Last December, I invited you to share your views on the value of Wikimedia conferences and the planning process of Wikimania. We have completed analysis of these results and have prepared this report summarizing your feedback and important changes for Wikimania starting in 2018 as an experiment. Feedback and comments are welcome at the discussion page. Thank you so much for your participation. I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources, 22:47, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
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I see you upload lots of interesting photos on Commons, but you don't include common people in them (except speakers at conferences etc). If you want to preserve history, houldn't you also take pictures of the audience of a conference rather than the speakers only? Why do we see you uploading so many pictures of cars and landmarks or landscapes but no pictures of commoners walking in the streets? Aren't everyday people in everyday situations worthy of inclusion in a historical photography archive? Street photography is a photography genre devoted to the common folk together with social documentary photography, with some famous practitioners of the art being Henri Cartier-Bresson and Bruce Gilden. But in Germany and other European Union countries there are many cultural and legal problems photographers face: people often don't want to be photographed and some countries have privacy laws that make the taking and/or the publication of photos of identifiable people illegal unless the person in the photo has given his consent. Such laws often take the face of personal data protection laws or personality laws. Street photographers often continue producing and exhibiting or selling their artwork despite the privacy laws and social documentary photographers also do the same with their documentary photographs. In Europe there is really a battle for the right to take pictures of people without their consent, with many cases ending up in court, like street photographer Thomas Leuthard's legal case in Germany. What is your position in this political debate? Do you believe people have a right to not be photographed in public? Do you think laws making it risky for photographers to take pictures of people in public without their consent should be repealed? Should everyone have the right to take pictures of people in the street without their knowledge or consent, or should this right be a privilege of only the members of the press and who should be called member of the press? Do you believe that philosophically and ethically it is the photographer's free expression to take and publich a photo of a person who doesn't want to be photographed? If every person in the street is allowed to have a copyright-like legal right of privacy over his face, how will art and documentary photography be practised in the streets? Essentially this is privatization of the public space and is thus inherently anti-democratic. In a democracy everyone can take pictures of everyone in the street even without their consent or even against the photo subject's will, and this is what free expression is. Photographers should unite and persuade European politicians to repeal those privacy and personal data protection laws and any law which make it impossible to record the history of everyday life in the street (but also similar laws exist in Quebec, Canada). Sardeis (talk) 01:40, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #186
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Combining history and an obsolete constellation with modern astrometry, we can do some cool stuff with Telescopium Herschelii - a bit of a pity it isn't a legit constellation really....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:28, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Croome Court, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Sun Alliance. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.
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