I've just gotten another email request for permission to use one of my
photos. Of course they have permission, but I'm struck by how much
trouble people always seem to go to find an address to send to. I'm
thinking that we should suggest to commoners that they post direct
contact info if they're comfortable with that, at least on user page if
not on every image - I think there's only been one time that a reuser
found mediawiki's secret email-to-user option and contacted me that way.
Stan
Hello,
Last week-end there was the first round of the French presidential election.
People from Wikimedia France have been working hard to attend meetings of
the candidates to take plenty of photos of them and other politicians or
artists supporting them. Wikimedia France has even issued a press release :
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CP_Couverture_%C3%A9lection> and <
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:French_presidential_election_%28…>
(browse the subcategories).
To get an official press card in France, more than 50% of your total income
must come from your activities as a journalist or photographer <
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_de_presse_en_France>. Photographers and
reporters from Wikimedia projects can obviously not get this precious pass.
Though, an accreditation letter from an institution (along with a
professional camera and a big amount of self-confidency) can be enough.
I know the English-language Wikinews provides such accreditations for
reporters. The French-language one doesn't. We have been forced to contact
each party and request temporary press passes for each meeting. Although we
are very proud of what we have accomplished, it would be great if we had
some accreditation letters as photographers. Should they come from Wikinews?
Commons? Dunno.
Browsing through the archives of Wikinews Water cooler, I have found this
discussion :
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Water_cooler/policy/Archive/15#Accredi…
Has there been any follow-up about this issue? If not, could we work on it?
--
Guillaume Paumier
[[m:User:guillom]]
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have
imagined." Henry David Thoreau
Some time ago someone introduced Mayflower on this list :)
My first opinion about this tool was: great, but ugly logo will make
it useless ;)
Now with some help of Masur we have something a bit nicer and good
starting point for evolving something even better ;)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikimedia_Community_Logo-Mayflower.…
AJF/WarX
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Clements <gmane(a)kennel17.co.uk>
Date: 01-May-2007 01:43
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Commons deletion issue
To: wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Cc: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
MediaWiki.org has just been a victim of the 'Commons deletion issue'. An
image from the Crystal icon set that was prominently used in many
navigational pages, including the main page, was deleted from Commons and
suddenly MediaWiki.org is full of broken images. The deletion was valid (it
was a duplicate file) but the fact that the actions on SiteA can affect
SiteB so radically is really rather worrying...
A technical solution would be for people deleting files on commons (for this
kind of reason) to replace the page with a redirect page, and for these
redirects to be resolved by MediaWiki when linking to a shared file. This
won't solve all problems of course, but it would help for this kind of
situation (or e.g. a GIF being replaced by an SVG). Of course, I'm sure
there are many ways this could be abused as well...
I don't know if anyone has any suggestions to deal with this kind of
problem, or even if it has already been recognised as an issue. The
non-technical answer is, of course, to copy the commons images to the local
wiki, but that kind of defeats the point of commons, doesn't it?
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Hi!
When "investigating" the copyright status of some old images, I
realized that our {{PD-old}} template is quite a bit misleading.
IIANM (note: IANAL), works published after 1923 by authors who died
between 1926 and 1936 (i.e. dead more than 70 years) are _not_ public
domain in US (and will not be until at least 2019 [1]), although they
are PD in EU states (among others). And as the US law is quite
relevant to the WMF servers, we must consider those works to be
copyrighted.
The copyright status of an old work is therefore determined not only
by the death date of its author, but also by its publishing date and
our templates (and procedures) should acknowledge that. (See also
[[commons:Commons talk:Licensing/Which copyright law applies?]])
Unfortunately, I cannot imagine we would be able to explain the
difficult rules on the upload form so that anyone would understand
them. The need for a wizard-style upload is evident once again…
P. S. I must say I am afraid that this fact about US copyright law is
ignored (not known) on more projects which consider works by authors
who died before 1936 as PD regardless of the publishing date.
-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]
[1] See e.g. [[en:Wikipedia:Non-US copyrights]]
Didn't realize this was crossposted, so i geuss i'll forward to commons-l
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: bawolff <bawolff+wn(a)gmail.com>
Date: Apr 23, 2007 5:42 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikinews-l] [Commons-l] Accredited photographer status?
To: Wikinews mailing list <wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
See also: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Accreditation_policy
and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews_accreditation_policy
As far as accredited photographer, on english wikinews its mixed
opinion as to what to do. I personally think That it should be
coordinated with commons. We had a bunch of commoners apply for
accreditation without ever contributing to wikinews, and most of them
got rejected (all except [[user:Gmaxwell]] i believe/ Mostly because
it felt wrong to give someone who is only there for the accreditation,
the accreditation).
On a side note, we had one accredited photographer who actively
contributed to wikinews [[User:Aselman]], as well as Zannium
semi-hiring John Mueller (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Academy_Awards_afterparty_CUN_Blu_C…
) As well as the accredited people who aren't ''photographers'', but
know how to click the button on a camera.
-bawolff
On 4/23/07, Delphine Ménard <notafishz(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I think we have had this accreditation conversation already, I can't
> remember where (foundation-l? wikinews-l?) or when. Sorry.
>
> The answer is very simple: For those countries where accreditation is
> a legal matter (France is one of them), the Foundation, or the
> chapters, cannot and will not give this accreditation.
>
> For those countries where the whole accreditation process is more
> open, then it could be imagined that the Wikinews community recognize
> some people as "wiki journalists" or something.
>
> Please remember that as soon as the organisation "endorses" any person
> to contribute content to the projects, it puts itself in a "publisher"
> kind of position, which we need to avoid at all costs, since the
> organisation is *not* a publisher.
>
> Delphine
>
> On 4/23/07, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2007/4/23, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom(a)gmail.com>:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > Last week-end there was the first round of the French presidential election.
