[Commons-l] Image donations?

Tue Jun 20 11:34:02 UTC 2006

On 6/20/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Er...you mean for the general public? I support seeking image
> donations for historical topics or specific holes in our coverage, but
> I don't know that we need more general amatuer
> my-dog-in-my-backyard,sunset-over-my-fence,my-street-my-school-my-car
> whatever photos. It seems to me the vetting system would have to
> discard 90% of what they were offered, so I rather question if it
> would be a worthwhile exercise.

Maybe. I think if we clearly define, in big friendly letters and with
pretty icons, what we want and what we don't want, we could get a lot
of good stuff. People aren't stupid. I suspect that there are quite a
few amateur photos of celebrities, for instance. In any case, the
campaign would be two-sided: an interface for instantly sharing media,
and a contact form for negotiations. If we advertise this broadly, I
think we could get contacts from places we don't expect.

> Back to the topic of image donations. Not just image donations,
> actually - it would be really good if we could find out if there were
> some unis with, for example, recorded speech excerpts or phonemes or
> whatever, that they were willing to donate. Someone would have to
> convert them to OGG. This would be fantastic support for Wikibooks
> language-learning books as well as linguistics articles in /all/
> language Wikipedias. I don't know how good our recordings are of
> clicks and trills, or uvuvular sounds, for example, are. It would be
> great to have native speakers' recordings.

If we organize a "media donation" campaign well and make it part of
the next fundraiser, I think it could lead to such people coming to us
and talking to us. But I do think we should be open for contributions
from the general public. Yes, a lot of images uploaded to Commons
aren't used. But from my own checks of the FlickrLickr uploads, a lot
of them _are_ used. FlickrLickr also automatically generates wikitext
for galleries like this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:FlickrLickr/Slice_55

This is meant for easy copy and pasting of links into Wikipedia
articles, and I encourage all "my" FlickrLickr reviewers to add images
to articles wherever they can. If we use a similar, somewhat more
refined process for a media donations campaign, I think it could work.

Erik