Getting the picture – an interview with the Graphic lab
- WikiProject Bhutan is looking for more editors to help expand and improve Bhutan-related articles.
- The Guild of Copyeditors September Backlog Drive is only 200 articles away from eliminating all copyedit tags from 2008. Help wipe out these old copyedit requests and earn a barnstar along the way.
- Valued pictures is looking for help reviewing nominated images.
This week we met up with five wikigraphists—members of of the Wikipedia Graphics Lab. We chatted with JovianEye, Begoon, Fallschirmjäger, Gringer and Orionist.
Unlike a conventional WikiProject, the Lab does not work with articles – only images, grouped into three "workshops": one for illustrations, one for photographs and one for maps. When the project started in 2006, requests were all grouped in one area, as the Graphics lab. Since then, the three separate workshops have been created, focusing people with relevant skills on the specific area they can work on rather than having to look through all requests. However, this sometimes means keeping watch on three different pages, each with a lower level of activity, as well as the sister project on Wikimedia Commons.
The project is in need of more people requesting improvements to photographs. However, there is a backlog at SVG creation requests, and a shortage of skilled editors in this field. With only a few regulars, notably veteran requester Chris, the Lab is only scratching the surface of the 7 million files on Commons alone. The addition of the 'Top 4' feature at the start of this year, a set of images requiring vectorisation at the top of the page that are changed every 48 hours, has helped in encouraging progress and getting through more files.
The project would also like to encourage beginners to become Wikigraphists by learning to use simple freeware applications, GIMP and Inkscape. Simple tasks such as cropping can be learned by just about anyone. They can try their hand at removing borders or captions of some of 80,000+ images donated to Wikimedia Commons by the Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives).