Multimedia:Ethnographic interviews/Jastrow

From Wikimedia Usability Initiative
  • Woman in her thirties
  • Main focus: taking photographs of objects in museums & during political rallies
  • uses the English interface

Goals

Goals when contributing museum pictures:

  • to give a good view of museum collections
  • to provide freely reusable pictures
  • the intended audience is mostly academic => to increase awareness about free licenses

Goals when contributing pictures of political rallies:

  • to provide freely reusable pictures that can be used on other websites
  • to increase awareness about Commons

Upload workflow

  • shoots photographs in RAW
  • develops them (exposure, noise, saturation, author metadata) using a dedicated software
  • does minor retouching using the GIMP
  • saves as JPG using a descriptive title
  • uploads pictures one by one; doesn't use batch upload tools; has never tried Commonist
  • customizes the "upload file" link in the sidebar using her personal JS, so that the link directs to the basic upload form
  • often copy/pastes from a similar picture
  • processes a picture, uploads it, processes the next one during the upload and so on
  • often uploads series of pictures, so descriptions are similar to each other
  • copy/pastes the license, uploads, and adds categories later
  • category work using HotCats; tries, then clicks and browses to see if a more precise subcategory applies. Also takes this opportunity to check if there are similar pictures

Other activities & facts

  • regularly browses categories she's interested in to improve categorization, detect copyright violations
  • uses the HotCats gadget
  • when assembling several pictures, metadata are lost
  • gets many e-mails asking for confirmation that people can reuse her pictures
  • communication is complicated in a multilingual environment; people have to talk through templates

Commons & Wikipedia

  • if the subject or the artist is not well known, adds some pictures to the Wikipedia article
  • most of reuse confirmation requests are about pictures displayed Wikipedia, which are a lot more visible than those on Commons only
  • spends more time working on Commons than on Wikipedia

Specifics of museum photography

  • takes pictures of the labels, buys official catalogues
  • makes it a point to add the ID number / inventory number
  • the wiki platform is very useful for people working on museum pictures: they can easily add/improve descriptions

Wishlist

  • statistics of freely-licensed pictures hosted somewhere else than Commons
  • interproject watchlist (especially for Commons)
  • toolserver tool that browses a family of interwiki-linked articles to see if one of them contains a picture