[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Sun Oct 15 23:19:05 UTC 2006

(I'm sorry for replying to the wrong message.  I lost Jimbo's 
original posting in an internal mail misconfiguration.)

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.

There are lots of contents that could (and should) be free, but is 
still under copyright.  Some are in the hands of museums and 
archives, some in publishers, some in government agencies.

I think it would be a mistake to start pouring money into such 
institutions, which should instead be forced (by a change of 
copyright law or national policy) or encouraged to give it away. 
We'd run out of money much too soon, and we'd build expectations 
that old collections can bring profits.

Take for example Anthere's recent report [1] from a conference 
where she told French policy makers that we can have NASA's public 
domain images for free, but can't afford to pay for copyrighted 
images from ESA (the European Space Agency).  As Wikipedia gets 
more attention, this argument grows stronger: ESA should (be 
forced to) free its images, to match NASA's offer.  Starting to 
pour money into ESA would be very contraproductive.  More money 
would in fact make our dream a lot smaller.

[1] http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-October/010854.html

Something I believe that money could do is a system of travel 
scholarships for young Wikipedians (say, under age 25) who want to 
travel to a foreign country for a few weeks to gather facts (and 
photos) that will then be published as free contents.  Even if we 
can't really require the results to be useful, the system is still 
not likely to be abused because it can only be used once or twice 
by the same person and the application process would include 
recommendations from the community.  The amount necessary to cover 
the cost for affordable travel and accommodation is not very large 
per person (say US$ 1000 or 2000, for example a European Interrail 
pass for two zones and 22 days is UKP 200 = US$ 300), but it can 
mean a lot to the individual.  A donation of $100 million would be 
enough for 1,000 such stipends per year for the next fifty years.  
Or rather, a $200,000 fraction of that donation would be enough 
for an initial trial of 100 to 200 such scholarships.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se