Find Wikipedia photos needed near you
wikishootme.toolforge.org
wikishootme.toolforge.org
So before you head out with your camera, perhaps do some linking first. What's left surprises me with articles with no photo, which I would have thought someone would have done by now. So I'll be the first!
This map mainly shows Wikidata items, in addition to some "orphan" images on Wikimedia Commons (a free media repo from Wikimedia foundation, mainly for used on Wikipedia but not exclusively), both are not technically the same as "Wikipedia" articles.
- Red dot: wikidata item without photo
- Green dot: wikidata item with photo
- Blue dot: Commons images without a wikidata link (keep in mind not all images need to have a link; some are just too trivial to have any wikidata item.)
It doesn't directly show Wikipedia articles around you. But Wikipedia has that feature built-in (albeit not an map): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
Edit: it looks like it does have Wikipedia articles as well in some small yellow dots.
Only the most representative image(s) should be linked from the Wikidata item. More precise properties also exist, e.g. you can separately link an interior image of a building or a tombstone image of a historical person.
OTOH, all images can link to all the Wikidata items they depict. This is using Structured Data on Commons which is basically an extension dataset linking images to what they depict: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data
Introduction video: https://youtu.be/lmWmMIuCJVM
Wikipedia only considers CC0, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses free enough for the image to be included without any issues. With these licenses, you could also add images to Wikipedia that are not your own, which would greatly speed up coverage.
I'm specifically mentioning this because some CC licenses seem permissive, but are not permissive enough for Wikipedia. A key example of this is iNaturalist, which contains millions of photos of all kinds of species that would be useful to add to Wikipedia articles.
Their default license is CC-BY-NC. Most photographers on that platform just leave it to that default unaware or not interested in licensing in the first place. Some might be aware of this default license and think they're being permissive and generous, making possible exactly sharing across services like Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, no. It's a painful mismatch as many of those photographers would likely be perfectly fine with the image being used in that context, but the Wikipedia license requirements prevent this.
Similarly, even a license containing an attribution requirement (which is morally perfectly reasonable) is problematic. You find a photo from user "anon2522" on platform X that last posted 8 years ago. The attribution information is really soft and fragile, it doesn't really link to an actual person and the little information you have may disappear at any time.
Bottom line, if you're truly creating an image "for the good of the world", CC0 is highly recommended. You can still attribute yourself in EXIF or as a small stamp on the photo itself.
CC-BY-SA = Attribution + Share-Alike: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
CC-BY-NC = Attribution + Non-Commercial only: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/
CC0 = some jurisdictions do not recognize the concept of "public domain", CC0 is a license that explicitly codifies the same ideas and is generally recognized everywhere (IIUC): https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...
The clarification of "BY" <==> "Attribution" is highlighted reasonably well at https://creativecommons.org.au/learn/licences/, which also provides a comparative summary of the other CC licenses.
Is this really a problem? We've found stone tablets with authors' names on them from thousands of years ago; they're attributed, even if we know nothing else about their authors. CC-BY doesn't require being able to track down the person to be useful.
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_att...
Yes, in general you can conclude that attribution is not a hard science, you attribute the best you can given available information. But even then there's painful gotchas as described in the article above.
The real problem I was aiming at is that it doesn't scale in the context of mass improvement of Wikipedia articles.
Say I'm an enthusiast regarding species of fly found in NorthEast America. There's thousands of species and we have thousands of Wikipedia stub articles lacking an image.
Next, I found a source containing said images and want to use them. One would now have to go through every single source image and do attribution to the best of our ability.
Is there a title? Mandatory to use. No title? Make up your own. Is a license included? If so, 3.0 or 4.0? Is the author mentioned? If yes, does the author want to be mentioned by their real name? Has the author included any other custom requests? You need to honor them. And so on.
It's incredible laboursome work if you take on the task of doing it properly. As a result, many may not bother to improve Wikipedia images on such scale.
Now imagine those images being CC0. You can skip every single step and be a 100 times more productive.
Blunt statement, but the most useful images licenses are "copyrighted" and "CC0". Any license "in between" is messy, not as permissive as you may think, and in many use cases (such as social media) their license terms are fully ignored anyway.
The CC non-commercial variant is also very problematic. It's easy to understand why people use it. But it means that if you're being cautious, you mostly don't want to use an NC photo because most "interesting" uses aren't unambiguously non-commercial.
* In the browser console
* In the browser settings
* In a browser extension
Meanwhile, addresses are hard in a global context. Implementing address search can be a lot of work because browsers don't provide one so you need either a (global) address database or an API endpoint to access one. Also, people expect a search which is both fuzzy and with autocompletion, which works best by prioritising results based on the browser location. Finally, you need to implement a user interface for the search field.
The reason is that it would be extra work, and it’s not clear how many people actually want this feature.
The application is already able to find articles around a given address. The only thing that would be changed, is that you enter the address by hand instead of letting the browser locate you. This can be easily done in a day
Would be nice to be able to expand it so that I could discover interesting things a little further out but still in easy driving distance.
