So, Flickr has stated that The Commons on Flickr is not bringing on any new members in 2010.
Since launching with the Library of Congress over two years ago, Flickr has been inundated with requests from photography-collecting organisations to join up; I know we considered ourselves lucky to be the 16th organisation on board.
The decision not to take on more partners has prompted people to ask: why the rampant interest in Flickr Commons, and not in Wikimedia Commons?
Mia Ridge wrote the question up first on her Open Objects blog, recording a little flurry of tweets on the topic. [Interestingly, these tweets showed one of the common, ongoing confusions about The Commons and Creative Commons licences; photographs added to The Commons on Flickr are not loaded up with a CC licence but with a ‘No known copyright restrictions’ statement; you can’t CC-licence material that’s out of copyright.]
Liam Wyatt, Vice President of Wikimedia Australia also wrote about this yesterday. Liam’s put significant effort into trying to bring the Wikipedia community and the GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) world together, including attending and presenting at last year’s National Digital Forum.
Liam gave a list of reasons why institutions interested in joining The Commons and those already in there) should consider Wikimedia Commons, including:
- increased disk space
- a project to improve the user interface for uploading content
- Wikimedia Commons’ ‘no ads, no corporations, no commercial motivation’ ethos
- contextualisation
- usage checking.
- context
- user experience & community
- community management
- a sense of content control
- useful statistics.
the overall community effect of Flickr and the deep engagement by a small but passionate group of Flickr users, has been the most positive result for us.
And secondly, the vastly important role former Flickr staffer George Oates played as the original passionate force behind creating The Commons. It’s fair to say the experience hasn’t been quite the same since she left, but the growth of a community around The Commons has been a joy to see and a pleasure to be a tiny part of.
Seb also notes that images added by the Powerhouse to Flickr Commons have seeped over to Wikimedia Commons. That’s certainly the experience we’ve had: for example, this image of the Government Tourist Courta thte 1925 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition was added from Flickr to Wikimedia. But many of the images from the Library’s collection appearing in Wikimedia Commons have been added by Wikipedians directly from our digitised collections.
Our motivation for joining The Commons on Flickr was three-fold.
Firstly, we believe in the idea of putting our digital content where the audience is. We had tried this with some success with a ‘normal’ Flickr account, but it was immensely frustrating that we couldn’t release the images we uploaded for any kind of re-use using the CC licences available on Flickr.
So (secondly), the creation of The Commons with its ‘No known copyright restrictions’ was immensely appealing. It gave us a chance to test what would happen if we released content for any use whatsoever – in a place where people would notice, and with loads of context (both about the individual images, about the Library, and about the overall project) attached.
Finally, and frankly – The Commons was an awesome community of people and organisations that we wanted to be part of. The relationships developed here have spilled over into all sorts of other places, such as Shelley Bernstein’s visit to New Zealand last year (and the workshop she and Seb Chan are running at Webstock next month).
None of this is to say that we’re not interested in playing better with Wikipedia/media. It’s more about finding the time to take this on, to form relationships, and to learn how to work with another community.
4 comments:
I think also Wikimedia has a lot of one-on-one 'bridge building' to do, to repair a broken relationship with the GLAM sector.
Most GLAM staff I know have tried editing entries on Wikipedia, feeling they speak with some knowledge on a topic, only to have their work reversed - in my case my new entry was flagged for deletion within TWO minutes of me pressing save!
With that kind of first impression, you can understand why we haven't bothered taking another look at the Wikimedia stable. Which then leads to ignorance - I thought the Wikimedia Commons was just a data store for images editors were putting in Wikipedia entries, I didn't realise it offered other benefits. I think it is supposed to be thought of as separate to Wikipedia, except GLAMs would prefer an integrated solution across all Wikimedia's products.
GLAMs get it that 3rd party sites offer a much lower risk for sharing content that have a cloud of rights issues hanging over them (as discussed). Flickr was the first to the party and captured our attention - it provided a safe, ring-fenced, image-rights-aware community. As a result, that box has been 'ticked' (at the end of the day, we are civil servants). So Wikimedia will need to come with something compelling for us to go through that process again.
So overall Wikimedia would probably need: (1) demonstration of the popularity/value Wikimedia provides from an ROI point of view; (2) a clear and easy process for GLAMs to interact with the whole of Wikimedia products; (3) a super-cheery community manager who will gently coax each GLAM in individually.
Apology: I'm writing this without even investigating what Wikimedia is offering (apart from what was presented at NDF), preferring instead to complain about my experiences editing Wikipedia - maybe I embody the epic uphill attitude battle Wikimedia faces (or maybe I should let grumpy comments sit overnight before pressing publish?).
Courtney thank you for this very good post and Douglas thank you for pressing 'publish'. I for one happen to agree entirely with you and especially your three points.
One of the main probelms in implementing such actions as you list in your three points is that it requires time/effort/money to enact these things. The professional staff of the Wikimedia-universe are very few and their role is largely in keeping the infrastructure of the site still going. All of the rest (including the content) is written by volunteers who, by definition, only engage in activities that benifit themselves [insert lengthy discussion of the role of altruism here]. So, whilst the three points are valid - and I agree with them - they are focused on making the Wikimedia experience better for 'someone who is not me' which makes it difficult to encourage volunteers to get involved in it.
Therefore it simply comes down to who is going to invest the necessary time/energy/money to jumpstart such a process?
I'm doing all I can as a volunteer, but if there's any funding bodies out there who want to help resolve these issues, don't stay quiet! :-)
Thanks both of you.
Liam, I've been thinking a bit about Wikimedia since you spoke at NDf last year; realistically, it shouldn't be so hard for me to add all our Flickr Commons images into Wikimedia Commons. It would just take a bit of internal negotiation, and some time for me to learn how to do stuff right inside WC.
As I noted in my post, I have seen images migrate over from Flickr to Wikimedia, and in some ways I wonder if this isn't actually a better process - letting the Wikimedia community pick what they think is useful, rather than uploading stuff and hoping it's fit for purpose.
Perhaps a good way for the GLAMS to approach this would be to work together with Wikimedia on a list of subjects/topics that would be helpful in plugging gaps? That way GLAMs organisations could work together to provide hi-res rights-cleared content that was desired by the users - a pretty clear-cut example of ROI in my books.
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