Petition to ESA - VereinDE-l

2 Mar 2005


      Hello Wikipedians,
Before I sent this letter out I first sent it to you so that you can have a 
look at it, if I have done everything right with the names etc. and perhapes 
there are two further names. ;-)
@Jimbo: I think we can propose this subset release idea later, as Mr. von 
Weyhe said to me, that is is important to write a short mail and not to pack 
to many into it, that the ESA PR center really reads it fully.
Thanks a lot for your support (it's a nice feeling).
Regards,
Daniel Arnold
---
Dear Ms. Imbert-Vier,
Some months ago I asked you for permission to use the images of the ESA image 
gallery in the popular multilingual free online encyclopedia Wikipedia [1], 
which you refused.
Recently I read in the news that the ESA is considering changing their picture 
policy with respect to the release of the images of the Huygens probe on 
Titan.  So I contacted Mr. Bernhard von Weyhe of ESOC some days ago and he 
suggested contacting you again to summarize in short the essential facts 
about Wikipedia and why we think that a release of ESA pictures under GNU 
Free Documentation License would be beneficial for you.
1. What is Wikipedia?
-----
Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia.  It depends on free content that 
is edited by volunteers from all over the world.  Behind Wikipedia is a 
non-profit organisation called the "Wikimedia Foundation" [2] (placed in 
Florida/USA), headed by the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Wikipedia is now in its fifth year and keeps growing exponentially. 
Independent newspapers have repeatedly stated that Wikipedia is a serious and 
generally reliable alternative to traditional encyclopedias like 
Encyclopaedia Britannica or Microsoft Encarta.
2. What is the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)?
-----
Wikipedia is freely licensed under the GFDL [3] with very similar use
conditions as the the popular GPL licensed Linux operating
system. Hence we are unable to embed content that is licensed for
non-commercial use only as it is with your very high quality images.
3. What if ESA pictures would be released under GFDL (or equally free)?
-----
Although we are not able to use your images within Wikipedia, we are
very interested in doing so, as we have lots of articles about space
science, the ESA and its projects. At the moment we can use the images
of NASA (and we use them very extensively) as they are forced by US
copyright laws to publish their content within the public domain.     
Therefore, NASA images are far more widespread than ESA images and thus
there is no balance in the representation of space science in
Wikipedia. ESA certainly deserves an even more increased popularity
especially outside the EU and the key role play the pictures.
So I plead for a free release of the ESA images. You won't lose
anything with this step - in contrary, you will get in return a lot
for free:
* A visual and educational more attractive representation within
Wikipedia (Wikipedia is also used a lot by journalists for quick
information retrieval).
* Increased use of ESA images in the mass media and lots of good PR
and more interest from the public.
* A big media echo, as you would be a precursor of the free knowlegde
movement (of course we would also promote such a step in coordination with 
you).
This petition is officially supported by the Wikimedia
representatives, namely
- Jimmy Wales, president of Wikimedia Foundation, jwales@wikia.com
- Arne Klempert, vice-chairman of Wikimedia Deutschland e.V., akl@wikimedia.de
- André Darmochwal, board member of Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.,
  sansculotte@wikimedia.de
- Yann Forget, secretary of Wikimédia France, yann@forget-me.net
For further questions I'm willingly at your disposal:
Daniel Arnold arnomane@gmx.de
or personal +49 163 8900491 (mobile phone)
(and if you like you can also contact e.g. Jimmy Wales via mail)
Yours sincerely,
Daniel Arnold - a Wikipedia contributor