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Wikimedia Foundation Nabs $3 Million Grant To Improve Accessibility of Free Commons' Content (venturebeat.com)
As with other Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikimedia Commons (a repository of free-to-use media assets, including photos, audio clips, and videos) is funded through donations, and the organization has now received $3 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic body set up in 1934 by the former president and CEO of General Motors. From a report on VentureBeat: With $3 million in the coffers, the Wikimedia Foundation says it will embark on a three-year mission to link assets on Wikimedia Commons with Wikidata, the organization's crowdsourced knowledge base. The upshot of this endeavor will mean that photos, videos, and all the rest will be much easier to find and, crucially, it will be "machine-readable" which opens up a wealth of opportunities to automate the process of integrating content into third-party services, such as apps and services operated by museums, galleries, and libraries. On the flip-side, this will also make it easier for third-party bodies to donate content to Wikimedia Commons while automatically including existing metadata, bypassing the need to manually label media.
Why do they need grants if they have tens of millions of dollars in cash reserves? Instead of a grant, how about a federal investigation to determine where the money is actually going? Jimmy Wales doesn't need to line his pockets any more than he already has.
The Internet Archive will became the backup of all the knowledge in the world. I think it is also important to donate to that project / library. https://archive.org/donate/
then more people would be able to use their content. Having licenses named things like BY-NC-ND means you simply cannot use the content without doing research. Even then, it can still be impossible to use content because of morass of words in the mess that Lessig made the decision to create instead of just making something simple. We had to stop distributing CC learning materials since our lawyers couldn't guarantee that we wouldn't get sued since BY-SA isn't clear on what in the hell it requires. The licensing mess has ruined CC.
Lawrence Lessog is a lawyer so of course he wanted to create more work for his kind.
I heard Lessig claim over a billion works were locked up with his Commons licenses. It's sad that bad licenses have destroyed sharing.
I would quote your post, but I'm unsure what FD-NB-MT-JH allows me to do.
It's like someone who want's to freely use doesn't like Free licenses, starts a thread and answer his/her own point several times.
If you can't get your Windoze virus to play every last format under the sun, what the operating system that runs the internet is capable of doing is the least of your worries.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
so we are done with the fundraisers now?
Here's the short form of the above post:
Wikipedia doesn't operate hand-to-mouth, they have savings so that when something bad happens, like a law suit, they don't have to shut down.
If you're accustomed to spending your paychecks as you get them, the idea of reserves (savings) may be a bit foreign to you. But what happens when your car breaks down (and eventually it will)? You're screwed. Responsible charitable organizations don't operate that way.
Android supports those formats out of the box.
I still don't understand the refusal to at least also make the files available in the formats that really are the defacto standard for *universal availability* reasons. It's not as if Wikipedia/Wikimedia *CAN'T AFFORD* the license fees to support old formats like MP3 or MPEG. They certainly aren't going to influence adoption of their favored media formats either. That war is already over.
Wiki has annual expenses of around $48 million and growing, and cash reserves about half of that - six months of expenses. Because their expenses for the next six months will be higher than the last six months, it's prudent for them to have a higher than average reserve - their expenses will be higher.
A separate question is whether the expenses are too high. Half of their expenses are salaries. They may have engaged in too many development projects that weren't worthwhile. You would expect SOME development efforts to go bad - if they never try anything that doesn't work, they might not be trying enough things.
It's not only whether Wikimedia Foundation has the resources to make works in those formats available. It's also whether mirrors that aren't as well capitalized as Wikimedia have the resources to make works in those formats available. This is why, for example, works under a license specific to Wikimedia are outside the scope of Commons.
support old formats like MP3 or MPEG
This isn't 1997. Technology has way surpassed needing to highly compress things to the extent that they have little fidelity.
The point of using open formats is to preserve things as best as possible, without chance of having a licence revoked or the licensing company folding. Transcoding from MP3 to the next generation's favourite format would greatly reduce quality and OGG has options for both lossy and lossless compression where needed. MP3 LAME VBR is quite decent but fewer devices support it than support OGG which greatly exceeds the quality with minimal filesize increase. I haven't got a single device that can't play OGG and have all my music in .FLAC (or .WAV). Even browsers support OGG (with the exception of the OS extensions known as IE and Safari).
[Rent This Space]
You nerds are hopeless and self-absorbed. Your final words in your final sentence really say it all.