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."

Comments

nice

[niner69]

Good job Germany. We should start lobbying Congress to do the same with the Library of Congress.

Re:nice

[Raul654]

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).

Re:nice

[corsec67]

The good side is that American law specifies that the work of government employees on government time is in the public domain.

That is only true of the federal government, not the various state and local governments.

Re:nice

[JoshuaZ]

Just because they can resist releasing the documents doesn't make the documents not in the public domain. I could have the only copy of a book written in 1500. That book is in the public domain. I am under zero obligation to give it to you. Much of material which is classified in the US is public domain as far as copyright is concerned.

Encarta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone know it was still around?

Re:Encarta?

[Bob54321]

Did anyone know it was still around?

Well, yes... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta

Re:Encarta?

[RabidTimmy]

I will miss there little maze trivia game whatever it was called. But then again, I guess I haven't used encarta in years, so maybe I won't really miss it.

Re:Encarta?

[Daniel Phillips]

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?

Gee...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Gee...

[corsec67]

It isn't that hard. I have submitted quite a few pictures to Wikipedia, and have learned a bit along the way.

The first one does take a while, but then you know what you want to use. I have hundreds of pictures on Commons, with most of them still on the Wikipedia pages. The ones that aren't have been replaced by better pictures.

The main thing is that pictures that you took, and can license in any way you want should go on commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/ . That allows your pictures to be used on other language Wikipedias, which images only on en.Wikipedia can't be due to licensing issues. Then, they will be listed in your gallery, and contributions lists.

Pictures where you can only claim a fair-use license have to go on Wikipedia, since fair-use is a US only thing, and can't necessarily be used in other countries.

If you have pictures of species that don't currently have pictures on Wikipedia, then it would be helpful if you put pictures on those pages, with the images hosted on Commons, and maybe added to the other language Wikipdeias as well.

Re:Gee...

[bhtooefr]

The beauty of their license is, you can scrape their DB, make a new wiki-based encyclopedia, and try to compete on flexibility of rules.

Re:Gee...

[bitrex]

I've spent some time looking at Wikipedia's articles on 20th century military history, and after noticing some errors in some of them I decided to check out who the major players in the edit history were. Surprise surprise, the great majority of articles on 20th century military history are moderated and controlled by a group of maybe a dozen uber-editors, who apparently spend the great majority of their time doing reverts, reverts, reverts. Obviously aspects of 20th century military history can be contentious, but a glance at the user pages of these editors shows that they also spend a great deal of effort handing out faux military "decorations" to each other and engaged in general self-congratulation for composing and defending the content of various articles. That kind of behavior a) doesn't encourage any kind of objectivity, only groupthink, and b) is so. fucking. queer.

Re:Gee...

[larry bagina]

I find the discussion pages to be much more informative than the article itself in many cases.

The peter north discussion, for example, contains dozens of people repeating the same basic arguments over and over:

• He has a big dick!
• It's statistically impossible for him to have a large dick!
• I have lots of (gay) sex and his dick is average.
• I have a large dick, too!

Re:Gee...

[Raul654]

"Submitting a picture is a simple thing. It shouldn't involve much learning." - in a world without copyright that's true. It's technically trivial create something like 4chan.

But if you want such a database to be reusable and legally trusthworthy, and not a legal land mine, then you have to ask a bit more of your contributors. And copyright law, especially international copyright law, is anything but simple.

w00t.

[ElectricTurtle]

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.

Permanent storage

[Narpak]

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.

Re:"Huge German Donation"

[copponex]

Das sagt deine Freundin auch immer!!!!!