On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Click-throughs are much lower, often on the level of
15,000-30,000 during
main page time. Yet remember these are also generating a steady stream of
attention on the articles themselves. The one amateur photo of a sound card
is receiving 2,000 direct page views at en:wiki plus an unknown number at
two dozen other language editions of Wikipedia. Multiply that kind of
attention across a few hundred articles and one year: this has the potential
to become a major source of web traffic to the donating institution.
Bundesarchiv has retained full copyright over high resolution copies of the
images they uploaded (the copyright in these instances is uncontroversial).
Without any actual advertising, readers have been using the source link from
the image hosting page to go to the Bundesarchiv site and purchase high
resolution files. Their sales of high resolution images have increased
significantly since the donation.
Whether and how to give additional credit is a question I'd rather not
address personally. Whatever the community decides I'll honor; the salient
point is that even with what we do right now it's a net benefit to
institutions that are smart about it. We need to communicate to them where
the advantages are, since this is new territory and a radical departure from
how they're used to operating.
Indirectly this helps our position with regard to NPG, because a
significant part of NPG's argument is that WMF is impossible to work with.
Each time we develop a cooperative relationship with another cultural
institution we prove that part of NPG's argument empirically wrong. The
more this happens, the more likely NPG is to look silly; the net effect
could soften their approach. Now is an excellent time to build those
relationships because the current situation is drawing attention to the
media side of Wikipedia.
Rather than assault the brick wall we walk around it: work with the
institutions whose copyrights are either uncontroversial, or who don't try
to assert claims over public domain material. As they benefit, Wikipedia
benefits, and ultimately the others may abandon their claims and get in line
to cooperate with us.
-Durova
--
http://durova.blogspot.com/