Just to avoid misconceptions: I do not expect that anything will change soon in the policies of French cultural institutions. It is extremely difficult to change the policies of large, traditional organizations unless there is a strong political will to do so - and I do not think that putting up free content online is a national priority.
My foremost goal is to get the ideas of free content and free access across, to the common public and to the people in charge. This is not so easy, because there are many misconceptions about what Wikipedia is about. For instance, contrary to what is often implied by the media, Wikipedia is not a free-for-all where anybody can do anything anytime - but many people believe it and thus are horrified by such a pandemonium, and because of this, they simply won't listen to what we say. Simply overcoming such misinformation is already considerable work. It took us years to be considered respectable enough to be heard by officials, and to get a short op-ed printed in the press. This means that in the meantime, myself and others (Florence Devouard, Pierre Beaudouin, and so on) had to go to many meetings, whose outcome many often just have been that people that did not know us would then see that we are not dangerous anarchist teenagers or raving idealists, but sensible, responsible folks. _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
