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Huge German Donation Marks Wikipedia's Evolution
Raul654 writes "In December, we discussed the German Federal Archive's agreement, at the urging of Wikimedia Deutschland, to donate 100,000 pictures to Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. At the time that was the largest picture donation ever to Wikipedia, and thought to be largest in the history of the free culture movement. Now Wikimedia Deutschland has reached a similar agreement with the Saxon State and University Library, which will donate 250,000 pictures to Wikipedia under CCA-ShareAlike. On a not-unrelated note: Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue its Encarta encyclopedia."
Good job Germany. We should start lobbying Congress to do the same with the Library of Congress.
Did anyone know it was still around?
I hope they don't have to figure out how to submit them and enter all the metadata through Wikipedia's terrible interface one by one.
I once tried to submit a photo to Wikimedia and it took me an hour to do it. Just figuring out which of ten diffeent licenses I should license it under was a pain because they're poorly described. And when I wanted to find the image later after some jerk reverted my edit to the page I added the image to, it took forever to do that as well because the search function wouldn't return it as a result.
If they'd actually make it easy for people to submit stuff to the site, this donation wouldn't even be worth a mention, because they'd be drowning in media. I'm one guy and I have 10,000 nature photos I'd be happy to submit, but won't, because they've made it way too difficult and time consuming to be bothered with.
If this can be given some momentum by other scions of Wikipedia following the model and pushing for similar arrangements with archives around the world based on referencing the WikiDE arrangements, maybe this could be turned into a tidal wave trend. The time has come for the artificial scarcity of knowledge in the modern era to end.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
shizer on the intarwebz already, but thx anyway germany
A win for the noble contributors of this article.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
I reckon one way to ensure that data is more secure, for instance the pictures in this case, is to make it available to sites like Wikipedia. Thus creating another place were the data is stored; and it becomes easily accessible to many. I would like to see this continue, perhaps not only through wikipedia; but it is a good start.
The Long Now Foundation
I was momentarily terrified by that phrase.
It is certain that Wiki will continue to receive money and donations for years to come. What I find interesting is that MS is slowing killing off what was considered for decades its core programs. Flight Sim is gone. Now Encartia. At one time, those WERE big players for MS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Microsoft's vision is that everyone around the world needs to have access to quality education, and we believe that we can use what we've learned and assets we've accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology solutions."
So Microsoft's vision is to be charitable, discontinue, or develop an even more exciting technology than electronic encyclopedias?
Are they *all* of David Hasselhoff?
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
Regarding Encarta, it appears access to it will be discontinued after October. Wouldn't it make sense for Microsoft, from a PR standpoint, to release its content under a public license, enabling Wikipedia to incorporate content it deems appropriate?
Seems like a stingy decision the way it is ("if I can't have it, neither can anybody else"), but that's not too surprising coming from Microsoft.
I've never understood something, which is how information in the public domain is compatible with the GFDL. For that matter, Creative Commons-Share Alike isn't either.
GFDL requires for something to currently be under copyright in order for the share-alike aspect of it to be enforceable and to propagate further on. If Wikipedia continues to accept these incompatible donations or incorporate public domain works, Wikipedia as a whole becomes polluted. Claiming GFDL is claiming a kind of copyright, but the parts that are actually public domain or CC-SA can't be claimed by GFDL and this could lead problems with lack of respect of Wikipedia GFDL...
Or maybe the hell with Wikipedia's license or anyone else's. As long as you're not using someone else's content, no one is going to sue...
The first step of the eventual demise of Microsoft, as given by an ancient prophecy:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
[Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818]
I think I can confirm your guesstimate...
( Redundancy is ) ^ n
Barring strange circumstances, outsourcing the content would like pose few or no copyright issues. Unless explicitly contracted otherwise the material would constitute a work for hire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire and thus would have the full copyright in Microsoft's hands.
Before reading the summary I thought Germany had decided to get rid of its old currency by donating it to Wikipedia.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
FYI, until August 2009 there is a window of opportunity for Wikipedia to move to dual-licensing of their text as both GFDL and CC-SA.
Perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation and/or the FSF are also concerned about what you're talking about?
(BTW, when I first read your post, I thought you were just misunderstanding something about the GFDL and that there had to be a way that it would be legal to add public domain works without violating the license, but now that I have bothered to read the latest version, I totally agree with you. That is one epically convoluted and unfriendly license. Ugh!)
