2008/12/3 Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com:
Dear Commonists,
Starting on Thursday Dec 4, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100.000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive.
Oh, this is excellent news - 100,000! Is there any chance you could give us a better idea about the general scope of this content? I'm particularly curious as to:
* what periods are covered; is it heavily post-1945, or is there substantial earlier content? * will we get a lot of illustrations of individuals? * are there any particular thematic collections?
These images are licensed cc-by-sa. Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things, asserts that the Federal Archive owns sufficient rights to be able to grant this kind of license.
...and *this* is a very useful thing to have had explicitly stated. Rights problems are now firmly their responsibility :-)
As to the image size issue: yeah, 800px isn't wonderful. It's better than a lot of the images we currently have, though, and it's *certainly* better than no freely-licensed picture at all - which is probably going to be the case for a lot of this material, especially if we get a good load of photographs of individuals...