[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Principles of organisation - who do we serve?

[Brad Patrick]

Commons exists to be a repository for free culture *and* to serve as
an inter-wiki storage medium for *free* media.  it is not a place to
dump stuff, nor is it a place which exists independently of other
wikis.

Copyright violations are not a minor or trivial problem.  They are a
serious problem, for which we are obligated to act when they are
properly brought to our attention.  This is all nothing new.

If there are Wikimedians who are advocating housing copyrighted media
in Commons, speak up now, because we need to get clear on why that is
not cool immediately.

-BradP

On 11/14/06, Jan Kulveit <jk-wikifound at ks.cz> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 10:30:13AM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
> ...
> > This discussion appears to demonstrate Commons simply isn't making
> > admins through its own processes anywhere near fast enough and its
> > processes need radical revision.
> >
> ...
>
> for me,  this disscussion again clearly demonstrates the principal
> problem that not  everybody understands the mission of Commons in
> the same way.
> There are basically two main alternatives
>
> A. Commons as free media library. In a way, free counterpart to
> stock media agencies and the like. Such libraries have much added value
> compared to the "raw material" - description, tagging, categories, some
> copyright inspection, possibly some quality checks.
>
> In this case, Commons are viable as an independent project, which may
> attract it's own community. Helping to build and improve such library
> may be interesting.
>
> B. Commons as a Wikimedia-wide file storage facility. Main requirement
> on storage is security (so a file doesn't suddenly disappear) and
> maybe ease of access (so any wikimedian can upload a file without much
> knowledge of commons).
> The "sweet part" is, the file storage is still expected to have some
> functions demanding expensive human resources: 1. copyright inspection.
>
> In this case, IMO Commons are not viable as independent project.
> I can hardly imagine people who would be interested in doing
> copyright inspection of what would be, in quality terms, mostly pile
> of poorly described rubbish, dumped from Wikipedias in high speed.
>
> As in this alternative commons are IMO not self-sustainable as a
> community, Commons tasks would have to be somehow adopted as another
> janitorial task by other Wikimedia projects (those with a mission
> which is able to attract people).
>
> Jan Kulveit [[User:Wikimol]]
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-- 
Brad Patrick
General Counsel & Interim Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
bradp.wmf at gmail.com
727-231-0101