I've used the Winkler Prins edition and I must say that on UI and innovative and especially interactive features it beat Wikipedia easily. So I'll be sad to see it go, although because most of the content came from the paper version we may see it reappear under a different brand name. But let's be honest, most of the time I checked Wikipedia, because Winkler Prins simply wasn't comprehensive enough. Never mind quality if you can't find what you're searching for most of the time.
Maybe the recent collapse of the Historical Archive of Cologne that buried thousands of invaluable historical documents underneath tons of rubble will cause more historical archives to re-think and open up and share their contents with the public.
Unfortunately, many museums and archives are more concerned about making profits with their historical documents rather than making some effort to make them available to the broad public. Many still think they own the copyrights to century old documents and paintings just because they are in the museum's possession.
And 250k free historical photos are great news of course. As Germany's terms of copyright protection are 70 years after the author's death (just like the rest of Europe), most photos of 20th century historical events are still copyrighted. With this donation and the recent donation by the Bundesarchiv, we finally get lots of free images from this period of time.
The Angels have the Phone Box
As Nasreddin Hodja was eating a chicken leg, a beggar asked Hodja to give it to him.
"It is not mine to give," said Nasreddin, "it is owned by my wife."
"But you are eating it!" protested the beggar.
"Well, that's what my wife told me to do with it." replied Nasreddin.
And they are quite good at handling images I think; http://www.flickr.com/commons
Back in my day we called those "related note".
Maybe the recent collapse...
...many museums and archives are more concerned about making profits...
...
Unlikely, as will be discussed below.
Many museums are in fact businesses, not charities, or public services, so this is understandable.
Many still think they own the copyrights
Now you know what posession is 9/10th of the law is all about !
While I agree that it is travesty to have such significant aspects of the human cultural experience privately held, it is difficult to imagine what type of system could be put in place to ensure unfettered access to the public. Don't dismiss the scale of such an undertaking. Do you really want your government responsible for this when they struggle to keep the pot-holes filled. I prefer to keep government as limited as possible, everything they get involved with turns into a stinking pile of excrement - I'd rather that didn't happen with the works of DaVinci, or Rafael, of Monet.
...Playboy or Hustler donate some hundred thousand pics. In that day, wikipedia will become really fun reading.
there is a program called.... commonist, it makes it easier to upload masses of files at once to wikimedia commons.
the other thing is this... do your 10,000 photos have descriptions for each photo? they dont want 'just any photo', they want stuff that is described well and illustrates something. the german government archives have been selected over decades by workers to catalog and describe them, and pick ones that have some signifigance (although that is a subjective term...)
it needs a better interface, but on the other hand, if they only cared about making it easy, every body would upload a bunch of copyrighted stuff that would be a huge legal mess. they have to spend their efforts in guarding against copyright problems, as much as they have to spend their efforts in making an easier UI. both are important....
there are some very interesting books on world war ii and soviet pows, written in german... im imagining the first useful translation would be into russian, no into english, as the primary audience for this stuff is not going to be american internet business academics. you are looking at tens of millions of people disappeared into the eatern front, the two major languages being russian and german there, and the ordinary people there not necessarily understanding english.
they are the only website publishing the full volumes of the publications of the nuremberg tribunals. all the lovely other websites that have those 'full volumes' are not complete and fail to mention they arent complete
Most museums in Germany are owned by the state (federal state, states or cities) or foundations. This has the advantage that they can first preserve the material and then think about making a profit.
which seeks to be microsoft speak for Wikipedia killed encarta. First big victory for the open content movement.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
On a not-unrelated note: Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue its Encarta encyclopedia."
Encarta could never compete with Wikipedia due to the tremendous workforce updating Wikipedia every day. Once gain open source wins against proprietary.
Wow, this is a (symbolic) victory for Free Software, and GNU.
Wikipedia was originally conceived as GNUpedia, then Wales made Wikipedia and it was decided to merge them onto Wikipedia.
Many people, including Eric S. Raymond, said it would fail.
But it has worked excellently. +1 for communal development.
For those interested here is Richard Stallman's original proposal which led to GNUpedia and eventually Wikipedia.
From Wikipedia: "Microsoft had originally approached Encyclopædia Britannica, the gold standard of encyclopedias for over a century, in the 1980s, but it declined, believing its print media sales would be hurt; however the Benton Foundation was forced to sell Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. at below book value in 1996 when the print sales could no longer compete with Encarta and the Microsoft distribution channel which gave away free copies with computer systems"