[Clipart] 30K! and ready to launch!!!

Schrijver eric at authoritism.net
Mon Apr 26 01:13:34 PDT 2010


I actually wanted to mail this before this discussion came up as it seems like after the fact now;

But I was thinking focusing on and sprinting for ‘x number of images’ can be counterproductive.

As a user I could care less if OCAL had 25.000 or 30.000 images:
at a certain point there is a cut off value where it just becomes ‘really a lot’!

Then it becomes more important to make sure they are of high quality, so users do not get discouraged when browsing and looking for what they want to find.
And since it is an open library, you can not do explicit value judgments.
But there is a lot you can do implicitly by having the core community reflect upon what is a high quality image, and propagate this via wiki, educational materials etc, and of course their own uploads.

Now with Jon’s collection of autotraced photographs, it is hard to not see them in the light of the push: since auto tracing is a quick way of creating content and thus reaching the 30k. Correct me if I am wrong though.

But the main point: now that there are 30.000 images, how aggresively do we need to push the quantity? As the project gets better known and attracts more contributors the number will grow by itself. I think focus should shift towards building a community and finding out how the OCAL collection can be of most use to people around the world.

just my 2c,

Eric S


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