Commons talk:ISA Tool/Challenges

Featured pictures on Commons campaign

Lots’ of lessons learned during this campaign

• lesson 1 : do not reuse featured or quality pictures in a campaign in the future. Even if some of them are not described, others are well described and the tool seems to not work well as showing the ones in need over the ones already described.

• lesson 2 : train participants to improve description practices (perhaps a video ?). Links to ‘’how to describe properly’’ ? For example adding « snow » when there already is « snowy landscape » is not helpful example

• lesson 3 : next campaign, indicate that the user with too many edits just changing ranks on properties instead of actually working on properties or adding captions, will be removed from the ranking (or his contributions cut in half etc.). Or fix the tool so that it is not counted.

• lesson 4 : fix the tech issue of info disappearing when rank of importance is changed : bug on phabricator

• lesson 5 : alsways do a campaign with fixed closing time Anthere (talk) 17:15, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Constant changing of preferred ranks on files

If you look at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Kathryn_Sullivan,_PCAST_Member.jpg&action=history, you can see that most of the edits made to that file in the name of challenge #239 have been turning the preferred ranks on and off for each "depicts" statement on the file. Is there any way to mitigate this so that people are not spamming a file with unnecessary changes to win a challenge? Perhaps by not counting rank changes as part of the challenge edits? Clay (talk) 23:52, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Some complaints (incl. mine) about wrong "prominent" statements were writen here: Commons_talk:Structured_data#Can_anyone_explain_what_is_going_on_here?. Raymond (talk) 06:50, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

In general, this is generating an awful lot of low-quality data. See for example https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Mother_Earth.jpg&action=history. And from what I've seen, that's typical. - Jmabel ! talk 23:05, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I propose we revert all edits related to preferred ranks by this campaign Trade (talk) 21:53, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

it's going on with destroying qualifier! @Patketeku Stop these edits, this is vandalism! Raymond (talk) 07:45, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

This is terrible... I feel terrible. I had not seen this till now. If I had seen that on the 30-31st... I would have blocked both guys. Ok, lesson learned (the hard way). Please help push the phabricator request : https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321272 (please support). Anthere (talk) 22:27, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out @Anthere, I was unaware of the Phabricator request. I do believe this tool and these contests can do good for Commons if some of these "gaming the system" issues are solved (along with some contemporary monitoring of contest edit quality). Clay (talk) 06:42, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

This problem is continuing. Basically, you have accidentally created a vandalism contest. - Jmabel ! talk 01:07, 12 April 2023 (UTC)