Commons:Think big - open letter about Wikimedia Commons/Priority list

This is structured collections of the problem we are facing on Commons.

This list is in the collecting phase, feel free to add new points or add more info to other points. The Plan is to get a list to be voted on later.

Technical problems

Unmaintained tools

Problem description

• Many important tools are maintained by volunteers. If they leave the project, these tools stop working.

Possible solution

• The WMF needs to adopt important tools.
• Where possible and reasonable the tools should be added to core MediaWiki or MediaWiki extensions.

Unreliable servers

Problem description

• Upload servers sometimes do not accept the uploaded files.

Unhandy deletion request handling

Problem description

• Deletion requests and tags for mission essential information are currently handled by pages and categories and there is no way for sorting and filtering them by reason for deletion.

Possible solution

• Build a task based software where the deletion requests are handled and can be tagged with tags like "FOP case","complex public domain case","doubtful authorship","waiting for VRT". This could speed up the case handling a lot.

Social problems

Legal input

Problem description

We have no way good way to get professional legal input.

• It is hard to solve complex copyright questions
  • This is a huge risk for external reuses

Possible solution

• Define a way to get input from the WMF legal team.
• Collect a number of typical legal texts that allow people and corporations to license their creative collections.

Technical and Social problems

Multilingualism

Problem description

• For discussions on Commons you basically need good English skills.
• For using categories you also need good English skills.

Possible solution

• For the categories the change to structured data could be the solution.

Welcoming new users

Problem description

• New users are facing technical issues resulting in deletion of their content.
• New users often do not have a good knowledge on copyright resulting in deletion of their content.
• New users do not find their way in the huge category tree.
• New users do not find how and where to get help.

Possible solution

• Communication without Wikitext
• Handling licenses without Wikitext
• Get more capacity of volunteers helping new users

Do we want to get rid of categories?

Problem description

• We never discussed if we always want to have categories and structured data next to each other or if we want to replace categories.
• If we want to replace them, should maintenance categories be left alone?

Possible solution

• Discuss this and get a consensus
• Transfer information from categories to structured data (The category system could stay in place for people who are used working with them and information could be continuously transferred until no one uses cats anymore)