[WikiEN-l] NYT: Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos

[Durova]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:

> Click-throughs are much lower, often on the level of 15,000-30,000 during
> main page time.  Yet remember these are also generating a steady stream of
> attention on the articles themselves.  The one amateur photo of a sound card
> is receiving 2,000 direct page views at en:wiki plus an unknown number at
> two dozen other language editions of Wikipedia.  Multiply that kind of
> attention across a few hundred articles and one year: this has the potential
> to become a major source of web traffic to the donating institution.
>
> Bundesarchiv has retained full copyright over high resolution copies of the
> images they uploaded (the copyright in these instances is uncontroversial).
> Without any actual advertising, readers have been using the source link from
> the image hosting page to go to the Bundesarchiv site and purchase high
> resolution files.  Their sales of high resolution images have increased
> significantly since the donation.
>
> Whether and how to give additional credit is a question I'd rather not
> address personally.  Whatever the community decides I'll honor; the salient
> point is that even with what we do right now it's a net benefit to
> institutions that are smart about it.  We need to communicate to them where
> the advantages are, since this is new territory and a radical departure from
> how they're used to operating.
>
> Indirectly this helps our position with regard to NPG, because a
> significant part of NPG's argument is that WMF is impossible to work with.
> Each time we develop a cooperative relationship with another cultural
> institution we prove that part of NPG's argument empirically wrong.  The
> more this happens, the more likely NPG is to look silly; the net effect
> could soften their approach.  Now is an excellent time to build those
> relationships because the current situation is drawing attention to the
> media side of Wikipedia.
>
> Rather than assault the brick wall we walk around it: work with the
> institutions whose copyrights are either uncontroversial, or who don't try
> to assert claims over public domain material.  As they benefit, Wikipedia
> benefits, and ultimately the others may abandon their claims and get in line
> to cooperate with us.
>
> -Durova


-- 
http://durova.blogspot.com/