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

[Alan Horkan]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Bryce Harrington wrote:

> Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 10:54:32 -0700
> From: Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.org>
> To: "Nicu Buculei (OCAL)" <nicu at apsro.com>
> Cc: Charles Moir <CharlesM at xara.com>,
>      clipart-list <clipart at lists.freedesktop.org>,
>      bulia byak <buliabyak at gmail.com>, inkscape-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: [Clipart] Re: [Inkscape-devel] RE:Xara Announcement
>
> 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?

Hot or Not

That kind of system also serves as a good way to randomly dip into the
collection and sample what is on offer and encourages random checking.
We cannot rely on the kind of interlinking Wikipedia benefits from.

The rating scale can be quite short 1-5 as we dont want to overemphasise
the voting.

We might want a comment/keyword like system allow users to add keywords
and list the top rated keywords (possible checked against a
preapproved list of keywords).
Comments under each image could help provide a quantity of text for search
engines to reference and provide users with a relatively easy way to
interlink documents.

Basically there are a variety of ideas out there already and the real
trick will be to find which ones can be reused most easily.  It might be
possible to use an existing systemw with only minimal modifications but
I'm sure you guys already have good ideas of your own.


Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/