Hi Wikipedia-wannabes!
The 'Wiki Workshop for Newbies' will be Tuesday Feb 1, 7pm @ New Work
City (412 Broadway at Canal St) in Lower Manhattan.
This is our first-ever pure newbie outreach and teaching event open to everyone.
No previous wiki-knowledge required :)
Sign up here, and tell your friends:
http://tinyurl.com/wikiclass
NWCU is made possible by amazing supporters of independents and
innovation: Google & New Work City
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About the Host: NWCU @ New Work City
This event is part of NWCU, community powered learning driven entirely
by member participation, NWCU is a curated collection of classes,
workshops, Meetup groups, and hackathons, all sharing one core common
goal: help existing and aspiring independents build, learn, and share
with one another, so more people can lead better, happier lives
working for themselves.
Founded in 2008, New Work City is a community coworking space in
Manhattan. We gather in a central space to work, collaborate, learn,
and socialize. Anyone with some work to do and a friendly disposition
is welcome!
http://www.nwcny.com/
====
Thanks,
Richard (User:Pharos)
Wikimedia NYC
http://nyc.wikimedia.org
Hi New York City Wikipedians/Wikimedians,
We've had some recent concerns about the high volume of emails on this
list, and so we're making this list announcement-only, and setting up
a 'discuss' list where detailed discussions should now go:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-us-nyc-discuss
I would encourage all active editors and those with a deeper interest
to sign up now for the 'discuss' list, and hopefully we can make a
vibrant community out of that.
In the future the existing list will be used for announcements and
events only, with the more nitty-gritty stuff on the 'discuss' list.
Thanks,
Richard
(User:Pharos)
The Wikipedia Day 10th Birthday Bash NYC is a celebration and
mini-conference to be held on Saturday, January 15, 2011, hosted by
ITP at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and also supported by Wikimedia
New York City, Free Culture @ NYU and other Free Culture Alliance NYC
partners.
The NYC celebration is one of a number of Wikipedia 10 events ("Wiki
X") being held worldwide <http://ten.wikipedia.org>, commemorating the
founding of the project in 2001.
You can register for the Wiki-Conference here:
http://tinyurl.com/wiki10nyc
See full event details and schedule (and add your own lightning talk!) at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Wikipedia_Day
Thanks,
Richard
(User:Pharos)
Wikimedia NYC
Strong light is a serious problem for museum curators because light can damage pigments. In many sections of the Metropolitan Museum, for instance in the section with Sung Dynasty paintings, the light is so dim that it makes seeing many paintings difficult. Strong light can damage both pigment and the support (paper or silk for Sung paintings), so the only option to dim lighting is not to exhibit the painting at all. I would NOT recommend using flash in any section of a museum where the light is dim.
Light not normally a problem with stone or bronze sculpture, or ceramics. So there harm from flash is not likely a problem.
It is allowed to upload to Commons copies made from museum web pages of out of copyright two dimensional work. The same applies to copies from books. If the image is a faithful reproduction of a two dimensional work, that is out of copyright, it can be uploaded to Commons with this template: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-art
That does not apply to three dimensional art because camera angle decisions, and lighting decisions, by the photographer are considered creative judgments. The photographs themselves are then considered protected by copyright law and can not be uploaded without permission to Commons. (Unless, of course, they are old photos and out of copyright.)
Malcolm Schosha
............................
--- On Fri, 1/7/11, Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase(a)frontiernet.net>
wrote:
From: Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase(a)frontiernet.net>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia NYC] Free-culture-compliant GLAM awards was: Museum of Art and Design lifts photo ban
To: "New York City Wikimedians" <wikimedia_nyc(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Friday, January 7, 2011, 5:18 PM
I'm no curator or
professional photographer, but I had the impression that one argument against
photography in museums was the damage that frequent exposure to intense light
could cause.
I've always gotten the impression that that was
less of an issue than they let on, more of an excuse to prevent competing
quality photos of the work from being created so they can sell more
postcards in the gift shop.
Daniel
Case
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_______________________________________________
Wikimedia_NYC mailing list
Wikimedia_NYC(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia_nyc
(referring to previous thread: Yes, as several people have described,
Wikimedia takes assiduous care about copyright but cannot be responsible for
contracts (formal or implied) between third-parties e.g. a museum and its
patrons.)
Continuing from the link that Sammy posted,
http://hyperallergic.com/photopolicy/
this has got me wondering if it really is viable to create a museum
photography policy list... but much more than that...
I think this could work globally, but first I'd like to see if it works in
one area and I think that New York is as perfect a place as could be found
for such a trial.
What I'm thinking is whether it would be a good idea for Wikimedia to
sponsor the creating of a "free-culture-compliant" rating schema for
cultural organisations. If it worked properly, it could be updated and
"announced" annually with the best organisations in different categories
(National/less than 5 employees/libraries...) winning some kind of
recognition/award.
Where I'm basing this off is Greenpeace's "Guide to Greener Electronics"
which has been running for several years now:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/electronics/Gui…
The deal with this is to take the public statements/policies of the major
tech organisations and rate them against a set of objective criteria. Each
year the new edition produces quite a bit of publicity e.g.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/27/apple-greenpeace-greener-…
Why I like this system is that it only assesses publicly stated policies
which means it does not require a complicated/expensive assessment system or
checking compliance with those policies. Also, by reducing things to a score
it makes it easy to rate the companies which allows for simple reporting
phrases (that the newspapers and corporate management like) such as "Nokia
stays in 1st place with the same score of 7.5 [green]".
Now, imagine if we could produce an objective list of "free-culture
criteria" that are applicable to cultural organisations (including but not
limited to photographic policies) and give each criterion a weighting. We
could make the list and the assessment process public, as is the wiki way,
which would also enable other organisations to self-assess if they wanted to
(something that cannot be done with Greenpeace's closed system). Then, once
an assessment had been done on all the institutions, we would be in the
position to be able to make a press release saying (for example):
"in 2011 The Brooklyn museum is the most free cultural institution in New
York, with the Tenement museum being the most improved whist the Frick
Collection became less free over the same period." This also allows smaller
institutions to be able to "beat" the big guys at something for the first
time!
What do you think of the idea in general? What do you think of the idea
specifically for NYC in 2011? And...before you think I'm just trying ask you
to do work, I should point out that the WMF has recently hired me on a 1
year fellowship (not yet announced) to improve our GLAM
outreach/collaboration capacity and therefore I would definitely be up for
helping to do the hard work on such a project.
Sincerely,
-Liam / Witty lama
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
I just got sent this:
http://hyperallergic.com/15410/museum-of-arts-design-lifts-photo-ban/
Thought folks in NYC might like to know :-)
(although, I suppose that many things in there are still copyrighted which
means that - with no USA freedom of panorama - you still can't put them on
Commons...)
Perhaps you already new this and it's old news, but good news nevertheless!
Do you have, and if not, do you think it would be valuable to create, a
document listing the status of various cultural institutions in the NYC area
according to their photographic and other policies that have bearing on
free-culture? Perhaps that might be a good pilot project for the
free-culture alliance??
-Liam
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata