[Commons-l] Copyright is hard (was Re: Professional photographers on Commons: sucess story)

[Delphine Ménard]

On Nov 8, 2007 7:43 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 8, 2007 1:31 AM, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Zombie users I'd say - I used to write personal notes instead of using
> > templates, especially for stuff that I deleted on sight. Maybe one in
> > twenty actually responded, for the others it's not clear if they even
> > saw my note. I don't understand the psychology either.
>
> I always thought the zombie users were users with the interface set to
> a language they didn't read fluently... I know that I'm a zombie when
> I edit some language I can't even remotely grok.

I agree with that. I would also add that the zombie users are usually
people who land on commons in an automatic kind of way, ie. they're
led there by some pretty advertisement from one of the projects and
are not sure whether they are in a different project, a different
wiki, or simply in a no man's land they can't grok. Also people who
don't speak "wiki", because they have no idea what they can do with an
orange banner that says "you've got a message".

There are very few people on Commons who are *mostly* on Commons (ie.
whose primary goal is contributing images), but they exist (we had a
few cases lately, that French-speaking contributor, the one that
started this thread). The problem as I see it is that we don't know
how to integrate people in the Commons community, because to *really*
be part of the Commons community, you don't need to be just a good
contributor. You need, as Brianna put it, to climb the high wall of
copyright and understand what this is all about.
In short, I think that access to the Commons community, unfortunately,
is at a high price. And I am not sure how we can change this
effectively. Initiatives that draw people in on more "sexy" matters
than copyright, such as POTY and such are great things, but are they
enough?

Delphine
-- 
~notafish

La critique, art aisé, se doit d'être constructive. -- Boris Vian in
*Chroniques du menteur*

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