On 6/20/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Er...you mean for the general public? I support
seeking image
donations for historical topics or specific holes in our coverage, but
I don't know that we need more general amatuer
my-dog-in-my-backyard,sunset-over-my-fence,my-street-my-school-my-car
whatever photos. It seems to me the vetting system would have to
discard 90% of what they were offered, so I rather question if it
would be a worthwhile exercise.
Maybe. I think if we clearly define, in big friendly letters and with
pretty icons, what we want and what we don't want, we could get a lot
of good stuff. People aren't stupid. I suspect that there are quite a
few amateur photos of celebrities, for instance. In any case, the
campaign would be two-sided: an interface for instantly sharing media,
and a contact form for negotiations. If we advertise this broadly, I
think we could get contacts from places we don't expect.
Back to the topic of image donations. Not just image
donations,
actually - it would be really good if we could find out if there were
some unis with, for example, recorded speech excerpts or phonemes or
whatever, that they were willing to donate. Someone would have to
convert them to OGG. This would be fantastic support for Wikibooks
language-learning books as well as linguistics articles in /all/
language Wikipedias. I don't know how good our recordings are of
clicks and trills, or uvuvular sounds, for example, are. It would be
great to have native speakers' recordings.
If we organize a "media donation" campaign well and make it part of
the next fundraiser, I think it could lead to such people coming to us
and talking to us. But I do think we should be open for contributions
from the general public. Yes, a lot of images uploaded to Commons
aren't used. But from my own checks of the FlickrLickr uploads, a lot
of them _are_ used. FlickrLickr also automatically generates wikitext
for galleries like this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:FlickrLickr/Slice_55
This is meant for easy copy and pasting of links into Wikipedia
articles, and I encourage all "my" FlickrLickr reviewers to add images
to articles wherever they can. If we use a similar, somewhat more
refined process for a media donations campaign, I think it could work.
Erik