On 10/17/06, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux(a)free.fr> wrote: I'm not so sure, looking at our top aspect ratios: Images Ratio 201436 1.33 61803 0.75 40633 1.00 37839 1.50 20991 0.66 14287 0.62 12942 1.60 10734 1.25 10552 1.49 10352 0.80 ~~~~~~~~ I'd be shocked if flickr didn't completely dwarf us in terms of images with 4:3 and 5:4 aspect. Since most cameras produce either 4:3 or 3:2, it would be interesting to answer the question: Are Wikimedians cropping all these images, or are we just pulling lots of images from outside websites where they are cropped to fit the layout?

On 10/17/06, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux(a)free.fr> wrote: Touché However, Judging by the popularity of Flickr, Youtube, and the non free creative commons licenses (which account for 2/3rds of the CC usage) I'd say that the general public cares not a lick about free content, so long as it is available to them at no cost and no one is suing them (i.e. free as in stolen beer is sufficient, since there is no RIAA going after folks for image copyright violations). That we have not yet made Freedom a primary concern (even among many of our own users!) is a substantial failure on our part ... other services which play really fast and loose with copyright (thank you DMCA safe harbor) will always have a broader collection of content as a result. Today, commons is a weakly organized pile of images (and some other media)... We're no better off than youtube, actually.. they offer ratings, recommendations, and a better search engine. I think we need to think carefully about our future. If we are to continue to provide value beyond a simple image dump for Wikimedia we must focus on the virtues of our model (demanding free content, welcoming enhancement and derrivation) compared to sites like Flickr and Youtube.

Gregory Maxwell wrote: In France, a society of authors and composers called SACEM demanded payment after a class of elementary school pupils sang a song for the retirement of their teacher (the song's title translates as "goodbye, Mr Teacher"), in public. Technically, they were right: this was a public performance of a song written by a still living artist, as managers of the rights of that songwriter they can demand payment. Of course, this created an outrage; the songwriter offered to pay the money owed to SACEM (once the artist hands management to SACEM, as far as I know, he cannot directly choose how SACEM manages his songs). This should remind teachers and parents that things such as using copyrighted photographs for a publicly displayed work (say, the kind of "students' works" shown during "open doors" days or at end of the year) may result in legal issues. After all, what SACEM does, the societies collecting rights for photographs may do. (Though I suspect they would have the common sense not to create themselves a public relation disaster.) In any case, running things with the knowledge that things are ok because people will break the law and no one will bother does not sound like a sound approach. Wikimédia France is trying to push many buttons to get public sources of photographs to release them under free licenses. It is not easy, believe me. Regards

geni wrote: We're not there yet. We're trying to get them to discuss the issues with us and trying to show them that, for instance, they would have an advantage in getting free advertisement on our sites (a public museum who puts up a photo on Commons that says "This photo was provided by museum Foobar which has the original painting, can be visited at blah blah" gets advertisement). :-)

geni wrote: We're also working on that. On Thursday I'm going to attend a meeting on electronic libraries.

bawolff wrote: Except for fake sizes such as SVG pictures, the largest is: Orion_Nebula_-_Hubble_2006_mosaic_18000.jpg a 18000x18000 picture stored in a 19 megabyte file.

Where are all these random stats coming from?? Anything the rest of us can play with? Brianna On 18/10/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: