2009/9/11 Joseph Reagle reagle@mit.edu:
So, on this note, what are some examples of content that was produced for pay at the Wikimedia Foundation? I can think of some archival material, such as the use of some material form the 11th edition of Britannica and images now in Commons.
There's a vast amount of PD material produced by the US government we use, which I think qualifies. Verbatim copying of the source text is a more rare now than it used to be, but a *lot* of our images are taken by professional photographers - or, failing that, people doing it in the course of their job - at NASA, the US Army, or any of a hundred smaller agencies.
Of course, as you say, none of this was produced *for us*. We're happy to absorb high-quality material intended for another purpose, but I'm not aware of many cases where we've taken on professionally produced material which had been created (for pay) with the intent of using it here.