2008/12/3 Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler(a)gmail.com>om>:
Dear Commonists,
Starting on Thursday Dec 4, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive
upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100.000 files from a
donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to
the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and
are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive.
Oh, this is excellent news - 100,000! Is there any chance you could
give us a better idea about the general scope of this content? I'm
particularly curious as to:
* what periods are covered; is it heavily post-1945, or is there
substantial earlier content?
* will we get a lot of illustrations of individuals?
* are there any particular thematic collections?
These images are licensed cc-by-sa. Wikimedia Germany
and the Federal
Archive have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things,
asserts that the Federal Archive owns sufficient rights to be able to
grant this kind of license.
...and *this* is a very useful thing to have had explicitly stated.
Rights problems are now firmly their responsibility :-)
As to the image size issue: yeah, 800px isn't wonderful. It's better
than a lot of the images we currently have, though, and it's
*certainly* better than no freely-licensed picture at all - which is
probably going to be the case for a lot of this material, especially
if we get a good load of photographs of individuals...
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk