It should be noted that toolforge tools are run by volunteers, and are subject to a different privacy policy than the main wikimedia sites (that said, they are not allowed to do shady things).
You should only need an account on wikipedia not toolforge. Blame all the people who keep uploading pirated movies.
"Vetted" is a bit of an exageration (its pretty easy to get an account. Sure technically there is a process, but its an easy one).
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.
All the other reasons like spam notwithstanding, without at least some persistent user ID, how would image licensing work? You'd only be able to have works that can be shared and modified freely without attribution.
Wikimedia is surprisingly lenient on accounts, you don't even need to give an email to get a username.
Yeah, I found the login requirement very confusing, and I definitely wasn't about to grant high-volume editing permission to an app I'd never heard of (WikiShootMe is the URL, but it's not mentioned on the page or in the HN article title, and HN clips off the subdomain).
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.
What is the difference between wikidata and Wikipedia? Most of the red circles near me have a wikidata page, with no data, and no Wikipedia page. Plus to be honest 100% of them are business so I’m not terribly inclined to do their seo for them.
Wiki data is meant to be some universal facts source that things like voice assistants to tap in to. Answering things like “how tall is Obama”. Wikipedia has much stricter restrictions on “notability” so most businesses won’t quality for a Wikipedia page but would be accepted on wiki data.
Wikidata is very inclusive. If there is a reliable public record of a thing existing (at the extreme end of the scale would be a park bench, tree, light pole) then it could be included. Wikipedia is quite selective with content included, generally requiring multiple public records documenting the thing, and for the thing to be something that the Wikipedia bureaucracy deem to be important enough to justify an article.
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.
It would see some analysis of overlapping red and green circles (or image titles) would be beneficial. Near me there are quite a few existing green circles but also a red circle asking for the same picture.
I get a blank screen with no way (that I can discover) of entering my location. I tried clicking the spyglass icon and entering my city. But just blank results on that as well.
It sort of breaks. If you search for something the map will load around Denmark, at which point you can zoom out and manually navigate to any location.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Interesting. Though a lot of the pages near me only exist on non-English Wikipedia (which is interesting since I'm in the United States). I'm not sure how many people where English is not the primary language will be searching for a tiny dam or bridge in a mid-sized city in New England. I'd want to make sure my photo has impact before I spend time driving to the location and taking one.
Do you have any examples of how photos with location are currently being used? I'm all for Wikipedia and sites having this kind of data to build on. But who already built on it?
I was thinking more small scale. Someone wants to make an educational youtube video about some obscure landmark and needs a picture but doesn't want to get copyright struck.
Same, I'm in Vietnam but most of the pictures seem to link to Spanish Wikipedia which, apparently, has an exhaustive range of articles on beaches around the world.
It could be that other languages are restrictive than English Wikipedia which is notoriously strict on what articles they allow.
If I look in my region it is absolutely filled with requests of pictures of every single street and canal making it very hard to find something that's actually worth taking a picture of.
There are notable buildings here, some statues. Not sure why you want to have a picture of a random street where some people live, I mean the privacy issues alone. At that point use streetview.
Thanks for doing this! I am going to contribute some photos soon, I've added a todo for this weekend. Plenty of red circles near me, and it will encourage me to see some new places in my area.
I'm confused about wikidata vs wikipedia - I'm surprised by the large number of dots near me, I thought every dot was related to a wikipedia article, then I clicked on the dots and realized they were wikidata, not wikipedia
I have a personal opinion that might not be popular
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.
Weird take when wikidata has 117% year-over-year page view growth.
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.
There really ought to be a map legend on the page itself.
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).
I stopped to contribute to Wikipedia after they banned edit access from VPN services, even if you are logged in, your account is old, and has no spam history in the past.
I was able to search just fine without logging in to anything. Denied location access, manually entered location, map popped up with blue, green, and red bubbles.
141 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] thread(The better privacy solution here vs all or nothing is for browsers to have an option to only provide imprecise locations.)
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.
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...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_bench
Or a truck. Apparently someone in my town is obsessed with cataloguing all the trucks owned / parked in the area.
Anyone know what this does?
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.
For example: https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/#lat=20.59366039765542&lng...
I got blank results as well, but just blindly clicked on the first result and it went to the correct place (YMMV).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It seems to have been auto-generated from public data using the DotNetWikiBot.
It could be that other languages are restrictive than English Wikipedia which is notoriously strict on what articles they allow.
What are the kind of things you expected to be asked to take pictures of?
[0]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Manske> [1]: <https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/wikishootme>
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.
https://edri.org/our-work/member-spotlight-wikimedia-deutsch...
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.
* 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).
0: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiShootMe
I’m amazed that someone added photos of every single park nearby, no matter how small.
I'm asking because I thought this would be automized. I'm suprised it's not!