> > > People from Wikimedia France have been working hard to attend meetings of
> > > the candidates to take plenty of photos of them and other politicians or
> > > artists supporting them. Wikimedia France has even issued a press release :
> > > <
> > > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CP_Couverture_%C3%A9lection>
> > > and <
> > > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:French_presidential_election_%28…>
> > > (browse the subcategories).
> > >
> > > To get an official press card in France, more than 50% of your total income
> > > must come from your activities as a journalist or photographer <
> > > http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_de_presse_en_France>.
> > > Photographers and reporters from Wikimedia projects can obviously not get
> > > this precious pass. Though, an accreditation letter from an institution
> > > (along with a professional camera and a big amount of self-confidency) can
> > > be enough.
> > >
> > > I know the English-language Wikinews provides such accreditations for
> > > reporters. The French-language one doesn't. We have been forced to contact
> > > each party and request temporary press passes for each meeting. Although we
> > > are very proud of what we have accomplished, it would be great if we had
> > > some accreditation letters as photographers. Should they come from Wikinews?
> > > Commons? Dunno.
> > >
> > > Browsing through the archives of Wikinews Water cooler, I have found this
> > > discussion :
> > > http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Water_cooler/policy/Archive/15#Accredi…
> > >
> > > Has there been any follow-up about this issue? If not, could we work on it?
> >
> > It seems to me that the accreditation can only be done by a legal
> > entity, and thus the accreditor at least formally should be the
> > Wikimedia Foundation or its French chapter. Of course they could leave
> > the decision as to who to actually completely dependent on the advise
> > by Commons or Wikinews or whatever. For PR reasons I think it would be
> > good to have 'Wikipedia' written on the accreditations (along with
> > Wikinews and Commons, and of course the WMF) - It's much better known
> > than the other projects, and thus could give an air of seriousness to
> > the user that otherwise he would not have.
> >
> >
> > --
> > Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com
> > ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Commons-l mailing list
> > Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
> >
>
>
> --
> ~notafish
> NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
> this address will probably get lost.
> NB. Cette adresse est utilisée pour les listes de diffusion. Tout
> email personnel envoyé à cette adresse sera probablement perdu.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikinews-l mailing list
> Wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
>
Hello,
What do you consider the aims of Commons to be?
What kinds of things should we be trying to do? How will we know when
they're done?
I have written up some thoughts about this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pfctdayelise/Aims_and_goals
Explicitly, I think our aims are these:
1. Support the Wikimedia Foundation project websites by striving to
assist editors, in their native languages, in providing, finding and
using free content media
2. Collect and provide free content media for all possible
educational* purposes
3. Manage and evaluate said content by volunteer community
4. Encourage and communicate the ideas of copyleft and "free
content", and highlight the alternatives to the current "All rights
reserved" over-copyrighted culture
note that "educational" refers to the intention of the media, not any
restrictions on use of the media. Any of our media may be used for any
purpose, educational or not. But on the other hand, some content will
never be appropriate here, regardless of how free the license terms
are.
note that "multilingual" and "wiki are not ends in themselves, but
just means we use to achieve these aims.
maybe some people will think 1 does not belong, and maybe some people
will think 4 does not belong. in fact some people may think 2 is the
single only purpose. Well, I consider in the volunteer-driven projects
of WMF, "content" (2) and "community" (3) and two sides of the same
coin. For me 4 is important because we want people to use our work,
not just gather a nice dusty unknown archive. And 1 is a pragmatic
statement of our situation today. No other WMF project is as
integrated with all the others as Commons is. And the more that use
increases, the more obvious it makes our usefulness to the whole
world.
On the page linked above, I wrote some examples of explicit goals we
could set towards each of these aims.
Many of the goals I set are almost purely technological. There is
simply a lot of functionality that we need, and don't have, at the
moment, and there is basically no way to replace it. I have come to
the conclusion that several core MW functionalities need to be majorly
adapted for Commons, ie not an easy toolserver-based fix.
Perhaps if we can present such united aims to the Foundation with
solid community support, we can get a promise of more developer
support from them in turn. Perhaps. :)
Comments on wiki or mailing list are always welcome.
cheers,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/etech_hitwise_s.html
We got mentioned as an "up and coming Web 2.0 site", along with three
other "media sharing" sites.
I found out about this mention, on an AfD for English Wikipedia's
"Wikimedia Commons" article, of all places...
cheers,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise
Is there a short guide to being a proper Wikimedia copyright paranoid,
that users and prospective admins can easily avail themselves of? It
would be a most useful howto document.
- d.
1.0 ==> big popularity with general public
A relevant bug: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3712
Here's my list: we need improvements in annotation, search, uploading
and content management.
* Improved annotation. I propose an improved way of annotating content
that combines the best of galleries, categories and tags. Since I
don't have a better name I just call it "annotations". I can imagine
how it would work in my head, I hope I explained it clearly enough for
other people to imagine it too.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pfctdayelise/Categories_and_galleries
Note this would solve most of the most important multilingual problems.
* Improved search. http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8738
Also relates to what metadata should be stored. The metadata needs to
be stored for us to be able to search on it.
* Improved uploading. Go to multi-step process instead of a single
form, allow uploading by zip, by directory, etc. Let us create a
licensing quiz that new users have to complete before uploading.
* Improved content management. Inbuilt tools and pages that allow
admins and other users to more quickly scan and tag content and flag
possible problems. (Maybe some hacked up version of Patrolled Edits
run only on file uploads?) The current system is cumbersome and not
comprehensive. Lots can fall through the cracks.
Likeliness of improvements taking place:
Search and uploading yes; content management and annotation, not
unless someone finds some money for someone else to get paid. :)
regards,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise