Wiki Loves Monuments/2012/Intervista OKFN

Today we publish an interview to Andrea Zanni, Frieda Brioschi and Iolanda Pensa, the main coordinators of "Wiki Loves Monuments" in Italy this year.

First of all, why don't you tell us something about yourself in the canonical 140 characters?

Andrea is a digital librarian, working with open access journals at the University of Bologna, admin in Wikisource and project coordinator in Wikimedia Italia.

So you share a common background in ... [Wikimedia, open knowledge, ...]

Each of us is interested in access to knowledge, and everyone of us in his own way. Andrea like to work with books and scientific literature, Iolanda ...

What is so special about WLM in Italy? Hasn't the contest been going on for a few years now? [si può anche far precedere da altre domande, tanto per non arrivare subito alle parti hardcore]

WLM in Italy is special because it's illegal :-) In fact, the legislation (the so-called Codice Urbani), prohibits anyone to take a picture and release it with a free license, as the CC-BY-SA, the license of Wikipedia. This license allows you to take the picture and use it also with a commercial purpose, and the law forbids this without an explicit authorization. Therefore, you can't take a picture of a "cultural good" in Italy and put it on Wikipedia.

Before going on, would you explain the main purpose of WLM?

The main purpose of WLM is, in the end, to gain free photos of international cultural heritage, and to put them on Wikipedia. The whole contesti is set up to say to people "Hey, look around you! There is awesome stuff you can picture, and give back to the world to see in Wikipedia." It is a simple message, but it is powerful, and thus the contest is just a game, a cool way of freeing material for Wikipedia.

And what happened this year that made you think it should be done, trying to go beyond the problems you mentioned?

This year, we decided to pursue the project anyway, because we think it is important to discuss openly about these issues, but moreover because we like free knowledge and pictures on Wikipedia.

Are you trying to involve some cultural heritage institution? [qui pensavo all'ecomuseo, da agganciare alla domanda successiva]

Yes. We are contacting various institutions and associations, presenting the project and asking them to join us. It will create a critical mass of people interested in free cultural heritage, and this is important in itself.

It looks like it'smuch easier to get a positive reaction from smaller institutions. What about the main bodies in Italy's cultural heritage?

Italy has a huge amount of visitors from other countries: are you thinking about that?

That it would be amazing to have tourists participate in Wiki Loves Monuments!

Italy has a name as the country with the largest number of UNESCO classified monuments: do you think this statistic is relevant to WLM? Why?

I've heard that participants are making lists of monuments as a guide to participants. Do you think these lists could be considered "open data"? [magari accennare alla collaborazione con OSM, come aggancio per il tema open data]