| ▲ | shimman a day ago |
| That's pretty cool and worthy endeavor. Having public domain pictures of cultural events seems like a worthy cause IMO. |
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| ▲ | alt227 a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| The point is when you go to Wikipedia and they are on a funding drive with their very prominent ads for donation requests, they dont mention any of this. They make it sound like wikipedia is very much at risk of dying due to lack of funds when in reality they are looking for more funding for programmes like this, which is where a lot of the mistrust and 'deceptive advertising' opinions come from. |
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| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent | next [-] | | They could tell us which programs. | | |
| ▲ | alt227 a day ago | parent [-] | | They could, but if their donation ads said for example 'please help us to take more photos of live events' instead of 'we need your help to keep wikipedia alive' then they would not get half the donations they do currently, which is the point. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree, that you can lie to people to make more money. That's called fraud. | |
| ▲ | Sabinus 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I wonder how well they would go if you could target your donation. Humble bundle did this and I appreciated it. |
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| ▲ | joshspankit a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Honestly, I’ve never donated bc “keeping Wikipedia up” could be a solved problem by now. Not just cheaper processing and bandwidth costs, but p2p hosting, etc. Every time I see that ad, I say to myself “it should not be that expensive”. Now, if they had said “We need 200k to send CC photographers to the Olympics”, count me in. That sounds bigger and way more interesting! | | |
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| ▲ | akudha a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Genuinely curious - why is photographing FIFA World Cup important? It is a very wildly watched event, extremely popular. Literally every for-profit media is going to cover it. Wouldn’t that money be spent on lesser known, lesser popular events? Or even projects like photographing the effects of climate change etc - the events that for-profit media is unlikely to cover? |
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| ▲ | Kayvanian 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Speaking as a WikiPortraits organizer: Wikipedia primarily uses free media, and the for-profit event coverage is of course usually not releasing their photos under free licenses. Our photos are released under Creative Commons for use by Wikipedia and, well, anyone, and big events like the World Cup are where we can capture a lot of the most notable people at scale. That being said, we're not just covering the big fancy events. We've done hundreds of events from indigenous festivals to minor league sports to science conferences. We've also donated equipment to wiki communities in Kenya, Ghana, and Benin to photograph their local events and culture, which are very undercovered on-wiki. The big events are what gets a lot of visibility and make the headlines but we do a lot more than that. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiPortraits_by... | |
| ▲ | dannyw 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The for-profit media don’t release photos under freely available licenses. So we’re looking at those images being under copyright for ~100 years. Licenses do matter, just like open source. | | |
| ▲ | scarab92 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | If it’s really that important to people, they should be able to raise donations for that program in particular. Raising funding for Wikipedia, then diverting 90% of the funds for pet projects is dishonest at best, and most likely fraudulent. The other problem, is that the projects wikimedia foundation has historically funded have a notable political bias, to the point where it has been accused of being a pseudo-PAC. |
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| ▲ | krackers a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I guess maybe the reasoning is that because it's a watched event it's useful to have libre/public domain photos of it? |
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