One of the projects I am involved with is [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipdia.org) especially
[WikiProject New Zealand](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_New_Zealand) which is attempting
to improve New Zealand related articles.
With the [General election](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_general_election_2008) later this
year one thing we would like to do is have photos of all MPs (both current and in the past) and
other political figures with articles. However there is still some way to go, for instance
the article on [John Key](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Key) ( National Party Leader and potentially the Prime Minister after the election) doesn’t have a photo and neither does [Peter Dunne](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dunne) and [Rodney Hide](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Hide) (and that is just the party leaders).
I’ve written to a few Political Parties as party of a [little subproject](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_New_Zealand/Content_task_force) but very little
luck so far except for the Greens who release their website photos under and open license already.
What is needed is for for the copyright holder of the photos to release them
under a license that can be used by Wikipedia and other projects. [This page](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing#Acceptable_licenses)
has some details but the big things include:
* Republication and distribution must be allowed
* Publication of derivative work must be allowed
* Commercial use of the work must be allowed
The guidelines I’ve been following are [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requesting_copyright_permission)
but I’ve not had much luck. I’m a little stuck really, I thought that the political parties would be
happy to ensure their people’s articles were of good quality but they appear to have other priorities.
Other ideas I’ve had include directly contacting the politicians or just going along to their clinics and asking to take the photos. Both will probably take a while though
and will leave a lot of gaps especially with people who are no longer MPs.
Anyway ideas and offers welcome, I thought I’d post this so I could point people at something online detailing the problem at least. My contact
email address is “simon at darkmere.gen.nz”.
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