Commons *has* a community, though a small and vulnerable one, and
regretfully declining community over the last years. Currently some twenty
people contribute 100 edits or more a month, and some four hundred people
contribute 5 edits or more a month, which is comparable to a "small"
language Wikipedia. I thank Pieter Kuiper fully for admitting Commons isn't
without it's own problems. I thank Ting Cheng, a community elected board
member of the Wikimedia Foundation, for his lengthy elaboration recognizing
an issue. I thank Dror for standing up. This Spring the WMF has initiated a
year long strategy formation process asking input from all sides and parties
involved around a series of questions concerning participation, reach and
quality. (Strict) compliance with license(s) is considered a [[[quality]]
issue by more than one regular contributor to Commons. Several image
gathering projects do have several goals, most notably informing the public
about free repositories of (for example) images which I will dub [[reach]]
and hooking newcomers to become contributors of content, which I will dub
[[participation]]. Initially dubbed [[governance of Commmons]] I would like
to invite all participants in this discussion, and all participants in the
[[massive upload conflict]]s to participate this year, just started, and
ending summer 2010, in the overall Wikimedia Foundation strategy formation
process. Help us all finding answers to all of "What should we do" and "How
should we do" questions. In my belief all active participants to Commons
should be give the time to reflect on the current issue, and give their
opinion, if they want to, which can take a longer time than the wikibreak of
Dror. Maybe it might be possible to generate a rough guideline in a year
time about [[I started a project to have the public take images and upload
them ultimately to Commons. How and when should I inform the community at
commons about my project and under which conditions won't the community at
Commons block all uploads from my project]]. After all, the Commons is a
very special project. It has many more sysops than active contributors. And,
as far as I know, a sysop is just a technical function, with the ability
(some buttons) and not the authority to push them without 'community
consent'. Governance at he commons and discussing about sysops might blur
this a little bit. That might presuppose sysops having an organizational
role or function they wouldn't have. And one last thing: Commons, like all
projects, are independent of the WMF, the Board of the WMF can't impose
anything on the project. So Ting showed a lot of courage by stepping into
this discussion, and I thank him for that, again.
Dedalus
On wikinews, we post the current number of pending RFA's and similiar
votings to the header of [[special:recentchanges]], perhaps that might
be something to look into on commons.
Personally, I am subscribed to this list because i like having a vague
idea what is going on at commons. However i would honestly not really
care about who's up for RFA. Even if i knew the person, I probably
wouldn't vote for them since i have only very minor contributations to
commons, I would not feel right voting in an RFA. but then again, I
quite likely would be in the minority here (since most people
subscribed, are fairly active).
-bawolff
"There are 1 types of people in the world: those who start they array
indexs at zero, and those who don't."
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:24:31 +0100 (CET)
> From: "Huib!" <abigor(a)forgotten-beauty.com>
> Subject: [Commons-l] Notice on mailinglists
> To: Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <49724.127.0.0.1.1256804671.squirrel(a)127.0.0.1>
> Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
>
> Hello,
>
> On Commons there have been several times that people come with the idea to
> post Rfa's or Crat, CU and OV here on this list so more people know that
> there is somebody running for extra rights.
>
> Since nobody did something with the idea I would like to ask : ''Are there
> any objections when there will be a note on this list about a request for
> Rights''
>
> I am happy to send a email for every request with the link to the
> discussion, the nomination text and a link to the user contributions.
>
> This will bring more people to the discussion when the know the people,
> since we still have people passing for adminship with for 4 votes or we
> need to make a rfc longer because we don't have enough people voting.
>
> Best regards,
> Huib
>
--
Http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/user:Abigor
Hello,
On Commons there have been several times that people come with the idea to
post Rfa's or Crat, CU and OV here on this list so more people know that
there is somebody running for extra rights.
Since nobody did something with the idea I would like to ask : ''Are there
any objections when there will be a note on this list about a request for
Rights''
I am happy to send a email for every request with the link to the
discussion, the nomination text and a link to the user contributions.
This will bring more people to the discussion when the know the people,
since we still have people passing for adminship with for 4 votes or we
need to make a rfc longer because we don't have enough people voting.
Best regards,
Huib
--
Http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/user:Abigor
Interesting - thanks for sharing this information.
Wikimedia UK is currently starting up a "workplace learning" project, which is going into companies - predominently media companies - and talking to them about issues such as how they can add to and re-use our content. One of the specific questions that we will be answering is how people like EU Observer can reuse Wikimedia Commons photos in a way that is copyright compliant. Note that the BBC, for instance, has a policy of not reusing our content specifically because no one can give them a clear answer to that question.
What we will say will be carefully worded to make sure people don't treat it as legal advice or some kind of permission beyond the terms of the license - important as we're not the copyright owners although some people may think we are! I was thinking of wording it along the lines of "here's the kind of things that other people do" (answers.com for instance).
Have you got any more information about the aggregate/weak vs derivative/viral argument? Am I right to presume the migration from GDFL to CC-BY-SA of wikipedia will strengthen the former argument? Are GDFL images on Commons migrating to CC-BY-SA at the same time?
Thanks for any help you could give.
Regards,
----- "Daniel Kinzler" <daniel(a)brightbyte.de> wrote:
> From: "Daniel Kinzler" <daniel(a)brightbyte.de>
> To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Sunday, 25 October, 2009 09:19:23 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal
> Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Wikimedia as stock photo source
>
> Andrew Turvey schrieb:
> >
> > ----- "Yann Forget" <yann(a)forget-me.net> wrote:
> >> From: "Yann Forget" <yann(a)forget-me.net>
> >>
> >> Py mouss wrote:
> >> > The license of the site (http://euobserver.com/static/terms) seems
> > to be
> >> > incompatible with the use of pictures licensed CC-BY-SA, no ?
