On 6/20/06, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@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