Huge German Donation Marks Wikipedia's Evolution 130
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."
Re:Gee... (Score:4, Informative)
The tools for automated submissions of the pictures are already in place. What is needed, however, are people to translate the German captions into English.
Re:Gee... (Score:5, Informative)
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 The ones that aren't have been replaced by better pictures.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/ [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:nice (Score:5, Informative)
That is only true of the federal government, not the various state and local governments.
Re:Actually, I consider this the big news (Score:3, Informative)
They fired the entire development team:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/03/microsoft_flight_simulator_partners/ [theregister.co.uk]
Re:Actually, I consider this the big news (Score:3, Informative)
Laid off, not fired. Though the difference is subtle, the former does not place a negative mark on their résumé.
Re:Public domain compatible with GFDL? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Encarta? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Gee... (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re:Gee... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
That's why Wikipedia logs well . . . everything. There's this handy one called the upload log [wikipedia.org] that, surprise surprise, logs uploads. Plug in your username there and it'd take about 2 seconds to find it again.
Re:Public domain compatible with GFDL? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Encarta? (Score:3, Informative)
As far as I know most or at least major parts of most of the the articles are licensed from other encyclopaedias, so they are not really free to just give them out.
According to Wikpedia [wikipedia.org] although the original content from Funk & Wagnalls was non-exclusive, Microsoft later purchased Collier's and New Merit Scholar encyclopedias, so at least some of the content would be free for Microsoft to donate. Should it happen to discover a shred of genuine generosity somewhere in its cold little heart.
Re:Encarta? (Score:3, Informative)