[Clipart] Re: [Inkscape-devel] RE:Xara Announcement

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 01:14:08PM +0300, Nicu Buculei (OCAL) wrote:
> bulia byak wrote:
> >On 10/16/05, Charles Moir <CharlesM at xara.com> wrote:
> >
> >>These are all good things. I have some issues about quality control on
> >>OpenClipart,
> >
> >
> >Me too, and I very much hope they will be resolved by implementing
> >voting (and periodically purging the lowest-voted ones) as well as
> >more wiki-like interface where I can easily upload an improved version
> >of the clipart as well as add keywords to find it more easily. Some or
> >all of this is, as far as I know, being planned or implemented;
> >perhaps OpenClipart people might want to comment more.
> 
> From the beginning the intention was to have ratings, the ability for 
> authors to improve their uploads and for users to edit metadata.
> For a while Bryce worked on a Document Management System intended to 
> solve all this, but recently he realized the project is going nowhere 
> and abandoned it.
> AFAIK, the current plan is to reuse a tool made by Creative Commons, 
> probably Rejon can give here some info.
> 
> Sure, if anyone step up and start working on a better interface, it will 
> be received with open hands :p
> 
> About periodically purging the lowest-voted images, I believe we are 
> *against* this, but *for* providing providing a selection of most-voted.

Quality can also be very subjective.

One thing I notice is that often the images that look the worst, are
quite useful because I as a non-artist can actually get in and fiddle
and customize them pretty easily without lousing up the whole image.
For example, we have some very beautiful, multi-gradient glowing arrows,
but if I need to stretch them a bit for a diagram, or put a turn in,
they look like hell; the simpler looking (lower quality) arrows are
easier for me to edit.

Anyway, the main reason we don't do QA of the quality of the images
currently is simple lack of manpower.  Generally one person puts in
about one or two weekends a month on cleaning up what's been submitted
that month.  Most of the QA is focused on filtering out images that are
either broken, or that have copyright/trademark issues (unfortunately,
there's plenty of work needed for those issues alone).


Regarding voting, I do think that's going to be the best way to go,
however we have *so* *many* images in there that I wonder how we can
make that work effectively.  Any ideas on this?

Bryce