[Commons-l] 100k image donation to Wikimedia Commons

[Andrew Gray]

2008/12/3 Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com>:
> Dear Commonists,
>
> Starting on Thursday Dec 4, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive
> upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100.000 files from a
> donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to
> the  history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and
> are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive.

Oh, this is excellent news - 100,000! Is there any chance you could
give us a better idea about the general scope of this content? I'm
particularly curious as to:

* what periods are covered; is it heavily post-1945, or is there
substantial earlier content?
* will we get a lot of illustrations of individuals?
* are there any particular thematic collections?

> These images are licensed cc-by-sa. Wikimedia Germany and the Federal
> Archive have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things,
> asserts that the Federal Archive owns sufficient rights to be able to
> grant this kind of license.

...and *this* is a very useful thing to have had explicitly stated.
Rights problems are now firmly their responsibility :-)

As to the image size issue: yeah, 800px isn't wonderful. It's better
than a lot of the images we currently have, though, and it's
*certainly* better than no freely-licensed picture at all - which is
probably going to be the case for a lot of this material, especially
if we get a good load of photographs of individuals...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk