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Improving Mindat.orgThe thread about Rob Lavinsky's photos

30th Dec 2016 02:55 UTCJolyon Ralph Founder

We have deleted the thread posted about Rob Lavinsky's photo descriptions as some of the comments, and the very title of the thread itself, were quite insulting to one of our major photo contributors.

The issue raised is one that has been raised and answered several times already in the past here, yet it appears that I will again have to explain our policy on this.

Rob Lavinsky / The Arkenstone are one of the largest online mineral dealers especially in terms of volume of material sold. We have been very fortunate that for over a decade now Rob has not just given us permission to use his photos, but also to task his staff with doing all of the work needed to upload the photos and descriptions of these photos.

Because of the volume of photos involved, and because we are not paying anything towards the effort involved in doing this, it is unreasonable to expect Rob to write separate descriptions for all of the photos he uploads, so we accept the same descriptions that were written by his team for selling the specimens.

Some of these descriptions do contain 'flowery' language and contain personal opinions as to the quality and rarity of the specimen that we may not agree with here.

But neither The Arkenstone nor Mindat.org have the time or resources to change all of them.

Instead, Rob and his team have said on more than one occasion that they are perfectly happy for us to edit descriptions as we see fit. When we see one that we feel is not 'appropriate' for mindat, we change it.

But we do not have the time to check every photo description for this and to edit them. We instead rely on feedback from people here to point out things that should be changed.

And in providing this feedback there is a right and a wrong way to do it. The right way to do it is simply to alert us to an image description that should be edited. Without insults or other unnecessary comments. Ideally this should be done in private message.

Then, things can get fixed and we can concentrate our valuable time in actually improving the database rather than spending our time dealing with this unnecessary response from a very tiny minority of our community.

It would also allow me to not have to interrupt my family vacation time to deal with this mess. I do not like having to tell my wife and son to wait on me having to deal with this nonsense when we should be relaxing and enjoying our time together. I am not happy.

This rule was set up to deal with Rob's descriptions but essentially this rule applies equally to all contributors.

Jolyon

30th Dec 2016 08:07 UTCHarald Schillhammer Expert

This is exactly what I usually do. I have been shovelling a lot of Myanmar photos to the correct locality and where possible inform the original uploader of my action so he can change his label information accordingly. I did the same with Rob's photos. Only when I edit the text in a way that it does not have any impact on the overall information, I do so "silently".

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