Massive Media Donation to Wikipedia from German Federal Archive
December 6, 2008 – 3:06 pm by Thomas GideonWikipedia just announced a massive contribution to their Commons.
Starting on Thursday Dec 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100,000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive.
The Federal Archive is making the photos available under a CC BY-NV-SA 3.0 Germany license and has apparently cleared its rights to do so. The photos are not of the highest resolution, about 800 pixels on the longest side. Regardless, this is an enormous addition to the commons. Flickr’s collaborations with US museums was on the order of a few thousand, maybe it is up to ten thousand or so. The Federal Archive submission is an order of magnitude or two beyond that.
I think this gives greater cause for the Wikimedia Foundation to exercise the GNU FDL window granted them in a recent updated by the Free Software Foundation to move their content to a Creative Commons license. I have to imagine that the CC license on these photos at a minimum bypasses some of the reuse issues for images in wikis presented by the particular conditions of the GNU FDL.