On 20/06/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/15/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske(a)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