Il giorno mar, 18/08/2015 alle 20.42 +0200, Romaine Wiki ha scritto:
[...] This is really sad for Italy. Extra sad because of the difficult copyright situation in Italy, what requires the local team already to do much much much more work than in most other countries, just to have a normal contest. The Italian team does a great job this year.
Since probably most people in wikimedia-l are not aware of this, I'll add some background on the Italian situation an Wiki loves monuments, and why it's actually extra sad for Italy in particular.
Wiki loves monuments is a big global project (one of the most successful ever), but in Italy it's a bit peculiar. The basic issue is that in Italy not only we don't have freedom of panorama, but there is actually a law that prohibits to take pictures of monuments, unless you get a specific authorization (and of course there is no list of Italian monuments and no simple way to know who is responsible for a specific monument). Since we are not people easy to stop, four years ago we decided to start asking for authorizations: we wrote to thousands of municipalities and other institutions. But every cloud has a silver lining, and we turned this problem into an occasion to build relationships. For this year's edition, we secured authorizations from 200 municipalities and 100 other institutions (so far); and with part of them we are organizing events (~40) during September. This is a huge work: apart from the many volunteers involved, we have a full time employee for WLM (Cristian Cenci) but actually also the rest of our staff is dedicating a lot of time to this (summing up, 1,5-2 FTEs as a yearly average). In particular, the budget of WLM in Italy is probably higher than in any other country (not because we waste money, but because of higher stakes). Clearly having specific authorizations is not the ideal solution, so we are actually advocating for a change in the law. Apart from taking part in the European effort on copyright (the FKAGEU), we are are trying to make the Italian politicians understand the issue (among other things, we have recently had an event in the Italian parliament).
In short, this means that WLM in Italy is planned long ahead, we have hundreds of institutional partner, and it is central to our strategy.
Lorenzo