> >>
> >> What the license of the site has to do with the image ?
> >> The site is certainly not a derivative of the image, so I don't see the
> >> relation.
> >
> > Whilst I'd never pretend to know anything about copyright, that would
> > also be my interpretation. The "SA" in CC-BY-SA refers to derivative
> > works - i.e. where you change, modify, etc the picture itself. Merely
> > putting the CC-BY-SA picture next to text doesn't create a derivative
> > work, so the text would not have to be CC-BY-SA'd
>
> This is a matter of much debate and disagreement, as old as copyleft licenses.
> It's "strong" or "viral" copyleft vs. "weak" or "soft" copyleft. Traditionally,
> the FSF takes teh side of strong copyleft with the GFDL, and the CC crowd tends
> more towards the weak variant, implying that the share-alike requirement does
> not apply to "aggregate" works, only "true" derivatives. To me, that makes more
> sense in practice, even though it may be less desierable in principle. The
> distinction is tricky, however.
>
> -- daniel
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:46:18 -0500
> From: Daniel Schwen <lists(a)schwen.de>
> Subject: Re: [Commons-l] WebGL enabled in Firefox nightlies
> To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <b4326860909251746t9dc83a5j1a0dbdb669708765(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> > Back from the old days of VRML - I remember there used to be a plugin
>
> Uhm, VRML is dead. And it's successor is not WebGL, but X3D. There are
> plenty of plugins for all operating systems. FreeWRL [1] and
> InstantPlayer [2]
> being two of the more active projects
>
> [1] http://freewrl.sourceforge.net/
> [2] http://www.instantreality.org/downloads/
Yes i know - the point being (and bear in mind i don't know very much
about 3d stuff, so take anything i say with salt) that if we wanted to
display some content natively to firefox using web gl, and than have a
java applet as a back up if no native support. (like we do for ogg).
the java vrml players were java applets that displayed 3d things,
hence i assume they could be used as a backup (I have no idea if thats
true or not). The point of it being java is that people wouldn't have
to download plugin
-Cheers,
bawolff.
Dear Wikimedia, MediaWiki, and Media-on-Wikis-interested,
with the Paris multimedia meeting looming ahead, I finally got around
to write some software I planned to do for some time, but never could
muster quite enough incentive for. It is a JavaScript (JQuery)-based
file management tool for Commons (and all MediaWiki installations,
technically). It runs on the toolserver in its current form, but could
be reshaped into a MediaWiki extension without too much fuss. I have
dubbed it "Commons Commander", in remembrance of the Norton Commander,
a quite useful file-management tool at the time.
For the impatient, a demo link:
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/commcomm/index.html?category=Pictures%20of%20…
Caveat: This is "alpha" stage, neither bug-free not feature-complete.
I tested it successfully on Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4, but it currently
fails on Internet Explorer 8 (quelle surprise!).
Some features:
* Two-pane browsing (can be switched to one pane)
* Browsing files by category, uploader, recent uploads, file search
* Filter current file list by title (e.g. all files in the current
category/user file list with "Paris" in the title)
* Thumbnails or detailed list, sorted by name, size, or upload date,
ascending or descending
* "Eternal scroll" - load some files initially, loads some more as you
scroll towards the bottom of the list
* Eternal scroll works for browsing files in a category, user uploads,
and search results
* Recent uploads will add new files every 30 seconds instead
* Search for categories and browse the category tree in a special tab
* Open file on double-click
* Select one or multiple files with Crtl and/or Shift keys, or with
buttons at the borrom
* Removing from / adding or moving to a category (where possible) by
buttons in the category sidebar (Commons only; needs TUSC login)
I have also hijacked the right-click context menu for files:
* Quickly add a file to a category (or move, when browsing a category)
* Rename a file (currently invokes "Move page" on Commons, as my bot
is not allowed to move pages)
* CheckUsage
* Go to file view/edit
* Show other files uploaded by the same user
* Show related files (searches for "significant" parts of the file name)
* Show categories of a file in the category browsing tab
I think this turned out to be one of my "prettier" applications, as
far as these things go. Originally, I planned to use drag'n'drop as
well, but I'll save that for later...
Please let me know what you think, and if this (or some similar thing)
would be usable within MediaWiki/Commons itself. Feature requests and
bug reports are also welcome, but please keep in mind that this is
still a very early stage of development :-)
Cheers,
Magnus
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 10:39 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] International Olympic Committee tells Flickr
user to change license
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Fajro <faigos(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 5:02 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2009/10/9 Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com>:
>>> Interesting article about how the International Olympic Committee is
>>> cracking down even on CC-SA licenses:
>
> The blog of the photographer:
>
> http://richardgiles.com/2009/10/09/the-olympics-and-creative-commons-photog…
>
That clears things up a lot, and brings up a lot of new questions.
Wikipedia is actually at the center of this whole thing: Richard Giles
changed the license on this photo of Usain Bolt (first to CC-BY-ND to
CC-BY-SA)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardgiles/2767537621/
at the request of a Wikipedian so that it could be added to Wikipedia
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Usain_Bolt_Olympics_Celebration.jpg
And Wikipedia is probably where the British merchant found the photo,
which he used to promote a book. And that commercial use is what drew
the attention of the International Olympics Committee. So now the
IOC, it seems, wants Giles to put the CC-BY-SA genie back in the
bottle.
What are the legal implications here? Does the contract (private use
only for photos) implicitly agreed to by Giles when he bought a ticket
to the Olympics invalidate the CC-BY-SA license, despite that
downstream re-users (like us) weren't a party to the original
contract?
-Sage
