Stan Shebs wrote:
Anthere wrote:
I have the feeling that in one year or so, freely licensed orphan images will indeed be deleted on the english wikipedia. That would be well within what I currently observe.
It wouldn't surprise me, I seem to recall some people muttering about that a while back. Just imagine all the AfDers migrating over to IfD!
I do not think people will bother moving them to commons, it is too heavy to do.
As a board member, isn't it within your power to pay a developer to come up with an automated way to transfer images from language WPs to commons? It's been wanted for some time, and would solve a lot of our image management problems. Commons has evolved much better ways to deal with large masses of images.
Nod. But frankly, it would not be considered as the most urgent thing a developer would have to take care of. Issues such as single login, or very simply, having the site run smoothly and with a decent efficiency (images loading time...) would be the priority.
Beyond this, we always fall back on the same issue, paying developers means more money. More money means having more fundraiser or fundraiser lasting longer, or people willing to take the time to ask for more grants (not so many people interested in doing that...) or simply looking for more sponsors, or putting ads ;-)
Overall, our license issues strike me as being more confusing and messy every day that goes by.
Organizations that deal professionally with as many images as are now in WMF's collection often have persons paid to do nothing but deal with license issues, calling and writing copyright holders for permissions, negotiating prices for licenses, etc. Pinching down on non-free images is basically our strategy to simplify things so that the Foundation doesn't have to start interviewing job candidates...
Stan
correct. This said... did you hear about the major uproar on the german wikipedia due to massive copyright infringment ? It is now in the press. And the german wikipedia, I believe, choose to entirely forbid all fair use images at least a year ago.
incidently, this major issue is the reason why Jimbo will probably not answer the questions about the arbcom for a while... so, please, show patience :-)
ant