On 20/06/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
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.
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.
Also given how much trouble even Wikipedians have understanding that WM content can be used commercially, it might be very difficult to succinctly put across the extent to which a free license is free.
Also, and this is a more general comment, there is still quite a disconnect between Commons and the projects, although it is definitely getting better as more projects switch to Commons-only and just time goes on. Sometimes there is a wealth of good pictures on Commons and no link on the WP article, or worse still no image at all. Sometimes (or often?) the beautiful FP nominations are not used in any Wikimedia project, anywhere!! Now I really wonder about that. We almost need another "project" of Commons people pushing the best content to all the WPs (they tend to be the most straightforward to illustrate for outsiders, plus maybe Wiktionary). So, I don't see that there is a good point to ask for image donations if we are not going to have people ensuring that the images will actually be used in some Wikimedia project. Same with the FlickrLickr content. Sitting around Commons is nice for us, but it could be so much better...
and yes I know in some cases a Commons gallery is a natural extension of a W* page. not every image has to be a lead photo, obviously.
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.
I just wonder how hard it is to convince unis to tighten their grip on the IP rights...
cheers, Brianna