We should definitely stick to our usual procedures on Commons - and make sure that the law is followed. Of course WLM is a good argument why Freedom of Panorama is a Good Thing but that is another discussion.š

It would be very helpful if uploaders can early in the prrocess identify which buildings will be protected, and which are possible to be photographed of course.š

Lodewijk (who is very happy that NL has Freedom of Panorama)

No dia 22 de Setembro de 2011 11:24, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod@mccme.ru> escreveu:
On Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:54:28 +0400, αΞΑΣΤΑΣΙΡ μΨΧΟΧΑ
<stasielvova@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod@mccme.ru>
> wrote:
>> as far as I understand, it was one of the
>> main barriers which delayed the participation of Russia.
> No. The problem was a base with a Lenin monuments of XIX century. Fear
> of lack of FOP is one of the reasons of small activity of existing
> users - so we have big activity of new users. We see that they make
> mistakes in this area, but even from them the count of errors is very
> small and the jury given the task to solve it carefully.

Well, I obviously have smth to say about this - and I will post it on
October 1, so that we do not get distracted from the current activity. But
just to mention it, the database has a number of typos (like the one you
cite), what is more important, it has a big number of more serious errors -
the monuments which are still protected by law and included in the database
but do not factually exist. The point is that this is not so much an
obstacle for running WLM, since hardly anybody would provide monuments of
non-existing monuments, and if someone would, this could be a major
success. (I think if we could collect in such a way free images of wooden
churches burned in Arkhangelsk Oblast in 1970s-1980s it would be great). On
the other hand, the FoP is a real issue - the images which violate FoP are
subject to deletion on Commons, and you do not want a new user to start
his/her participation in Wikipedia with a deletion review notice on his/her
talk page. The fraction of non-free images is obviously small, since most
of the monuments of cultural heritage protected in Russia were created
before 1917 and thus are PD-RusEmpire. I believe (but did not check) that
this fraction is even lower in Saint-Petersburg.

Cheers
Yaroslav