Now I can retire...

My image of Taliesin West
(from Wikimedia Commons)

Previously, I have written about how Encyclopedia Britannica introduced a free access scheme for bloggers. Nifty. But this flows both ways. EB is also moving to make use of resources available to it.

Point in case, the image at right.

As I am sure other people do, I periodically search for my own name using Google's search capabilities. Well, the other day, on the second page of the search (may not still return results) I found this link ... Turns out that EB chose to use my image to illustrate their article on Taliesin West! (Taliesin West was architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school in the desert in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA from 1937 until his death in 1959.)

So now I'm rich, right? Well no. That image, as you can see, is freely available on Commons, for anyone to use, as long as the license (in this case the GFDL 1.2) is honored. Which it is.

So am I upset? Nope! I'm delighted. This is how it's supposed to work. Free images are made free so that people can USE them. EB has properly atttributed the image and thus is free to use it as they see fit.

Maybe it's a bit ironic that EB is using a free image FROM a WMF site to illustrate an article which is supposedly better than the same article on Wikipedia. (which by the way, currently uses someone else's version of basically the same composition)... and, better or not, clearly is in competition.

But it's nifty! Got any other examples? I wonder who else has been honored this way?

By the way, here are both articles, you decide which is better:

• Wikipedia's version is here.
• Encyclopedia Britannica's version is here.
  

In all honesty, I have to say EB wins this one. What do you think?

Knol and Wikipedia

Wikipedia's Knol page
Image by dannysullivan via Flickr
Fair use claimed for commentary
By now, everyone and their brother has blogged about Knol. If you don't know what it is, you've been under a rock, apparently (not that there's anything wrong with that)... follow the link. (which naturally leads to Wikipedia)

Probably half of those blogposts have to do with the relationship between Knol and Wikipedia. Again, go find them if you want to read them.

Some people are saying it's a new gold rush. I have an AdSense account so I decided to see what if anything in the way of gold there is to be had.

I've taken some content from Wikipedia and put it on Knol. The content I took is content I myself authored... I took my DYK articles, at the point of the last edit by me prior to the first edit by someone else, so all content was mine, and Knolised them. (why that edit? Because at that point the content is solely authored by me. That means I can relicense it as I see fit, granting GFDL does not take away the right to license under other terms as well)

The actual formatting leaves a lot to be desired, since they are paste jobs, if I see any signs of traffic I'll improve them. But for the most part at least so far, they are the only Knols on those topics. All their links lead straight to Wikipedia, at least for now.

I am not going to pimp them by linking... if you want to find them you can.

I'm curious as to how this all will play out... will these get any traffic? Will I get improvement suggestions? Will Knol itself complain? Most of these show high correlation to Wikipedia which is not unexpected.

What do you think? Have any of you done this? What will the long term effect be?

Bad pictures?

While some say that too many pictures can detract, a picture, any picture, can really add a lot to a Wikipedia article, I think. Compare this version of "Walker (machine)" with this version ... (actually finding where the article on this topic (legged vehicles) was located in the first place may be the subject of a different post, it was a chore). False modesty aside, the picture adds a fair bit of interest to the reader, I think, as well as giving illustration to some of the points made in the article.

I've been sitting on that picture for the better part of two years. It was taken in April 2006 when I visited the U.S. Army Transportation Museum ... see "procrastination" for part of why I sat on it... the other part of why? It's just not a very good picture.. it's blurry, the machine is out of focus, there are distracting elements in the background, the entire machine is not in the picture, the angle is bad, and so on. In fact, it hits most of the reasons why pictures fail to become rated as Quality Images (much less Featured Pictures, which has much stricter standards) at Commons. So that held me back, I was embarrassed.

However, I've realized that I believe what many probably already knew to be true... A bad picture is better than no picture. If you have a free image that would illustrate a previously unillustrated article, use it. The article will be better, and perhaps someone else will be spurred to add a better one to replace it. Another case in point, the U.S. Army Transportation Museum article itself. Compare this version (no pictures) with this version (bad pictures)... a noticable improvement (I added a lot of other stuff as well, to be sure). But that's not the end of the story. Someone else found and uploaded a better picture of the Liberty truck to produce this version. Now, the reason they saw the article is probably the Did You Know process (another blog post topic!) but the point is, they saw my crappy picture, and improved on it.

So then, if you have freely licensed pictures, don't be bashful. Add them to articles that have no pictures, and either they will improve the article, or they will be replaced by a BETTER picture, also improving the article. You can keep your fair use ones, Wikipedia has enough of those as it is. :)

Thoughts?