On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
One of Wikipedia's big weaknesses is a lack of free images of leaders, entertainers, and other notable individuals between 1923 and about the mid 1990s. If a collection of such images (news archives, maybe?) were made available, it would provide a major boost to Wikipedia and potential content re-users.