Slashdot Mirror
Wikimedia Commons reaches 400,000 Files
Brushen writes "Wikimedia Commons, a website built to be a repository of free, public domain, or GFDL images, sounds, and animations, has reached 400,000 files this week. Launched in September 2004 by the Wikimedia Foundation, the creators of Wikipedia, the organization intended for it to be a source of images that could be used in the rest of the organization's projects. As well, recently they've had a best picture comeptition."
...find 400,000 images and videos on the internet that weren't porn? Now that really is an accomplishment.
My script don't crash! She crashes, you crashed her!
How many of the media files have been taken despite being under copyright? I've seen the obvious and/or controversial images removed -- pretty promptly in most cases. But how about an image taken from a website with no watermark taken from a website where the webmaster has no time to pursue misappropriation.
Although if they truly have 400 000 original images that have been validly released for them to use, more power to them.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
Now there will be 100k more files, of which 99k are called hello.jpg ;)
Slashdot couldn't overwhelm their servers even if they wanted to. They get a LOT more traffic than Slashdot does.
400,000 files seems like an awful lot of licenses to verify. Having said that, this is a real boon to graphic artists, 3D animators and the like. Gotta love that CC license.
You Need To BeDoper
Taco, is it really that hard to correct "comeptition" to "competition"?
You are supposedly an editor, yet you can't even be bothered to use a spellcheck?
I know he says this doesn't matter on slashdot and that it is just minutiae, but most people would say it does matter a great deal. This site is run by paid editors, it is long past time they act like it.
400,000 files is very impressive achievement. I've only ever listed to sounds on Wikicommons a few times though; I don't think they are too useful.
Anyway, I think the following page is worth a visit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sunrise
- Jax
Well, as a photographer I'm not sure I welcome this. Yeah, Adobe has entered the royalty free sector, for cheap-ass business users looking for cheesy pics of people in suits shaking hands. That was never a market I competed in. Wikipedia worries me because well funded media organisations are going to stop paying for real photographers to do stuff like "we need a picture of Barcelona for a travel story". Oh, get a wikimedia image, pay nobody, increase value add for our shareholders. And I guess I don't care about that either because I don't have any pictures of Barcelona. And there are no serious ethical issues of working in Barcelona. But for stuff I do have, like a refugee camp someplace quite logistically hard to get to or work in, or for a picture of the leader of this rebel group, or of a soccer team in a war zone. Is this sort of thing better when it's taken by a kid who doesn't speak the language who's just left college and is doing the peace corps thing, and decides to donate all this holiday snaps to wikimedia(though the pics are lowish resolution and miscaptioned). Or should that kind of thing be done by AP or Reuters who employ (for example) someone in the refugee camp who knows what's going on. Or by independent foreign journalists with their own set of biases? Yeah, we should all adapt to the market, worse is better, etc. I'm watching people who are cross subsidising photography with other income sources eat away at my market, and I don't like it.
The non-free files referred to are basically just all the project logos. All of them can be found here
The only other exception I can think of is the spoken version of GFDL, as absurdly enough, GFDL itself isn't GFDL compatible (modification isn't allowed)...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
No, for subscribers it is optional. It is only compulsory for the editors.
Flicker's CC material has over 8 million pictures now, all CC categories summarized. Even if you restrict yourself to the CC license subset Wikimedia uses, there's still more pictures on Flickr. However, Wikimedia possibly has a more "professional" set of pictures, rather than "here's me and my girlfriend on vacation" pictures, but with Flickr's powerful tagging system, I still recommend people looking for CC pictures suiting their license needs to check them out. I've found a surprising number of high quality photos there that suits Wikipedia perfectly, but keep in mind Wikipedia prefers CC material that is NOT restricted to non-commercial use only. When I use images from Flickr on Wikipedia, I usually use the most free license -- the Attribution license. Then it's a simple matter to attribute the picture with a link and author in the image description when you upload it.
Of course, don't forget Google's Advanced Search which nowadays support searching for CC licenses material too. If you're still looking, Wikipedia's public domain resource list is another good starting point.
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find 400,000 images and videos on the internet that weren't porn? Now that really is an accomplishment.
Ok, it's funny. But a lot of images are new photographs taken for Wikipedia not previously found in internet.
There is a lot of fun in take photographs, but it's a lot better if they have a purpose.
When I travel for fun or for business I take my camera with me and take some photographs that I think can be interesting for Wikipedia. I have contributed to Barcelona or Josep Puig i Cadafalch in architecture from the city where I live. But I have also taken images from other cities (Tarragona, Santander, L'Ametlla de Mar).
So it's not a problem of where to find images on internet but of take new ones for Wikipedia.
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
In related news, the Geograph project has 108,000 CC-licensed photos now.
Surely the turning point will be when those villagers have cameras and internet connections. There's no intrinsic requirement for journalists to white american men, especially when villages start getting mobile phones or $100 laptops. I think wikipedia/wikinews might be ideal for them...
