That said, there's a bit of criticism - constructive, I hope. I'm not sure if further emails like the ones at
would be very helpful - they didn't work at the time, and clearly haven't worked in the past four years, despite your tweeting. The issue the IWM had in that case was that they didn't agree with you that it was copyfraud. The solution would be a sit-down talk between professionals, that is as you say, "
I remember trying this with the IWM in 2013 - at the time, I was talking to the institution about the WW1 centenary, which they were the driving force behind. They were happy to talk, and extremely friendly, and we had several meetings with them. However, they had issues with the emails that you were sending to them, which they saw as rude, passive-aggressive, and generally unhelpful. The institution didn't see them as polite correspondence, and it made them reticent to work with Wikipedia because they didn't feel like they could be a part of a community that spoke to people like that. I know that to you the emails were professional and to the point, and objectively correct. But to them it came across as unprofessional, and that it happened during the run-up to the WWI centenary made it very difficult for Wikipedia to get involved in the commemorations in any more than a passive capacity. You redoubled your efforts after you saw the IWM refusing to change, but sometimes, our passion for change - for righting the wrongs in the world - makes us seem like fanatics to middle-managers in cultural institutions. This pushed them away, and made it harder for them to understand our point of view.
The solution here is, as you say, friendly and professional discussions - social media campaigns about it, as well as using words like "copyfraud" (which invoke thoughts of criminality in the minds of the reader), are counterproductive. We need to be professional and approachable, engendering change through example, and although social media campaigns and shaming work sometimes (and are legitimate ways of forcing change on an old institution), we have to be careful not to go to it as a first option, especially when our strength in WMUK is our professional connections throughout the third sector and "GLAM" world.