard an extremely easy and painless experience for even noobs.

U.S. gov templates and uselang=pd-usgov Wizard sections

How you can help:

Need someone to develop special templates for major U.S. government providers of public domain or public domain-ish material for use with http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Special:Upload&uselang=pd-usgov and put it together in the WikiMedia namespace. Mulling through the PD template category at Commons and en.Wikipedia is a good starting point, but check the facts and if there is a way to keep the number of templates to a minimum yet still account properly for variations, that'd be great for user-friendliness sake.

Wikimedia Commons/Wikipedia's most common upload templates and uselang=wikimedia Wizard sections

How you can help:

1. Compile a list of the principle ways media at Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia are tagged.

2. Adapt current CZ templates to create new templates, as needed, for this section of the Wizard.

3. Put together the "Wikimedia Commons or Wikipedia" section of the Wizard. Customize the WikiMedia namespace areas to work with uselang=wikimedia.

Public Domain Wizard

This section of the wizard will be by far the largest, yet I think it can be made exceptionally user-friendly, mostly involving mere clicks to a few YES/NO questions for each country, and will result in a near-perfect rate of accuracy for images tagged as public domain.

How you can help:

1. Research basis. We need to create an authoritative outline on the public domain laws of every major country and as many minor ones as possible. This will form the research basis of the Public Domain Upload Wizard. To accomplish this, we need someone who can spend a day at a university law library that has

• Geller, P. International Copyright Law and Practice (Two volumes), LexisNexis, 2006.[1]

And perhaps:

• Goldstein, P. International Copyright: Principles, Law, and Practice, Oxford, 2000.

Most or probably all university law libraries have Geller's work--its pretty much considered the definitive work in English on the subject.

Ideally, two people should do this same research separately so all info can be cross-verified before we go making a system that relies on the research.

2. Images of flags of the world. In prep for the above, we need an image of the flag of every country uploaded and placed in Category:Country flags. Sounds like the perfect first job for User:ImageUploadBot.

Once these priliminary steps are done, projects that will put together the Public Domain Upload Wizard can be formulated and carried out, such as creating country-specific templates.

MediaWiki:Edittools

How you can help:

1. Take the lead to customize MediaWiki:Edittools for the Upload Wizard. There is great untapped potential in the MediaWiki:Edittools area, since it can be customized for each uselang=foo area used by the Upload Wizard. See http://en.marveldatabase.com/MediaWiki:Edittools and the additional (incomplete) java that makes it run at http://en.marveldatabase.com/MediaWiki:Common.js for one wiki that started an attempt. Jami Hari at that wiki might be willing to collaborate.

Categories!

The longer this is put off the more painful it will be to remedy.

How you can help:

1. Come up with category naming conventions.
2. Come up with a canonical list of major image categories. Commons may prove a useful idea-prodder, although it suffers from some "category chaos".
3. Devise ways to avoid "category chaos", as far as possible
4. Explore tools to facilitate quick tagging. Are there any?
5. Enlist community involvement, perhaps have a "Big Image Tagging party"
6. A better idea may be to explore User:Robert W King's idea of creating a game
   1. Requirements:
      1. CGI/PHP form extension for mediawiki
      2. An interface page to pull up an image and submit a form value to write to that image page
      3. Make it fun!

Recruiting and PR

How you can help:

1. Sweeten the deal for professional and semi-pro photographers to release excellent photos at CZ. For photographer John Doe, create Category:Photos by John Doe and allow him to tag every image with the category and link to it in the "Related images" section of {{Image notes}}. Then, at the category page, we allow the photographer to make it his "CZ Photography Page".
2. Visit blogs and lists inhabited by photography buffs. Explain what CZ is doing and invite them to join.
3. Featured photo of the week?
4. ...
5. ...