Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The Congress Party of #India does not understand #Wikipedia

The Minister of Law and Justice in the Indian government, Mr Veerappa Moily and with him the Congress Party do not know how to deal with  Wikipedia. Take Mr Moily's Wikipedia article for instance, it does not even have a picture of him.

For politicians it is important to be seen as the friendly, smiling person, the person who will deliver what they promise in the elections. Wikipedia is where people find information about Mr Moily because Wikipedia gets a high ranking in the search engines. No picture though.

In an article in the Financial Express, he hits out at WikiLeaks and Wikipedia. The good news is that he knows them apart. The bad news is that he does not understand that an encyclopaedia with a neutral point of view is not the enemy.

The LDF in contrast does understand the opportunity Wikipedia offers; they made many pictures available under a free license and consequently articles about their politicians have a high quality picture. We may not have an article for all their politicians, but the pictures are available to be used as illustrations.


Mr Moily I make you an offer; make a high quality picture of you available to us under a free license. I will blog about it and, I will propose it as a featured picture candidate. When it becomes a featured picture, millions of people in the whole world will see it.
Thanks,
       GerardM

3 comments:

libregeek said...

LDF is not a political party. AFAIK, it's an alliance of several other political parties.

GerardM said...

I changed the text. I think I am not doing that badly writing about India anyway.

I will propose a high quality picture for featured picture :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Amir said...

The logic says that that makes sense, but the reality is a lot weirder. WM-IL went to the Knesset several times to convince Israeli politicians to release their photos. We told them that that's an excellent way to publish themselves - something that nearly all politicians are supposed to want very strongly. The response, however, was rather weak. We are not giving up, but the fact is that it isn't easy.