This has been missing for some time -- there is no way for researchers to use commons to share and archive freely-licensed data files. It came up again at the dev summit as a persistent problem (despite the existence of the Data namespace); has there been any recent talk about enabling this?
SJ
This sounds like a really good idea. I think it would also make sense to use Commons as a place to upload data files that have been imported in Wikidata for later reference and checking.
-- Hay
On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 9:36 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
This has been missing for some time -- there is no way for researchers to use commons to share and archive freely-licensed data files. It came up again at the dev summit as a persistent problem (despite the existence of the Data namespace); has there been any recent talk about enabling this?
SJ
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 9:36 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
This has been missing for some time -- there is no way for researchers to use commons to share and archive freely-licensed data files. It came up again at the dev summit as a persistent problem (despite the existence of the Data namespace); has there been any recent talk about enabling this?
SJ
In theory this would be jolly nice. However as the copyright issues in the data namespace have been difficult, we know that introducing these formats will require further guidelines and policy changes to cover csv and other types of file.[1] Let's not underestimate how much time this takes, and how few free volunteer days there are available to do this in an adequate way, support by a consensus for the changes.
As an example, though individual items in a data set may be thought uncopyrightable, there are many examples where the assembled data is considered creative work, and so can be a new intellectual property. This is clearly true with subjective data, such as the "top films of the 20th century" which I can see in my Kodi app, which is probably not "freely-licensed", it may not even be legal for me to download it...
The red flag in SJ's email is understanding "free-licensed data files". For me, this must mean being able to: - validate the source - apart from exceptional cases there must be an identified rights holder to release the data - the data should have "educational value" and so must have test-able reliable content - volunteers must have easy tools to validate content, in the same way as we can use Google Images to search for copyright violations
Links: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Proposals#Proposal_t...
Fae