[Commons-l] Original art on Commons

Sat Nov 13 11:04:00 UTC 2004

Wikimedia desparately needs more artists. Projects like Wikijunior - a  
collection of Wikireaders for kids - need high quality illustrations in  
order to flourish.

In my opinion, the Wikimedia Commons should become the central artistic  
hub of the Wikimedia community.

What can we do to make it so?

Well, there are a few technical changes that will help:
- New upload form that makes it easier to choose licenses and write  
descriptions. I'm planning to hack something together here soon, but it  
won't be the super-ultra form that I've created mock-ups for in the  
original Commons proposal.
- An external media manager to collect files and batch-upload them to the  
Commons, with a nice Windows GUI to boot.
- A better discussion page system. The whole Image talk:, Commons talk:  
etc. wiki page system is confusing for newcomers and difficult to track  
for us.

But except for the first one, these changes will take months. There are a  
few things we can do right now:

Create portals for different communities
----------------------------------------
 - 2D artists
 - 3D artists
 - photographers
 - filmmakers
 - sound experts

The purpose of these portals would be that we can pass on these URLs to  
people who know nothing about Wikimedia. Each portal should give a brief  
description of the type of files that we want - useful to Wikimedia  
projects - and the free content principle. It should also highlight a few  
of the existing works in that category as examples, including links to the  
Wikimedia projects that use them.

Featured content separated by category
--------------------------------------
Successful community art sites have some kind of comment and feedback  
process. For us right now, that is [[Commons:Featured picture  
candidates]]. I think we need to create this site in all the categories  
mentioned above, and link the individual featured content candidate pages  
from the portals.

Catalog and systematically approach existing projects
-----------------------------------------------------
The largest community art website I know is deviantart.com. Much of their  
content is not of interest to us as it is purely artistic. However, they  
have many excellent photos. Alas, most of them are not under an open  
content license.

First, we need a list of these projects.

Second, for each of them we need volunteers who search existing content  
and browse new content. Virtually all of them have contact forms. In cases  
where the content is useful to us, we could post standard messages:

  Hi Xy,

  your picture [bla] could be useful for the Wikimedia project [abc].
  In order to use it there, we would need it under an [[open content]]
  license, such as the GNU Free Documentation License.

  Would you be willing to put your picture under such a license? I would
  then upload it to the Wikimedia Commons, our shared media repository.
  If you want, you can also upload it there yourself - see the
  [portal link] for further instructions.

I think if these messages are sufficiently personalized, they will not be  
considered spam.

Press release
-------------
Once we have the portals more or less in operation, we need to start  
working on our first real press release. One good occasion would be the  
50,000th media file. I'm picking a reasonably high number so we have some  
time to prepare this properly.

This press release would include a real press kit, with examples of our  
media and information about the Wikimedia projects. It would also  
prominently describe each of the different portals. We could create  
variant versions to send to different communities - e.g. photo magazines,  
artist weblogs etc.

Rules of exclusion
------------------
During all of this, we need to make it very clear that the Wikimedia  
Commons is for Wikimedia projects. People will be pissed off if we delete  
excellent artistic works that have no relation to anything we do.

Maybe in the future, art itself will become one of our missions, but right  
now it isn't. Anything that's created needs to be tied to the distribution  
of knowledge. So that should be emphasized on all the portals.

Getting all of this off the ground will be a huge undertaking, especially  
since our community is still small. I will be occupied by Wikinews in the  
next few weeks, so I would appreciate it if anyone else took the  
initiative to start working on this.

Regards,

Erik