On Mon, 2010-05-24 at 03:30 +0100, Thomas Dalton wrote: > On 24 May 2010 03:28, Brian McNeil [Wikinewsie] > <brian.mcn...@wikinewsie.org> wrote: > > Why not? > > The main reason not to do it is the amount of work involved in setting > it up. At the moment, we are limited far more by volunteer time than > money. We need convert money into time by hiring staff, not time into > money by forming this kind of partnership. I think there needs to be a > benefit in addition to the money if this is going to be worth doing.
I have to disagree. And, will try to do so as reasonably as I can. You are quite correct that the WMF, and chapters, having staff is a key priority. I am, thankfully, not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV). It is the expertise of such people that could see boilerplate agreements drawn up that volunteers/members such as myself could take to local suppliers. From there, you might only build a £300-400 pound/year income with one supplier. But, join the dots, ... Take it around the UK. How many cities? How many articles for local places? A few hours of a lawyer's time to craft good 'standard' contracts, an hour or two of the time of volunteers like myself; it pays for itself very quickly, establishes a steady income stream, and encourages people to contribute because a tourist from the other side of the world might go home with the text, or picture, from an article they've contributed to. It fits with the attempts at some sort of rapport with museums. Their gift shops will sell T-shirts; think the "British Museum" doing a tee with an excerpt from the [[w:Howard Carter]] article, a related picture they've donated to Commons, and a payment to the WMF to put the enWP logo on it. Cafepress sucks, is overpriced, and 'over there'. Long-term I'm not talking about shifting a few dozen T-shirts; more like thousands per-year, per-city. To the intelligent tourist, it is embarrassing to go home with an "I visited X, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" - with a "Made-in-China" label on it. No. With a little luck, and some help from a UK-based equivalent to Mike Godwin or Dan Rosenthal, you could have a lot of local companies looking to give money to the WMF, and protecting the trademarks for us. Seriously, just look at your local city, and its heritage. Look at the Wikipedia[1], and Commons[2] stuff for Edinburgh's most famous green space. Nothing featured pic/article-wise there. Good enough for a T-shirt though, and a real incentive for people to get featured material around that. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_Street_Gardens [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Princes_Street_Gardens This ended up overly-long; but, I assume people will see why I immediately thought of Thomas as 'doing an an Iain (Dr No) Paisley impression'. Again, Kul is CC'd. I know how busy he's usually kept, and how careful the WMF is in entering into any agreements. It may be quite some time before he could comment on what I'm suggesting, but this is preemtive action; such businesses are usually poor when it comes to respecting copyright. More likely they'll defy the requirements to work within the legal framework and hope they don't get caught. It doesn't have to be like that, but a flat "no" is opening the door to the Wild-Wild-East flooding the EU and US with counterfeit goods bearing WMF logos. What, above all, we can't afford is volunteer time policing that. Brian McNeil. -- "Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news." · Freelance, community-accredited, journalist. Wikinewsies do not officially represent the Wikimedia Foundation, its chapters, or any of the officially registered projects; all work is done on a freelance basis. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil | http://www.wikinewsie.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
