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2054 discussions

Original art on Commons
by wiki_tomos 27 Nov '04

27 Nov '04

I am not sure why no-one has responded, but many of your ideas sound very good. I think there are many people who have a large amount of photos and other media files to offer, some already on the web under free license. But they might feel hesitant to upload one-hundred picture. I, with help from others, am indeed creating some sound files for each of basic Japanese letters and some compounds to be used in Japanese language wikibook. There are about 100 of them. I am very sure there will be others, if not yet, doing very similar things for similar projects. So I find a batch uploader would be very helpful for others like me. Tomos

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flags
by Gerrit 14 Nov '04

14 Nov '04

Hello, Wikimedia Commons currently insists all images to have a free license. I completely agree with this policy. However, I have a question about the license of a flag. A flag is a sort of drawing. If I find a flag somewhere on the internet, it may not be free. If the flag is correct, and I would create another correct flag, however, it would be exactly the same, and it would be free. Legally, drawing the same flag again, pixel for pixel, would alter its license, wouldn't it? If so, can I let an image program do this? Suppose I find a correct flag in .gif format, download it, convert it to .png. It then is a different flag with the same content. If the license of the source is unknown, what do I know about the license of the new .png? It may be a derivative work, but the result would have been exactly the same if I would have followed the exact instructions at http://www.freewebs.com/mahabadassociation/flag.html . It confuses me: can a flag be licensed at all? regards, Gerrit Holl. -- Weather in Twenthe, Netherlands 14/11 10:25: 5.0°C wind 0.9 m/s WNW (57 m above NAP) -- In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961

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Original art on Commons
by erik_moeller＠gmx.de 13 Nov '04

13 Nov '04

Wikimedia desparately needs more artists. Projects like Wikijunior - a collection of Wikireaders for kids - need high quality illustrations in order to flourish. In my opinion, the Wikimedia Commons should become the central artistic hub of the Wikimedia community. What can we do to make it so? Well, there are a few technical changes that will help: - New upload form that makes it easier to choose licenses and write descriptions. I'm planning to hack something together here soon, but it won't be the super-ultra form that I've created mock-ups for in the original Commons proposal. - An external media manager to collect files and batch-upload them to the Commons, with a nice Windows GUI to boot. - A better discussion page system. The whole Image talk:, Commons talk: etc. wiki page system is confusing for newcomers and difficult to track for us. But except for the first one, these changes will take months. There are a few things we can do right now: Create portals for different communities ---------------------------------------- - 2D artists - 3D artists - photographers - filmmakers - sound experts The purpose of these portals would be that we can pass on these URLs to people who know nothing about Wikimedia. Each portal should give a brief description of the type of files that we want - useful to Wikimedia projects - and the free content principle. It should also highlight a few of the existing works in that category as examples, including links to the Wikimedia projects that use them. Featured content separated by category -------------------------------------- Successful community art sites have some kind of comment and feedback process. For us right now, that is [[Commons:Featured picture candidates]]. I think we need to create this site in all the categories mentioned above, and link the individual featured content candidate pages from the portals. Catalog and systematically approach existing projects ----------------------------------------------------- The largest community art website I know is deviantart.com. Much of their content is not of interest to us as it is purely artistic. However, they have many excellent photos. Alas, most of them are not under an open content license. First, we need a list of these projects. Second, for each of them we need volunteers who search existing content and browse new content. Virtually all of them have contact forms. In cases where the content is useful to us, we could post standard messages: Hi Xy, your picture [bla] could be useful for the Wikimedia project [abc]. In order to use it there, we would need it under an [[open content]] license, such as the GNU Free Documentation License. Would you be willing to put your picture under such a license? I would then upload it to the Wikimedia Commons, our shared media repository. If you want, you can also upload it there yourself - see the [portal link] for further instructions. I think if these messages are sufficiently personalized, they will not be considered spam. Press release ------------- Once we have the portals more or less in operation, we need to start working on our first real press release. One good occasion would be the 50,000th media file. I'm picking a reasonably high number so we have some time to prepare this properly. This press release would include a real press kit, with examples of our media and information about the Wikimedia projects. It would also prominently describe each of the different portals. We could create variant versions to send to different communities - e.g. photo magazines, artist weblogs etc. Rules of exclusion ------------------ During all of this, we need to make it very clear that the Wikimedia Commons is for Wikimedia projects. People will be pissed off if we delete excellent artistic works that have no relation to anything we do. Maybe in the future, art itself will become one of our missions, but right now it isn't. Anything that's created needs to be tied to the distribution of knowledge. So that should be emphasized on all the portals. Getting all of this off the ground will be a huge undertaking, especially since our community is still small. I will be occupied by Wikinews in the next few weeks, so I would appreciate it if anyone else took the initiative to start working on this. Regards, Erik

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Wikimedia Commons mailing list
by erik_moeller＠gmx.de 11 Nov '04

11 Nov '04

The purpose of this mailing list is to have a single place of discussion for the needs and organization of the Wikimedia Commons project, as well as a good way to alert its members of important developments. Regards, Erik

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