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

[Sarah Ewart]

*Cough* This is something that I've been working on quietly and there is a
real possibility that things will improve at a higher level than political
parties. I can't really say very much on here because the important bits
were shared in confidence but I am hopeful about next year and images are
already starting to filter out slowly via this person  (I received another
one for a federal MP just today actually).

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 4:12 PM, Brianna Laugher
<brianna.laugher at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
>
>
> --
> They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
> http://modernthings.org/
>
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