On 10/17/06, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
I'd be shocked if flickr didn't completely dwarf us in terms of images with 4:3 and 5:4 aspect.
"Free" ? As in "free speech" or in "free beer" ?
Touché
However, Judging by the popularity of Flickr, Youtube, and the non free creative commons licenses (which account for 2/3rds of the CC usage) I'd say that the general public cares not a lick about free content, so long as it is available to them at no cost and no one is suing them (i.e. free as in stolen beer is sufficient, since there is no RIAA going after folks for image copyright violations).
That we have not yet made Freedom a primary concern (even among many of our own users!) is a substantial failure on our part ... other services which play really fast and loose with copyright (thank you DMCA safe harbor) will always have a broader collection of content as a result.
Today, commons is a weakly organized pile of images (and some other media)... We're no better off than youtube, actually.. they offer ratings, recommendations, and a better search engine.
I think we need to think carefully about our future. If we are to continue to provide value beyond a simple image dump for Wikimedia we must focus on the virtues of our model (demanding free content, welcoming enhancement and derrivation) compared to sites like Flickr and Youtube.