[Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia.org (that's with an "m" as in multimedia)

[Daniel Mayer]

On Friday 21 March 2003 10:51 am Axel wrote:
> That is a noble project, and if you stick to public domain or GFDL
> pictures, it will be much nobler still. Please familiarize yourself
> with the wealth of image resources listed under
>      
>    http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources
>
> I think Jimbo's suggestion of a free photo resource site is great. It
> could work pretty much like the GIMP photo archive
>
>    http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/
>
> with a wiki-edited set of keywords for each photo, except it should
> allow uploading of course, and needs to keep track of the license (or
> lack thereof) and origin of each photo. Initially, we could seed the
> database with all the photos from the public domain sources. Could be a
> bit resource hungry though.
>
> Axel

This is a most excellent idea. In addition to being a home to the Foundation, 
Wikimedia.org could also be the central repository of all types of resource 
media files (images, sounds, videos, GIS-based maps, maybe even indexed 
read-only source text documents ...) that could be used by all Wikipedia 
languages, Wiktionary, "WikiTextbooks", "WikiFiction" and whatever else we 
think-up. This project could be covered by the GNU-FDL by default, but IMO 
the GNU-FDL is poorly suited for media files... 

We can have a more extensive license discussion later but either way I would 
support a license (or several licenses) that has/have the same type of 
restrictions and protections as the GNU-FDL but is better-suited to media 
files. And, like Wikipedia pages the license(s) could be compulsory by 
default for all materials created by project contributors and uploaded to the 
website. 

"Fair use" media would be discouraged and could be allowed only on an interim 
basis for things we could potentially produce ourselves (such as an image of 
a famous building that still exists or person who is still alive). But some 
things we could not obtain a new copyright to (something for which we do not 
have a free media file for nor could obtain for practical reasons). 

These things would have to be clearly marked as "fair use" so that any 
downstream licensee for whom the use would not be fair, could easily exclude 
those media files from any Wikipedia-derivative work that might make use of 
the media (exact attribution would be absolutely required in order to 
discourage the copying of non-free media files and to make it as easy as 
possible for downstream licensees to ask the copyright holder for 
permission). But the general goal of the project should be to have the 
maximum amount of media under a free license. 

IMO this proposed project shouldn't necessarily be limited to media files that 
are already used by a Wikipedia or Wikiwhatever article. It could be a 
project onto itself that Wikipedia articles could use as its media resource 
(using the image and media namespaces just as we do now). This could also be 
a good place to figure out some better way to more intelligently index and 
add metadata to the content in order to facilitate media searches (even human 
made lists would work here but we've already tried that with Wikipedia with 
limited success).  

And of course, if there isn't a Wikipedia/Wiktionary article that makes use of 
a media file, then we would have no "fair use" claim to have that file on our 
server (even then we might be on shaky ground since many people will find the 
image first and not the article that makes use of the image - "fair use" 
media may have to be excluded from Google indexing for this reason).

This should encourage a community of media producers to form whose goal would 
be to create a "free as in libre" media resource. The only problem I see is 
that it would be difficult to check for copyright violations (this may be a 
very important point - esp with some newly proposed legislation and the 
general insane paranoia in the media industry about file sharing). Come to 
think of it, our sever may also be abused by teenage garage rock bands 
looking for a distribution medium... 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma
The usual at [[March 17]]

PS if this project really takes off as "Wikimedia.org" then we might have to 
think up yet another name for the as-yet-to-be-named Foundation in order to 
avoid confusion. Sigh... I thought I had it nailed with Wikimedia. But we 
could still simply think of the media file repository as a shared resource 
for all Wikimedia projects (such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary...).