Is this sort of thing better when it's taken by a kid who doesn't speak the language who's just left college and is doing the peace corps thing, and decides to donate all this holiday snaps to wikimedia(though the pics are lowish resolution and miscaptioned). Or should that kind of thing be done by AP or Reuters who employ (for example) someone in the refugee camp who knows what's going on. Or by independent foreign journalists with their own set of biases? Yeah, we should all adapt to the market, worse is better, etc. I'm watching people who are cross subsidising photography with other income sources eat away at my market, and I don't like it.
Well, here's the thing. If your photos are better-suited to someone's needs relative to how much you're charging, then they'll pay.
It may *be* that all people need are lowish-resolution pictures. [shrug]
I really wouldn't worry that much, though. The open-source software world has been going strong for a long time, and there's no shortage of software that still needs to be developed.
It does mean that maybe the world will wind up with fewer photographers if some are simply doing redundant work (if you need a picture of the Grand Canyon, for instance, it just doesn't make sense to have a system in which people are paying the 50,000th photographer to take *another* nice picture of the place) than it would have otherwise. Or maybe those photographers will be out producing more nice pictures that aren't redundant.
I get National Geographic. Its photographers are *excellent*. What if *all* publications could have National Geographic-class photos because of efficiency improvements in photography? I mean, I'd like that an awful lot.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Some of these image sites need to combine databases. There must be dozens of various free-license image sites, and it's frusterating that there's no single search to index them all.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
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I remember reading something about how, while something like the Mona Lisa may not be copyrighted, photographs of the work are
I'm assuming that what you read was published either outside the United States or before 1999, when Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. was decided. The ruling, an application of the Feist test, was that exact photographic copies of two-dimensional images in the public domain are not eligible for copyright on grounds of lack of originality.
I'd put in more money... if I could afford it. Right now I'm paying nearly 350 a month for my three piles and that will be moving to 400 come june... an amount I have no idea how I will afford.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Straying wildly off topic here, but you are wrong. It is very easy to get a savings account that pays a greater rate of interest. If you have enough money to repay the loan, and you put it in a savings account rather than repaying the loan, then at the end you will have more money than if you paid off the loan.
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http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Feces
Boo hoo. You keep throwing about "cross-subsidiezed" as if it's
some mortal sin. You're an artist. Artists starve. That or they
do something else to eat. Most cartoonists have side jobs. Many
musicians, etc. etc. If you're lucky enough to make a living from
your art (or playing a fucking game), you're just that *lucky*.
There's no right to profit, there's no right to make a living at
what you want. Yes, it sucks.
Were that I say, pancakes?
When big corporations say similar things, they are laughed it. There's some kind of quote relevant to it, and I don't have it. But the point is that just because you made money on it before doesn't mean you have a right to make money on it forever.
Times change. Cobblers had to find new jobs once upon a time, now there's a new set of people who need to retrain themselves.
Due to digital cameras, amateur shutter bugs take 1,000 pictures on a 7-day vacation instead of 72 or 108. And the quality (technically, not necessarily artistically) of even a good P&S is of the level that low-end pro cameras took 20 years ago.
Putting 2 and 2 together, it looks like the life of photographers is going to change.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
THat's been said time and time again and I've always pointed out that Wikipedia has trouble handling the load even without a Slashdotting. Haven't you witnessed its constant slowness and frequent bouts of database errors? On-peak hours it takes a beating and they're always playing this cat-and-mouse game where they keep adding more servers to prevent those things from happening.
Having contributed a fair bit to Commons myself, trust me when I say that licenses do get verified... much more so than comparable websites. You have to explicitly state the license, and the source of the image as well. If the image seems a little too nice to have come from an amature source the administrators on Wikicommons will try to check up on you as an individual to see if you really do have content of that quality that is original content.
I have had images that I uploaded which have been deleted. I obtained the images from some government web pages, for instance, which I thought were available under the public domain. Those in particular get some strong attention because the copyright can be tricky. It turns out after some investigation that the images were under strong copyright and no copyleft license. I did cite the page links where I got the images, which at least permitted this type of search. Those pages which don't list the source of the images are generally deleted as well because this sort of search is then impossible.
ESA (European Space Agency) images are particularly disapointing because the license is incompatable with copyleft principles in general. Wikicommons does not support a non-commercial use only restriction, for instance which the ESA has all of their content licensed under. That kills a bunch of really cool space images which previously would have been available through the public domain.
I will be the first to admit that there are still some holes on Commons, and a few images that slip through the cracks. Still, I would trust images I obtained from Wikicommons as being mostly vetted for copyright licensing, and if somebody asserts copyright on an image I obtained from Wikicommons, I would put the burden of proof on the crazy person trying to claim copyright. Most likely they would be a scam artist trying to scalp some money from you when they really don't have a valid claim.
This is an advertisment for wikimedia. They want you to donate to their recent fundraiser. Kinda shameful having slashdot post it.
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So how many of those 400,000 files are from Wikipedians uploading their entire collection of holiday photos? And how many are actually any good?
The major limitation in photography is the person who takes the photos. Hand an idiot a top of the range camera and you get badly composed photos with excellent colour rendition.
The peace corps college kid takes away your income source, sure enough, but the kid also provides to millions of people for free what they otherwise would have to pay for. So overall, it's a clear plus for the world; you just happen to sit on the wrong side of the equation. Time to move.