Learning patterns/Collaborated with Government organisations, What's next?
What problem does this solve?[edit]
Government organisations are mass donors of content which can help to improve a lot of Wikipedia articles and illustrate them with images. But it is difficult to handle the mass data and content donated by the Government if not followed sequentially. Most of the content remains unused and stays in for a while.
What is the solution?[edit]
A systematic way and the division of role helps in solving this problem. Division of role helps in assigning certain tasks to a certain individual who is capable of finishing the task provided to them. It helps to identify the leadership quality within the individual and also helps to finish the work on time. Involving community members not only from local but from Global communities will also help in this work.
- Guide to approach Government institutions to release content under Open license
- Showing the need for open licenses through practical experiences (they edited Wikipedia)
- Providing information on open licenses and case studies of previous success stories
- Pilot projects to open license content
- Positive reinforcement of their decision (blog post)
- Metrics to show the impact of their decision
- More pilots to normalise open licensing within the government
- Using multiple case studies within the government to encourage a policy change
- Policy change to make open licensing standard practice
- They are putting their open license policy and content in the wider context of their educational remit as a government
Things to consider[edit]
- Analyse the content and where it can be used.
- Find the source, identify the person in the picture. (Often in group pictures the name of each individual are not provided)
- Divide the work among the community members to keep the track. Though Wikimedia Commons identifies the duplicity of images, but it will take time of volunteers.
- If the images are of high qualities crop them so that it could be used in other Wikimedia projects.
- Spread out to volunteers to help in the campaign.
- Add images to Commons and also ask other volunteers to use them on Wikipedia articles via mailing lists, social media channels and others.
When to use[edit]
When Sports and Youth Services Department of Odisha released the content of 2017 Asian Athletics Championships under CC-BY-4.0, I with the help of a volunteer from the United Kingdom added the images from the website to Commons. While it took 7 days to add almost all the images, the next day around 40% images were used on various Wikipedia projects. Currently, the count is 60%. Read more about this collaboration at Wikimedia Blog.