fyi

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John 
Andersson
Sent: Donnerstag, 30. Januar 2014 09:29
To: [email protected]
Subject: [WikiLovesPublicArt] Wiki Loves Public Art 2014 postponed

Dear everybody,

During the last weeks there have been ongoing discussions within our chapter 
about Wiki Loves Public Art and our chapter's active involvement. We have been 
extremely happy and proud over what was achieved last year but still we have 
had to reconsider. Yesterday the team working on the international contest 
sadly took the decision that we will postpone the contest and review the 
possibility again next year. We have reached this conclusion as as there are a 
number of issues that have to be solved for the contest to make sense, and each 
of them are a potential show stopper:


 1.  The once again ongoing discussions on Wikimedia Commons about PD images 
and URAA[1] and also images under Freedom of Panorama in the source country but 
not in the US[2] - we feel that it would be irresponsible to use movement 
resources in this way if the images might end up being deleted. If the 
Community isn't convinced all photos might end up being deleted even if it is 
not necessary. We believe that these discussions need to be closer to a 
solution before we run this contest again;
 2.  We lack strong international partners/sponsors this year which means that 
the value of these efforts decreases and the cost would increase. Europeana the 
other day informed us about their new focus areas for the year - where WLPA is 
not prioritized;
 3.  The technical issues with Maarten Damers' tools. As you might know Maarten 
recently informed the WLM team that he will not work on moving the tools to 
Labs, and therefor they might all stop working shortly when the Toolserver is 
killed. The Ukrainian Wiki Loves Earth team has said that they can take over 
the work with them, but this is still not solved as far as we know - and they 
might not have time to help with WLPA either. In our team we sadly don't have 
the capacity to do this work.

Additionally, there are a few new legal developments in Sweden that we are 
currently dealing with. The chapter is currently involved in legal actions 
regarding publications of photos of works of art from Sweden, as there are some 
legal ambiguities in Swedish legislation. This severely limits what we could 
have done in Sweden during the contest, as we do not want to risk contest 
participants being dragged into the process. Thus meaning that there will be no 
national contest in Sweden.

Obviously you can still do a national contest if you so please, but as it seem 
now, Wikimedia Sverige will not take on the international coordination this 
year. I am really sorry for this as we all have spent time working on this and 
we have had great fun working with you all. We sincerely hope that we will be 
able to pick up the contest again in the future!

Any data already collected could still be used to generate lists on Wikipedia 
and we could help with that if needed. If you do plan to carry on, obviously we 
are still available for questions and consultation if needed.

On Commons and other places there have been many discussions on what we could 
do with photo contests in the future. This might be worth thinking a bit more 
about.[3]

Please let us know your thoughts.

Best,

John Andersson, on behalf of the international team

[1] 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Use_of_Foreign_Works_Restored_under_the_URAA_on_Commons
[2] 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/Non-US_Freedom_of_Panorama_under_US_copyright_law
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2013/Future
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