Your release of 100,000 CC-BY is very exciting news, thanks for writing about it in your
blog [1]. It is a really big step forwards for libraries to make their holdings available
on the Web with Creative Commons licenses, and you deserve a lot of credit for doing it,
and helping move the conversation forward.
I am writing on behalf of some of the Wikipedia Commons volunteers. We were wondering if
Wellcome would be open to having these CC-BY images uploaded to the Wikipedia Commons. We
noticed that Wellcome Trust has an opening for a Wikipedian in Residence [2] and took that
as a sign that it might be something you would be interested in helping out with?
As you know Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe [3], so having an extra high-resolution copy
of your images up in the Commons could be beneficial from a digital preservation
perspective. More importantly having the images in the Commons helps them be reused in
article content at one or more of the 285 language Wikipedias—which is great for access
since Wikipedia is the 6th most popular Website in the world [4] and recently saw 532
million unique visitors per month [5]. Having the images on the Commons with proper
attribution and URLs to the Wellcome Library website would let your content participate in
that ecosystem.
If you think this sounds like something you would be willing to work with us on please let
me, or the Wikimedia Commons discussion list (cc’d here) know.
Sincerely,
Ed Summers
[1]
http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2014/01/thousands-of-years-of-visual-cultur…
[2]
https://cancer-research-uk-jobs.tal.net/vx/appcentre-External/brand-2/candi…
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS
[4]
http://www.alexa.com/topsites
[5]
http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/