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."

nice

[niner69]

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

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.

Re:Gee...

[Anonymous Coward]

*warning - long, drunken, expletive-filled post ahead*

The last thing those cocks want is for anything to be easy or convenient or friendly. For all their blather about "information wants to be free" or anything along those lines, they're the most obnoxious, jack-booted fucktards to exist on the net. If you aren't one of their goose-stepping, line-toeing sycophants then they want *nothing* to do with you. I submitted an update to an article about a Broadway show and the Fuckapedia family spent an entire week shitting all over themselves and frothing about how I was "advertising" and "violating the spirit of the community." I haven't bothered contributing since, and those assholes can suck a ten-pound bag of dicks. I know when I'm violating a spirit or advertising, and I didn't do it. Fuck them.

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:Gee...

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Well for the English version anyway. What about all the other languages supported by wikipedia?

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: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: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.

Re:Gee...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like wikipedia alright. Here are some particularly egregious things I've seen happen at wikipedia:

Some guy nominates Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) [wikipedia.org] for deletion and fails in his attempt. So what does he do? Merges every episode, save that one, into List of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes [wikipedia.org]. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he violates WP:PARENT [wikipedia.org] and engages in backroom deals to gain support.

And then there's the case of Torchic [wikipedia.org]. A front page featured article with 20 paragraphs and 46 citations now reduced to redirecting to a list of pokemon, with 2-3 paragraphs (depending on whether or not a one sentence paragraph counts) and no citations. So proud is wikipedia of this that they created WP:POKEMON [wikipedia.org] to commemorate it. Of course, WP:POKEMON neglects to mention what I just did.

Oblig. grammar nazi

[tux0r]

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.

I think I can confirm [msn.com] your guesstimate...

Re:Encarta?

[wmac]

What is valuable content in your opinion? You obviously have problem with MS otherwise how a whole encyclopedia which contains a lot of text, pictures and video cannot be useful?

Re:I hope the cologne archive collapse leads to ch

[prefec2]

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.