[Commons-l] Durova tries to get us more pics

[David Gerard]

On 09/10/2007, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> When a person contributes content for the express purpose of getting
> us to link to something or mention something we are being abused. It
> may often be that the benefits of accepting their mis-motivated
> contributions far exceed the harm of being used as a promotional tool
> but it still makes me very uncomfortable.


I think the basic motivation is to turn SEO's and publicists'
boundless energy to something resembling *good* use. Because you know,
while Wikipedia's both mainstream-popular and easily
user-contributable, it's not like they'll ever stop.

With rampant conflict-of-interest editors on en:wp, do we work with
them and calmly block them if we have to, or do we work to publicly
vilify them? The first, and most certainly *not* the second - because
we have public oppobrium to work for us. Look at the WikiScanner
stories - the COI editors got the bad public and media reaction; we
were seen as imperfect but basically good.

If people push the promotional thing too far, that will piss the
public off. If they do it right, they can in fact do well by doing
good.


> To me it seems that we are possibly incubating a class of use which
> our long term survivability demand we be able to reject categorically.
> Our openness is our greatest strength, but it's also our biggest
> weakness: If the world starts seeing Wiki(p|m)edia as a resource for
> promotion rather than a resource for learning and selflessly sharing
> knowledge then we will have failed.


I believe the people this is directed to already think of it in those
terms; if we can get them to see how to do well by doing good, at
least they're not attempting to do well by doing bad.

Furthermore, I think it's of immense value to encourage an environment
where releasing commercial content under a proper free license is
*normal* and the obvious thing for a publicist to do. I think that
would do a tremendous amount to further our mission in the wider
world. Much as open source software makes proprietary software largely
obsolete (per your analogy in [[:en:Wikipedia:Keyspam]]).

If we eventually have the problem of *too much* freely licensed
high-quality popular commercial content ... then we've  won.


> Durova clearly good for the size of commons in the sort term, but long
> term it might result in quite a tragedy, .. ego gets in our way
> enough, more private interest can't help.


I know en:wp is outpacing Moore's law - how's Commons doing compared
to Moore's law for bandwidth and disk space?


> I'd much rather hear about people's efforts to bring in other
> clasesses of photographers... people who have missions more in common
> with ours, rather than marketers whos mission is often so orthogonal.
> Other non-profits, governments, educators, etc..
> Why don't you forward news of that instead? ... Probably because it
> isn't happening. How do we fix that?


Possibly by some of us (e.g. you) pushing Commons to those people the
way others of us have been hitting the publicists. I wonder if we're
at a stage to go to the governments who fund the European Space Agency
and ask them to ask the ESA to use a free license, rather than just
complain that we use NASA images by preference; if their funding
sources ask for it, that should make it more politically viable for
them to do so.


- d.