On Friday 21 March 2003 10:51 am Axel wrote:

That is a noble project, and if you stick to public domain or GFDL pictures, it will be much nobler still. Please familiarize yourself with the wealth of image resources listed under

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources

I think Jimbo's suggestion of a free photo resource site is great. It could work pretty much like the GIMP photo archive

http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/

with a wiki-edited set of keywords for each photo, except it should allow uploading of course, and needs to keep track of the license (or lack thereof) and origin of each photo. Initially, we could seed the database with all the photos from the public domain sources. Could be a bit resource hungry though.

Axel

This is a most excellent idea. In addition to being a home to the Foundation, Wikimedia.org could also be the central repository of all types of resource media files (images, sounds, videos, GIS-based maps, maybe even indexed read-only source text documents ...) that could be used by all Wikipedia languages, Wiktionary, "WikiTextbooks", "WikiFiction" and whatever else we think-up. This project could be covered by the GNU-FDL by default, but IMO the GNU-FDL is poorly suited for media files...

We can have a more extensive license discussion later but either way I would support a license (or several licenses) that has/have the same type of restrictions and protections as the GNU-FDL but is better-suited to media files. And, like Wikipedia pages the license(s) could be compulsory by default for all materials created by project contributors and uploaded to the website.

"Fair use" media would be discouraged and could be allowed only on an interim basis for things we could potentially produce ourselves (such as an image of a famous building that still exists or person who is still alive). But some things we could not obtain a new copyright to (something for which we do not have a free media file for nor could obtain for practical reasons).

These things would have to be clearly marked as "fair use" so that any downstream licensee for whom the use would not be fair, could easily exclude those media files from any Wikipedia-derivative work that might make use of the media (exact attribution would be absolutely required in order to discourage the copying of non-free media files and to make it as easy as possible for downstream licensees to ask the copyright holder for permission). But the general goal of the project should be to have the maximum amount of media under a free license.

IMO this proposed project shouldn't necessarily be limited to media files that are already used by a Wikipedia or Wikiwhatever article. It could be a project onto itself that Wikipedia articles could use as its media resource (using the image and media namespaces just as we do now). This could also be a good place to figure out some better way to more intelligently index and add metadata to the content in order to facilitate media searches (even human made lists would work here but we've already tried that with Wikipedia with limited success).

And of course, if there isn't a Wikipedia/Wiktionary article that makes use of a media file, then we would have no "fair use" claim to have that file on our server (even then we might be on shaky ground since many people will find the image first and not the article that makes use of the image - "fair use" media may have to be excluded from Google indexing for this reason).

This should encourage a community of media producers to form whose goal would be to create a "free as in libre" media resource. The only problem I see is that it would be difficult to check for copyright violations (this may be a very important point - esp with some newly proposed legislation and the general insane paranoia in the media industry about file sharing). Come to think of it, our sever may also be abused by teenage garage rock bands looking for a distribution medium...

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma The usual at [[March 17]]

PS if this project really takes off as "Wikimedia.org" then we might have to think up yet another name for the as-yet-to-be-named Foundation in order to avoid confusion. Sigh... I thought I had it nailed with Wikimedia. But we could still simply think of the media file repository as a shared resource for all Wikimedia projects (such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary...).