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German Gov't Donates 100,000 Images To Wikipedia
Raul654 writes "The German Federal Archive has agreed to donate 100,000 images to Wikipedia under the German version of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License. These pictures cover a period from 1860 to present. This is the largest picture donation ever to Wikipedia, and possibly the largest in the history of the free culture movement."
Apparently, this is part of a project which will eventually make 11 million photos available for public use.
You would think that Governments--who exist to serve the people--would constantly look for avenues of already successful community sites as venues for returning information to the public. With privacy & security in mind, I wish that more governments would release this sort of stuff under a creative commons ... even if citizens of the world then have access to it, I don't think the taxpayers would mind. Wikipedia & other Wikimedia sites have shown to be very successful non-profit sites that are community owned and driven. Can anyone think of a good reason why we shouldn't extend the Freedom of Information Act a little further with recent advancements in communications and technology?
My work here is dung.
With all the stories over various entities trying to screw everyone over fair-use, such as the one over a state claiming copyright over their written laws,, this is a nice change. What I like about creative commons is that it is one way for a content holder to hold on to their 'rights', yet allow the material to be used by the general public. This saves our culture being lost in the cellars of town hall or of those of some other 'IP owner'.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Wrong stereotype I'm afraid. I think this action will affect pictures like this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Einsatzgruppen_Killing.jpg
So hopefully clusterfucks like this won't happen in future
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Image:Einsatzgruppen-Killingfull.jpg
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
For any German speakers out there: Most (all?) of these pictures lack English captions. I'm sure the people on Commons could use all the assistance they can get translating the German captions (especially into English). You can register an account on Commons and help.
Also, props go to Wikimedia Deutchland, which arranged this donation.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I can't say if it was a decisive factor in this particular image donation, but that's one of the arguments free-content proponents have been using to try to get other governments to open up at least some portion of their images: pointing out that since there is this large public-domain repository of US government images, if they want to promote their history and culture on par with that of the US, they need to provide us with a similarly high-quality, free-licensed collection of images.
Otherwise a large portion of generic examples are going to be US-based ones, simply because they gave us the images whereas other countries didn't.
Sometimes it leads to almost comical results, where dozens of other countries' leaders, ministers, and other figures are illustrated on Wikipedia by a photograph of them shaking hands with Reagan or Carter or Kissinger or whoever, because that US-visit photograph was freely released by the US State Department, while their photographs from back home are under a more restrictive copyright.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Bollocks, this is not Wikipedia, but Wikimedia. Almost any picture gets accepted as long as the copyright stuff is in order.
Some of the captions are in need of being rewritten into a reasonable form even in German, especially older ones that are either out of date or hilariously biased. The worst are probably those that were apparently entered during World War II and never updated.
For example, this one (which has in fact been updated), originally came with a caption that reads roughly:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Commons has different image policies than Wikipeida. It will take pretty much any picture as long as it is of passable quality and acceptable copyright status.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
That is an interesting link, and beyond the value of the content, it also shows the evils of our dysfunctional copyright. The arguments that this photo should not be lost because it chronicles one of our (as in the human race) despicable moments are valid. I would also say that it is just as bad to let our chronicles of good and happiness be destroyed as it is to let chronicles of evil and shame.
So, this photo SHOULD be in the public domain, but so should works that are not chronicles of shame. For example, it is a travisty that the 'Happy Birthday' song is still under copyright.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike is not exactly an onerous or hard-to-comply-with license. It is also fairly easy to understand and interpret (unlike, say, the GFDL).
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Correct, because the CC doesn't make the distinction between binary and source versions of a piece of work. Which makes sense, as it's rather difficult to demand the negatives of a photo made 50 years ago (and you would gain little from doing so).
CC-SA-AT however does come very close to the GPL IMHO. In most cases with data you can modify the 'binary' directly without needing a 'source' version and for many kinds of data you can't even define a separate source version of the work.
It's only when you talk about code that making this distinction makes sense, as you have a binary that isn't easily modifiable without the source it was made from.
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It is good to see they are not excluding things from the Nazi Era. That is as important historically as any other period and should not be forgotten.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
That Heilmann worked for the German Democratic Republic's Ministry for State Security has been well known for a while, he is objecting to claims on Wikipedia that he was a pornographer and the like, which there is very little evidence of. Someone said it better than I could
He never wanted to block the whole german Wikipedia.
The wrong article got attention due to the press and the editors actually saw that the content was wrong and fixed it.
He didn't complain about anything about his stasi-past. He apologized afterwards for the blockade, saying he never wanted to affect so many people or hide anything.
What would you do if you had a Wikipedia page with a wrong (and citation-free) content and wikipedias policy says, you can't change it.
What does this have to do with the collaboration between Wikimedia Germany Company and the German government that has gone on for several years (they donated several images before), tell me?