Slow Boats

Weekly Wes Whine

So the last time I looked at MySpace there was a sign-off link on every page. Had I hallucinated their absence?

Hallucinating the absence of things is a genuine form of hallucination. It is far more common, in fact, than the kinds of hallucinations that you read about in novels. Long before a crazy person develops the ability to hallucinate a flying elephant, he will practice on less difficult tricks, like hallucinating that his wife isn't yelling at him, or that he isn't losing a war. It's easier to hallucinate that something isn't there, because not seeing a thing takes less imagination than seeing a non-thing.

I know all of that from vivid first-hand experience, garnered during my Funny-Peculiar Years, also known as What Years? So I wouldn't be surprised if the sign-off links were there all along.

OK. Let's try to gripe about something real this week. I'll give MySpace a rest, and gripe about Wikimedia Commons instead.

Before I do, I want to say that I really really love Wikimedia Commons, and my gripe will be a kind of love-slap. Wikimedia Commons has single-handedly made my blogs and countless other blogs easier on the eyes, by providing us with media that us little people can use for illustrations without having to constantly seek permissions. This is a boon to humanity.

My gripe concerns the search process. You go to search for a picture and you have two ways to peruse the hits. Let's say you decide to do a search on something there's too much of, like "painting". Now you have pages and pages of hits. How do you pick one that you want to use? You have to see them!

That's what thumbnails are for. That's why Google Image Search and every other image search-engine provides thumbnails.

Does Wikimedia provide thumbnails? If you make a separate request for them! You have to click on "Find media with Mayflower" and Mayflower, the slow boat to the new world takes weeks to land you 400 miles from where you wanted to be. And you stay! Because you don't want to go through that again!

What kind of images do most people want? They want the most relevant ones! That's what "relevant" means! So why is the default to waste all my time to give me the "most recent" images first? So if some fool just yesterday uploaded 20 expressionistic paintings of his right big toe, that's all I get on page one?

And, while we're at it, why is Mayflower piloted by an administrator named tangotango, not to be confused with the Polish user of the same handle?

This has been a love-slap at Wikimedia Commons, Mayflower, and phonetic alphabet spellings, by Whiskey-Echo-Sierra Bravo-Romeo-Oscar-Whiskey-November-India-November-Golf