Camera-wiki.org talk:Camerapedia

Origin of Camera-wiki.org

To be strictly accurate, Vox created a new Flickr group (its name changed a couple of times), and Flickrmailed invitations to anyone who seemed angry enough to take some kind of action. Steevithak had done some hard thinking about what steps would be involved, and in the new group he proposed a plan of action which we basically followed to the letter.--Vox 20:44, 26 March 2011 (PDT)

Assertions lacking evidence, and opinon

I've just now made some changes to this article, but I have left in the parts that worry me the most. Here they are:

after incidents of wrong user attribution of wiki texts and unauthorized image uploads - both reverted by Wikia after protests

I'm not surprised to hear of this. But such an assertion needs indisputable evidence. Let's have it.

Camerapedia is [...] on thin ice since it started commercial mode without having a valid permission for most of its Flickr image links.

Putting aside for now the allegation about "thin ice", the claim that the site lacks "valid permission for most of its Flickr image links" is a very serious one. Startling claims require very solid evidence. What is this evidence?

Almost the whole community of Camerapedia contributors moved to the Camera-wiki.org project.

I don't immediately see familiar names at work over there, but mere personal impressions aren't good enough. Exactly what is the basis for this assertion? (How do you measure "the whole community of [pre-Wikia] Camerapedia contributors"? What's the criterion for "[moving] to the Camera-wiki.org project"? How many did move to it? And what's the percentage?)

its "Wikia skin" truly spoils many of the old original page designs

Mere opinion. It's opinion that I happen to agree with, but it's mere opinion all the same. It doesn't belong here. Zuleika 19:15, 28 March 2011 (PDT)

Hello? Any response? Any evidence? Zuleika 06:03, 4 April 2011 (PDT)

There are several threads in the flickr camerapedia forum that contain original accusations from copyright holders with image captures of the offending material, including cases where Wikia staff members removed copyright information from the exif data of images found in the camerapedia flickr group, then uploaded them to wikia with either no attribution or incorrect attributions indicating they belong to wikia staff. There are also posts I made in several threads during my attempts to contact wikia staff that include links to Wikia talk pages, one in which a wikia staff member acknowledged the problem, claiming it was unintentional, apologized, and agreed to remove the offending material. They followed through in a few days and removed the photos. The controversy resulted in additional flickr camerapedia members abandoning the group and moving to the flickr camerawiki group.

In other cases, copyright holders removed their photos from the flickr camerapedia group and publicly withdrew their permission for Wikia/Camerapedia to use the photos. Wikia's response, which appeared either in a flickr camerapedia group forum or on the old camerapedia discussion page, was that Wikia would not remove these photos and considered their continued presence in the wiki as permission from the copyright holders to use them. In order to withdraw permission to use the photos, Wikia maintained it was up to the copyright holders to find and remove each image on their own. Camera-wiki admins including myself have been removing these from the wikia site as we find them. Many have been removed (with edit summaries indicating the reason) but more may still be present on the Wikia site.

There are also numerous accusations in the discussion threads from copyright holders of CC-NC type images stating they believe Wikia's continued use of them on a commercial site is a copyright violation. Wikia has not responded to this. Though in prior wikia take-overs Wikia has claimed this is not the case and that they have a legal right to use NC images (I believe there is a section in the Wikipedia article on Wikia addressing this complaint in general)

I think it would be more appropriate to say "most of the admins and active members of the community" made the move. Admins can be documented by the historical content of the about pages on both sites. Possibly the active members could be confirmed by the special:statistics pages (not sure if historical info is available there for Camerapedia though). 100% of Camerapedia editors left the site after the take-over (including lbstone). The only active admins last I checked were Wikia staff members. 100% of the ex-Camerapedia admins have either become active on camerawiki as admins or editors, or expressed some level of support (though some have asked that the specific nature of their support remain anonymous, at least for now). Also you can quantify the community assertion through the number of flickr users who either abandoned the flickr Camerapedia group and moved to the flickr camerawiki group (in this case, the word "active" is definitely needed as there are around 2000 members of the camerapedia group who donated images and never made the move, many are not even active flickr accounts anymore). The flickr Camerapedia group lost close to 1/3(?) it's content. We gained all they lost plus that of a number of users who have not yet removed their content from the camerapedia group but may in the future (e.g. rebollo_fr's 5,000 images). Percentage wise (approximately) 15% of flickr users made the move but 85% of photos did. Further, both pages have statistics available. The number of members and photos in the camerapedia group appears to be declining while the member and photo counts in the camerawiki group are growing at a slow but steady pace. So the reasoning is that the 15% were the active flickr users who are ongoing contributors of photos. One other point worth making is that while the flickr camerawiki group is actively being used as source of photos for camera-wiki.org, Wikia now appears to have abandoned the flickr camerapedia group altogether, instead relying only on uploaded images from new wikia users.

Regarding the skin, I'd change that to say the wikia skin broke the layout of camerapedia's pages, which were designed for a width larger than allowed in Wikia's skin. The narrowed width forced wrapping of images and text in places it was not intended, in some cases harmless but in others rendering the pages incomprehensible (photos of the wrong camera appearing next to descriptive text for example). Wikia staff have made to changes to fix these problems on some pages. It should be possible to confirm this from the wikia changes log and history. Whether it's ugly is subjective but the layout problems should be easy to document.

If I can get time, I'll try to track down the direct links for some of this stuff, but if anyone else can do it first, please do.

Steevithak 07:23, 4 April 2011 (PDT)