Archive:Media Assets Workgroup/Development

Have a 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.

Projects

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

Commonist

See User:ImageUploadBot for how to help.

flinfo

Customize flinfo to work with Citizendium. Requires some ability to understand php. No one has started this yet. The flinfo source code is GFDL and is available here. The goal would be to incorporate use of this at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Special:Upload&uselang=flickr

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 do pitch in with, but don't let these limit you.

• U.S. gov templates and uselang=pd-usgov Wizard sections. 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. 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. Need someone to compile a list of the principle ways media at Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia are tagged and to help put together the "Wikimedia Commons or Wikipedia" section of the Wizard in the WikiMedia namespace.

• Public domain wizard. Need someone who can spend probably a full day, maybe two, at a university law library that has this book (most or probably all have it--its pretty much the definitive work in English on the subject) and type rather detailed notes about the public domain laws of every country discussed in the two-volume set. This will form the research base of the public domain upload wizard. Ideally, two people should do this same research separately so all info can be verified before we go making a system that relies on the research. Once this is done, smaller projects to build the Public Domain Upload Wizard can be formulated and carried out, such as creating country-specific templates. This section of the wizard will be by far the largest, yet I think exceptionally user-friendly, mostly involving mere clicks, and will result in a near-perfect rate of accurately tagged public domain images.

• • In prep for the above, we need an image of the flag of every country uploaded and placed in Category:Country flags.

• MediaWiki:Edittools. There is great untapped potential in the MediaWiki:Edittools area, since it can be customized for each uselang= area used by the Upload Wizard. For example, see http://en.marveldatabase.com/MediaWiki:Edittools and the additional java that makes it run at http://en.marveldatabase.com/MediaWiki:Common.js.

Categories!

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

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