[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Sun Oct 15 21:50:26 UTC 2006

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you 
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of 
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be 
> purchased and freed.
> 
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase 
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you 
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
> 
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, 
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
> 
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a 
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what 
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would 
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
> 
> --Jimbo

   Someone may have suggested this below in the thread, I have only read 
about half of it.  But, I thought I would throw it in anyway.  According 
to our article on the topic Encyclopædia Britannica started losing sales 
and value in the company around 1990 and then sold for 135 million in 
1996.  All print encyclopedias seem to be doing less well than in the 
past for obvious reasons.  I think this might make them open to the 
ideas of selling the copyrights (not the companies) to earlier versions. 
   The 1911 Britannica has been pretty useful to the project I suspect 
that older editions of a number of print encyclopedias might also be useful.

SKL