Commons talk:Coffee table book

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To celebrate the 1000th Featured picture, Commons will publish a Coffee table book with a selection of its featured pictures.

Organization[edit]

  • Who will coordinate this
  • Who/which organization will be responsible for publishing
  • How will the selection be done
  • Who is willing to help
  • ...

Willing to help[edit]


I created a google group for easier discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/commonsbook/ --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 23:30, 19 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Publishing, responsibility[edit]

We need to find a publisher. Then we must find a person or organization that will be legally responsible for the coffee table book. I think one of the local chapters or the foundation itself? Any ideas? -- Bryan (talk to me) 08:53, 9 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

One of the chapters seems like a good idea to me. I wrote an email to one of the WMF employees about this idea (no reply yet). I hope that they will be able to find an agreeable allowance for images, even if it's "only stuff by Wikimedians who have gone through X verification process" or 5000 edits or trusted by 10 admins/bcrats/stewards or some other standard. I understand if they wanna leave out stuff like Flickr images. But a good amount of the FPs are self-made works so excluding even the questionable stuff should still leave a lot of content.
I mean we could do this entirely unofficially, but I would be so much prouder to see Commons & WMF logos on it! pfctdayelise (说什么?) 09:34, 9 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I agree that it should only contain images made by Commons users. I think a selection process should be held, in which all Wikimedians can voice their opinion, and a team of 5-10 trusted users make a selection based on those opinions. -- Bryan (talk to me) 10:33, 9 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If they're good enough to be included, why not include them all? Leave it to the good sense of the designers to arrange them. So some shots might take up a page by themselves, and another page might be arranged with 4x4 images. I don't think book-design-by-consensus is going to be very successful. :) --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 11:57, 9 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well, depending on volume, of course, but one reason to not include them all would be price of final product. The price would depend on the number of pages and the size the book would have. Is there any desired max. price? I was thinking max. E59 (about $80), excluding postage. It would be nice if the chapter would be able to make a 20-25% profit on it. That would mean that the production price should not be higher than E47,20. Just a calculation, but if we would have more pages than would fit in our budget, we can either add the images in gallaries which would fit more images on a page (but not leave room for multi-language captions most probably) or leave them out of the book altogether... Siebrand 08:04, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Designing by consensus might not be totally practical, but it should be possible for the Wikimedia community to voice its opinion on which pictures should be highlighted. Nothing binding, but just as an advice.
I personally have no idea what the average Wikimedian is willing to pay for such a book. We might start a little survey later on, and based on that see how many images we are able to include? -- Bryan (talk to me) 10:37, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Getting back on this, who/which organisation will be legally responsible for the publishing of the book? -- Bryan (talk to me) 14:44, 16 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The German Wikimedia chapter probably has the most experience with this type of products. I know many of the members of the Dutch chapter and I could try and find out if they feel anything for taking responsibility. If a lot of money up front is required, I think only Wikimedia Germany would be able to do it. The Dutch chapter is still extremely poor... Cheers! Siebrand 16:40, 16 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've got some experience in publishing and could possible help. Although, I wonder, what you guys think about how many people will buy this book? How is it going to be distributed? --Fb78 07:25, 19 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Fb, that would be awesome. :) We're still working on those details. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 23:20, 19 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Caption languages[edit]

I was thinking that we should add captions to the images where we have room for it, something like 6-8 languages and where we have less room 3-4 languages. I have a few questions and proposals:

  • which languages should we add captions in? English seems like a well suited candidate, but all others are open to me.
  • one thought was to open a pre-order (with pre-pay) list for the book and have the people give a language of preference with their order. The two languages with the most orders, would also be added to the captions.
  • it would be nice to have at least one non main stream non-latin language added to the captions, to underline the multi-language aspect
  • which would the languages in the smaller set be?

Siebrand 08:09, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It would be better to do different print runs in different languages IMO. (I am still thinking in a print-on-demand mindset rather than tradtional publishing...) Or only number the images, and separately print insert-sheets with captions and credits in various languages, and insert them in the back of the book according to the purchaser's request. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 09:27, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Multilinguality is one of the highlights of Commons. So if it is feasable, we should try to get it printed in multiple languages. Based on activity on Commons, I say that it should be possible to have it translated for certain in English, French and Polish. We do have a very large German community here, but they seem not to be very active in translation, as well as Spanish. -- Bryan (talk to me) 10:30, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
POTD commonly have a dozen or more language captions. Maybe not the same dozen every day. But it wouldn't surprise me if we managed 15 languages at least. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 10:36, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I guess we could have one "universal" version with some major languages, such as ("including but not necessarily limited to") English, German, French and Spanish. If this were to succeed, this would sell nicely on Amazon. Then there might be other combinations for other markets: some publishing houses work strongly in the Nordic countries and a different five-language version could be provided for that area etc... Samulili 19:13, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

We have to get moving![edit]

CatScan shows that there are currently 904 FPs. We don't have that long!

I suggest we aim to publish a book containing the Wikimedian-created FPs.

Maybe one of you guys could whip up some DB we could edit on the toolserver? I'd want to put fields like

  • image name/link
  • author
  • source
  • license
  • description/s
  • date (if relevant)
  • geocoding (if relevant)
  • keywords/categories (for thematic sorting in the book)
  • link to FP nom
  • date made FP
  • copyright confirmed (check the believability of each case)

using a wiki page to edit info like this for 1000 entries would be too painful. I suggest we number them according to date made FP.

We should get a list of the non-geocoded ones and ask the geocoding group to help us.

Wow exiciting! --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 13:26, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

looks good to me... pfctdayelise (说什么?) 23:19, 19 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

title[edit]

I don't like 'Wikimedia Commons Exposed'. "Exposed" has too many other connotations. I prefer just "Wikimedia Commons" or something like "Excellence in free content". pfctdayelise (说什么?) 13:29, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Pictures at an Exhibition - Wikimedia Commons. How about that title? It is subtle yet interesting (and musicians and artists will know what it refers to). Arnomane 13:17, 14 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Objectives[edit]

It just occured to me to ask the fundamental question: what are the main objectives. Basically I can think of two which will lead to different solutions in marketing etc.—is the objective to raise money or to raise awareness? Samulili 19:15, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Creating a book like this and shipping it is expensive. Making serious money out if this without a guaranteed number of sales of 700-1000 will make it very hard to invest in a fixed edition. Print on Demand (PoD) is more expensive. As long as we do not know for certain that we are not going to sell hundreds or thousands, we will not make any substantial profit out of it. Siebrand 19:27, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Making money out of this will be hard. I believe we do this 1. for fun, 2. to raise awareness, and 3. we should break-even -- Bryan (talk to me) 20:06, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I definitely vote for 'raise awareness'. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 07:37, 16 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I agree.
/me puts on my spock ears: A logical consequence then is that we sacrifice pretty much everything but our core values to maximum sales and publicity.
It seems to me that for maximal awareness we need partners (publishing companies) who expect some profit, probably leaving nothing to us. But that's ok because we're raising awareness, not money. Samulili 08:19, 16 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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