Cormac’s blog

Despite my photographic background (my undergraduate course was a three year diploma in photography), I don’t keep it up much any more - though I have been slightly more active since buying a nice digital SLR last year. Even still, I didn’t feel I had a lot to learn by uploading photos to Commons or Flickr (as per week 6 of the oercourse) - which wouldn’t exactly be new to me. Instead, I concentrated on doing some digging around other resources (more on which in my next blog post), and working on Wikiversity’s “help” pages around uploading and using images - mainly this one.

Images can cause problems on Wikiversity. For example, there was much activity recently by a group of students in a face to face group, who had been tasked with writing educational materials on “Design for the environment” as part of their coursework. They developed a lot of good resources - but, as I pointed out on the talk page, they also uploaded a large number of copyright violations. Some students were clearly aware of copyright issues, and used free content photos from Commons and Flickr (though sometimes these images were not free enough for Wikiversity); some students uploaded copyrighted work and illegally placed it under a free licence; and some others uploaded copyrighted work claiming that, since it is to be used in educational contexts, it falls under “fair use”. Whatever was done “wrongly” (with respect to Wikiversity’s free content principles) was not done out of malice, but simply a lack of awareness either of copyright itself, and how it works, or of Wikiversity’s position on copyright. And copyright - as I’ve said before, and as anyone in the free culture movement knows - is a mind-bogglingly complex arena.

Images on wikis can be a real headache - Commons is not Flickr - and there’s a reason why most people use Flickr in preference to Commons, even amongst the free content heads. Mediawiki’s syntax is clunky and sometimes completely counter-intuitive (as with storing sound files in the “Image” namespace!) - and then there is the complexity of learning about Wikimedia’s pretty ‘hardcore’ stance on copyright (which, IMO, is a good thing). However, when you’ve traversed the learning curve somewhat, it does work, and make sense. I haven’t gone through the blogs of the people in this course to see what experiences people have had with images on Commons/Wikiversity, but I would imagine that there were some frustrations (or will be, when they find their images deleted by zealous Commons admins!).

All of which brings us back to, yep, education. We, as part of the free culture movement need to educate people about not just the need for open content, but the process by which people can make content free. We, on free content projects like Wikiversity, have to develop robust but clearly understandable resources for doing so - targeting people from absolute zero knowledge to people with specific queries. Commons does this to some extent - though its guidelines are probably actively offputting for rank beginners - and so I think Wikiversity could complement this in a very significant way. If anyone has any experiences of wikis and images they’d like to share, I’d love to hear them to be able to develop resources or learning spaces to make images more workable in a wiki context.