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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
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
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.
Das sagt deine Freundin auch immer!!!!!
Are they *all* of David Hasselhoff?
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
On Wikipedia, a distinction is made between pictures and text. All the text is GFDL, but the pictures can be other licenses. An article can have GFDL text with creative commons attribution/sharealike pictures. I'm not a lawyer, but I've been told that mixed copyright like this is a relatively new, ill-defined area of law. For distribution, Wikipedia is available in text-only dumps and combined text/image dumps.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I think I can confirm your guesstimate...
( Redundancy is ) ^ n
This is why the Wikimedia Foundation has been in talks with the FSF, which resulted in a new version of the GFDL that allows dual licensing with CC-BY-SA. A proposal is now underway to make such dual licensing mandatory for all new content on Wikimedia projects.
Translation for the lazy:
"That's also what your girlfriend always says!"
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.