[Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Dream a little -- collaboration

Fri Oct 20 05:48:43 UTC 2006

If I had $100 mil to work with, or even a tenth of that, I'd want to set up
a framework for coordinating current digitization, archiving and online
content distribution projects. Such an organization could provide
digitization support and expertise, hosting support, and lobbying and legal
support for free licenses and free content. This organization could have as
clients everyone from the Internet Archive to a random university library
that has a collection of papers they're digitizing to the free Darwin
project to... whatever. Like CNI ( http://www.cni.org/) the organization
could help make connections between partners, but on a much larger scale.
I've done research into what digital libraries and collections of free
content exist, and it's truly unbelievable how many startup digitization and
content-freeing projects there are out there, many of which are struggling
for lack of money, manpower and expertise. Only by working with the people
who have local expertise in what content is available where -- the
librarians, archivists, copyright holders and government agencies of the
world -- will these corners of excellent content be unearthed and made
available to everyone.

Even huge digitization projects are plagued by the fact that they're often
fighting a losing battle. For instance, the U.S. government has an ongoing
project to archive online materials produced by government agencies, but
still hundreds of thousands of documents a year go offline, disappear and
are lost forever, mostly not through malice but through an inability to keep
up. Project Gutenburg has been going on for years and there are still
thousands of works that could be included. These projects, and more
importantly much smaller and unknown ones besides, could do with support and
help coordinating volunteer hours to expand the scope of current
preservation efforts. Wikimedia, through providing the right framework, has
achieved the seemingly impossible in five short years -- the world's largest
reference work, plus a cultural movement to boot. Think about what
developing an equally appropriate framework for content freeing and
distribution efforts could do.

-- phoebe
-- 
phoebe ayers | brassratgirl /at/ gmail.com |

On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales < jwales at wikia.com> 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
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