Talk:Philip Greenspun illustration project/Guidelines

Licensing issues

At what stage in the process is the free content license considered applied? If it's upon submission, then a mediocre illustration might lose the prize money, but still be found "good enough" to put in articles. This would probably not be fair to the illustrators, so perhaps we should only apply the free content license upon acceptance and payment.

Also, since this is a paid gig, it seems a little odd to leave the choice of free license up to the illustrators. I think we should just pick one standard package (either CC-BY and GFDL, or CC-BY-SA and GFDL, or maybe something else) to apply to all illustrations in this project.--Pharos 15:48, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

The image has to be on Commons to be evaluated, so the free license should apply upon or even before submission. If illustrators don't like that then they should probably not take part in this project.

As for "losing the prize money but keeping the image", I think we will have to see how it goes. I really have no idea what we can expect. The Review group will work with illustrators if there are smallish problems, to get them up to scratch. "Style" is not one of the vital criteria.

As for leaving the license open, why does it seem odd? The donor has expressed no preference about it and as long as it's Wikimedia-compatible, i.e. Commons-acceptable, I'm not sure what the problem is? cheers --pfctdayelise 16:06, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

I guess I'm seeing it more from the perspective of possible "outsiders" participating in this project, people who are not already part of the Wikimedia community. I think to anyone coming in as an outsider (who possibly has some professional illustrating experience, and is interested in getting paid), the idea that their work could be used without any payment would be quite surprising. At the least, we should make this really clear in the guidelines (that the work enters free content upon submission, not acceptance), or we risk a lot of future acrimony. (I imagine it would be technically possible to temporarily upload not-yet-free submissions to meta, but that of course would be a different approach.)

I know User:Gmaxwell has expressed some strong preferences about what type of licensing we should ask for when we approach third parties (say, about releasing a publicity photo), specifically that there be dual-licensing CC and GFDL. Normally we'll just take any sort of free content license, but I thought as we were specifically commissioning these works the Wikimedia Foundation might have some sort of optimal licensing arrangement in mind. Also, again if we are dealing with "outsiders", these will probably have no preference or even knowledge of free content licenses, and we'll have to just recommend something to them in any case. Thanks.--Pharos 05:09, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, you are right that it will need to be emphasised that contributions become free content. As for license recommendation I would recommend CC-BY-SA + GFDL which is the same as the Commons recommendation. --pfctdayelise 05:00, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I think that's too restrictive (I hate using GFDL for images), but it seems like many are ok with it so I'll be quiet :) As for the images that don't get the prize money, one idea is to have the authors donate all submissions to Wikimedia so they can be copyrighted by Wikimedia (similar to project logo entries). That way they can exist on Commons without changing any policy and the usage can still be controlled. Wikimedia can then re-license the winning image under whatever. Authors of the losing images can then decide if they want to free their images anyway. Of course, this isn't ideal as we want all of the images ;) I think giving submitters an option (e.g. CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, or PD) would be the best thing, while making it clear these are irrevocable and non-exclusive. Let's not force restrictions on work where the author doesn't want them. Rocket000 03:50, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I feel quite positive that illustrators will not be asked to transfer their copyright to the Foundation. They will retain their copyright. The only requirement is that they license the work under a free license. Illustrators can't take part in this project if they don't release the works under a free license. That's not optional. --pfctdayelise 15:26, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Of course not. And I would definitly oppose requiring author's to transfer all their rights. I just mentioned that as possible way to deal with the concerns mentioned above. I want to give the authors as much freedom as Commons gives any other uploader. Our licensing recommendations should be the same, too. Rocket000 08:23, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

About "Illustrations should be accessible to the vision impaired (e.g. colourblindness)."

I see someone questioned this in the comment. :) I don't mean people with total loss of vision, but impairment, mainly colourblindness is what I think of at the moment. It is very easy to make a diagram meaningful for colourblinded people with just a small amount of preparation. e.g. don't use colour as the only differentiator, use a fill pattern as well. With labels, have lines connecting the area to the label if needed, not the kind of "legend/key" you will see in e.g. Microsoft Excel charts. :) It is not a major point in any case. pfctdayelise 12:25, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

video

I'm making an ogg-format video to illustrate the English language Wikipedia's action potential article (Philip Greenspun illustration project/Round 1/Request list/01). I've been experimenting with the MediaWiki ogg video player for the past year and I tend to have some problems with it (example). I wonder if there is anyone who is an "expert" in diagnosing ogg video problems that occur with MediaWiki. --JWSurf 20:00, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I think Greg Maxwell and Tim Starling both know something about it, as they were the folks who made our OGG Player happen. You could try posting to commons-l and/or wikitech-l. --pfctdayelise 01:20, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Please also CC Michael Dale <mdale at wikimedia dot org>. He's our new resident Ogg guru. Say I sent you there. ;-) --Eloquence 02:37, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

• useful information from Tim: "The green bar is probably a Cortado bug -- Theora has a 16-pixel block size, and the player is meant to crop the edge blocks after it decodes them. Your example video is 12 pixels short of a block in the horizontal direction, but it's an exact multiple of 16 vertically." <-- Now I know to make my images have pixel dimensions that are a multiple of 16. --JWSurf 18:21, 14 August 2008 (UTC)