[Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] contents under education/information licenses

Tue Nov 21 17:07:21 UTC 2006

On 21/11/06, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:

> I also think WP could do more to cynically play on European chauvinism
> than it has so far. 1/2 :-) A public statement by Jimbo, saying
> something like "we will not accept unfree ESA images in WP, and while we
> don't want WP to present a US-only view of space exploration, it's up to
> the Europeans to fix this", would likely get reported widely, and
> hopefully put some pressure on ESA to change what is at best a sloppy
> practice.

Yes. The reason Wikipedia is full of NASA and CIA World Factbook
images is because those resources are public domain. That's not
US-centrism - it's using images because they are free content. If
there's a problem with not enough ESA images, it's up to the ESA to
fix that; somehow NASA has survived.

I understand this is pretty much what Anthere said to a group of
French government figures - if you want to compete with the flood of
US imagery, make it just as available.

- d.