(Probably possible to do a sparql query for this at https://query.wikidata.org but seems like it would be complicated, at least given my relatively novice level of sparql skills)
Hence Wikidata could have an item for every memorial park bench listed at [1] but Wikipedia just has a single page [1] describing what a typical memorial park bench is, and providing some examples either in list format or as a gallery of photos from Wikimedia Commons. Wikidata items for the memorial park benches could have properties for coordinates, official name, person or thing commemorated, date of construction, area the bench resides (e.g. park), length, height, width, construction material, identifiers assigned by heritage or government bodies, artist who designed it, benefactors who funded it, links to significant events related to the bench (e.g. used in a movie), etc.
Or a truck. Apparently someone in my town is obsessed with cataloguing all the trucks owned / parked in the area.
Would it be easy to make this tool work for people who don't want to mess around with browser settings? Or would it be easier for me to learn how to tell the browser where I am?
Edit: The search icon more or less works, but just showing a navigable map would make much more sense.
What are the kind of things you expected to be asked to take pictures of?
But I feel like requiring a login makes it a nope.
There is also no validation whatsoever on Wikipedia accounts, email verification etc is not required.
If you're worried about trusting toolforge.org, it's run by Wikimedia, the organization behind Wikipedia.
You should only need an account on wikipedia not toolforge. Blame all the people who keep uploading pirated movies.
Well then, if not being allowed is the thing that protects us from harm, we're all saved!! /s
Basically you can't openly be evil, and if someone discovers that somebody is being evil they get kicked out. Also i think there is a proxy so you can't easily collect ip addresses.
So its a step above some random website, but ultimately its closer to a third party site then it is to being real wikipedia.
Given you are all on hackernews which is basically a link aggregator for random websites, there is really no reason for this to give anyone pause.
Wikimedia is surprisingly lenient on accounts, you don't even need to give an email to get a username.
I needed to go hunt down the documentation (available under the hamburger menu), which makes it clearer (eventually) that authorizing is only required if you want to upload pictures through the WikiShootMe app - so you could skip authorizing and upload through Wikidata/Wikimedia Commons instead.
It has the "near you" feature, you can shoot a photo with your phone and upload it with the app too.
I really want the Commons Mobile app to work, and I don't know why it always failed with my Pixel phone, but it was a really frustrating experience.
It could be that other languages are restrictive than English Wikipedia which is notoriously strict on what articles they allow.
It seems to have been auto-generated from public data using the DotNetWikiBot.
(i know it's a different project, but, I suppose same profil user)
Wikidata is a semantic web thing to collect facts about the world in a machine readable way (e.g. queryable via https://query.wikidata.org )
Generally speaking, wikidata is more broad than wikipedia.
Comes in handy when updating the interwiki language links, or being able to automatically fill out those infoboxes.
Wikipedia is actual encyclopedia and useful
Wikidata is a weird idea to create a weird “semantic web” - a hierarchy of everything that ever existed or will exist - and it’s about as useful and easy to understand as previous experiments with semantic web.
Wikimedia seems to double down on this instead of letting it die; I really don’t understand the point, I don’t think that it’s useful and it’s really hard to edit, as a editor.
Interesting thing is - it’s CC0 instead of creative commons for some reason. Their argument is that you cannot copyright a fact. I donno.
The audience is quite different, and it may very well not be useful to you, and that is ok, but wikidata clearly has an audience and seems to be on an upswing. Its certainly doing better than pretty much all the other sister projects.
As an aside, politically wikidata is really WM-DE's baby, so its really more them doubling down and WMF along for the ride, but of course its all very intertwined.
It’s definitely not the least useful of the wiki projects - that award definitely goes to WikiNews - but at least WikiNews is not intertwined with everything on wikipedia.
[0]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Manske> [1]: <https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/wikishootme>
Anyone know what this does?
For example: https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/#lat=20.59366039765542&lng...
Sort of a pattern with Wikipedia... every time I've attempted to assist with something, it turns out they don't like how I do things. So I don't.
I got blank results as well, but just blindly clicked on the first result and it went to the correct place (YMMV).
I'm asking because I thought this would be automized. I'm suprised it's not!
(The better privacy solution here vs all or nothing is for browsers to have an option to only provide imprecise locations.)
Also, I immediately thought this would violate Wikipedia's "No original research" policy, but looks like images are exempt[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
I’m amazed that someone added photos of every single park nearby, no matter how small.
Here's an example of a photo that was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, with extensive EXIF metadata: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giza_pyramids_and_Kh...
To hide your lens size you you can always strip the metadata before you upload, e.g. with ImageMagick:
convert original.jpg -strip output.jpg* larger, green circles represent Wikidata items with an image
* larger, red circles represent Wikidata items without an image
* smaller, blue circles represent Commons images
* smaller, yellow circles represent Wikipedia articles, in the current language edition
EDIT: After reading the documentation page [0] linked in another comment, I see that there is legend in the "layers" popup on the upper-right. It did not at all occur to me to look in this location; I would have guessed that this icon let me change the underlying map tiles (e.g. transit, traffic, topography, etc).