Talk:Wikimedia Fellowships/Project Ideas/NARA DOCUMERICA photographs color correction
Volunteer restoration efforts[edit]
Hi Djembayz! It looks like restoration of NARA photos are already being undertaken by volunteers, as part of the GLAM partnership project with NARA. I would imagine that color correction would be part of this effort. Fellowships should not take on work that volunteers in the Wikimedia movement can do or are already doing. Rather than a fellowship, maybe all thats needed is to add these photos to the list of suggestions on the Commons project page? Siko 00:21, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
- Hi Siko. In case you were unaware, Djembayz is a Wikimedia DC board member, and she is quite familiar with the NARA GLAM project (and has come to the National Archives in person for our events). As to whether this overlaps with ongoing work, I would say that image restorations are certainly something that we would like to see as part of the NARA project, but that Commons page you linked to is mostly aspirational. I was able to provide high-resolution images from NARA and set up that page in the hope that the Commons community would undertake restorations of them, but this mostly isn't happening. There are literally tens of thousands of images in the DOCUMERICA set alone. The total number of NARA files cleaned up is probably in the dozens, and the total that got an extensive, featured picture-quality restoration could be counted on one hand. The latter can be a significant amount of work to do, but even more simple edits like correcting colors and cropping require a more specialized skill set than most editors possess.
I think there are a lot of good ideas in Kristin's proposal, but one thing I would suggest is that it is possible that a fellow could even just take more of an organizational role, designing community processes to ensure that such images get the work they need. There might even be other creative solutions, like working with a university digital photography class, since the work requires little actual wiki editing skill. Anyway, I am not entirely familiar with fellowships, but I wouldn't want this to be dismissed under the assumption that such work is already being done; there is certainly a need that could be filled. Dominic 01:09, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
- This is great input to have, thanks Dominic! It can be hard to tell from project pages which plans are underway and which are purely aspirational, so glad I asked :-) If you come across anyone who would be interested in taking on a fellowship project like this, please do send them my way so we can continue to discuss too. Meanwhile, we'll keep this page in the active list as an idea for anyone in the community who is interested in helping develop it further. Siko 01:36, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
- Good to hear from both of you. We could definitely use an organizational hand in this. I'm still working on NARA photo categorization, and there's a long way to go just on the tagging. Haven't even gotten to uploading all that scanned material-- we need Dominic and his upload bot again! ;) Djembayz 02:18, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
- This is great input to have, thanks Dominic! It can be hard to tell from project pages which plans are underway and which are purely aspirational, so glad I asked :-) If you come across anyone who would be interested in taking on a fellowship project like this, please do send them my way so we can continue to discuss too. Meanwhile, we'll keep this page in the active list as an idea for anyone in the community who is interested in helping develop it further. Siko 01:36, 1 February 2012 (UTC)