Ah, forgot to say: Jane, this initiative seems to very much overlap the DPLA/Europeana ongoing "standardization" effort: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H6TWxGARqUMxJrc2sXjaBlOsg7UkUTb27rvtS8aC...
I hope you join forces for a combined outcome. CC's practical approach (for metadata, machine-readability etc.) can be very useful to counter some rather speculative discussions found elsewhere; and DPLA, Europeana have a lot of hands-on experience with very messy copyright information, which CC almost certainly lacks.
Gergo Tisza, 03/10/2015 00:40:
The main issue with this effort, on Wikimedia and elsewhere, will be that there is no guarantee we have any metadata about file attribution and copyright status. See also https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_driveAs that page shows, we have machine-readable metadata for the license at least for 99% of Commons files and 99% of all files. The number probably gets much higher when weighted by number of views. I would certainly not consider missing metadata in 1% of our files the main issue.
Numbers are not everything; there's much more in that page. The coverage is so good because we cheat ;-): public domain and all rights reserved files can be marked in the same way! https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive/How_to_fix_metad... And most of our tags on Commons have no meaning for the external world, for instance last time I checked we didn't use the public domain mark for public domain files.
Nemo