[Wikimediaau-l] Quiet campaign on freely licensed politicians photos

[Brianna Laugher]

Hi,

I have noticed for a while the difficulty that Wikipedia editors have
had in obtaining freely licensed photographs of Australian politicians
for their biographical articles.

I think a good project for us might be to do some gentle (private)
lobbying to political parties and/or their branches to encourage them
to release a set of high quality portraits under a free license.

The best case would be if we could get a party or parties to release a
bunch of photographs rather than individuals (a last approach), mostly
because it is much more efficient.

I think it is a good project because it will be positive for both them
and us, it's very easy for us to point out the benefits for them, it
will further raise awareness of free licenses to politicians and the
work necessary to achieve it is mostly on-wiki and easily divisible,
making it easy for people to contribute even in small amounts.
Probably starting with current politicians and working backwards is
the easiest way to go.

It could go something like this:
* Collate stats about articles via different ways of categorisation
(eg state, fed/state/local [in cities?], party)
* Prepare letters and arguments to help persuade parties and individuals
* Find and collect contacts in all the parties and at all levels of government
* WMAU sends letters, phones people etc.

So you can imagine this is one case where having a body behind a
letter might hopefully be more persuasive than an individual.

We have lots of starting points already --
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Australian_politicians
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Australian_politics

Thoughts?

cheers,
Brianna


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