One project of the Transmediale Festival (Feb 2011 in Berlin) has created illustrations for 26 Wikipedia articles. Why doing this?
“Open culture have developed inspiring text-based collaborative models, but have yet to develop successful models for open collaboration on visual culture. Wikipedia Illustrated seeks to develop such models. Through a book featuring 26 illustrated articles, a blog that follows the production and a set of workshops we hope to develop a methodology for contributing creative-commons licensed illustrations to Wikipedia. Is the visual aspect of Wikipedia so lacking and dated because it could only use freely licensed images? Or is it that images have to become “historical” to become removed, objective, factual, and therefore applicable to the Wikipedia guidelines? Is the Wikipedia project really inviting visual artists to contribute their work to the commons? Or is visual work inherently less collaborative? As the project evolves it exposes the myths and biases behind these questions and reveals the surprising and complicated dynamics of open culture.” (Project blog)
One of the illustrations you can look at in the hebrew language Wikipedia.
Source: http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A5:Humer.jpg (CC-licensed)
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