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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."
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.
The good side is that American law specifies that the work of government employees on government time is in the public domain. The bad side is that the library of congress website is the single most disorganized, least function website on the internet. It is the only non-proxy website I have seen in a decade or more that uses temporary URLs (which makes deep linking to their content on Wikipedia difficult, since we can't link to the page we got it from).
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
I should have specified that the data I had in mind was things that are, or should be, available to everyone; but can only be accesses through archaic means at the present moment. What individuals to do preserve their own private personal data or pictures is non of my concern.
The Long Now Foundation
Naturally Microsoft, being a self-described good corporate citizen and having no further profit motive for doing otherwise, will proceed to do the right thing and donate all the Encarta articles and images to the commons. Won't they? Won't they?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
No, some involve naked women eating shit.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The fact that there's a fairly complete, informative article about Encarta aptly demonstrates one of Wikipedia's strengths.
Following the first multimedia Academic American Encyclopedia, Microsoft initiated Encarta by purchasing non-exclusive rights to the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, incorporating it into its first edition in 1993. (Funk & Wagnalls continued to publish revised editions for several years independently of Encarta, but then ceased printing in the late 1990s.) Funk & Wagnalls had been a third-tier encyclopedia available at cut rates in grocery stores, where volumes were sold individually as well as in one collected set. The name Encarta was created for Microsoft by an advertising agency, successfully guessing that it sounded better than Funk & Wagnalls.[4]
The article's summary illustrates one of its weaknesses...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.