On 6/15/06, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
I was wondering if there is some kind of organized effort to ask photographers and image agencies for donations (read: GFDL- or CC-licensing) of images.
Last year I thought a bit about the idea of having a dedicated "image fundraising" campaign for Commons, which could perhaps run alongside the next regular fundraiser. The idea is that there would be a simplified upload process, and a post-upload vetting system to determine which material is actually useful. I proposed this to another Wikimedian, who unfortunately did not end up finding the time to work on it. Here are a few of the mock-ups I made on paper:
http://scireview.de/wiki/donations1.jpg http://scireview.de/wiki/donations2.jpg http://scireview.de/wiki/donations3.jpg
(Sorry for the poor quality, this is done with a camera, not a scanner.)
The idea is, as is hopefully clear, to have a simple two-step process for uploading and describing the pictures. All the licensing stuff would be made as simple as possible, with reasonable default choices. Aside from advertising this online, we could approach some publications systematically. Given how much Wikipedia is loved by the media, I think getting a story out there "Wikipedia asks for photo donations" wouldn't be too hard.
The actual post-upload review would be done in a collaborative review process similar to my FlickrLickr project. In fact, the FlickrLickr codebase might be a useful basis for this.
Magnus, are you interested in working on such a project? Anyone else?
Best, Erik