Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-25/Op-ed

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Thank you for your story. It's a testament to how people can contribute to Wikipedia and open culture in ways other than editing articles. Encouraging more people to do this is especially valuable because of the large gap between the end of the public domain and today. Sure, we can create content now, and we can use content older than 1923, but this is the only way we can use content created in the decades in between. Gamaliel (talk) 23:25, 26 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for a great write-up. Ijon (talk) 04:27, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to all the Bareras for making these photos available. Gamaliel is right that we need more photos taken from 1923-2000. There are likely 1000s of photo collections from this period taken by very able photographers, and we'd love to upload their photos. Just a few could do wonders for many of our articles. Perhaps we could organize a WikiProject to identify and help them.

I have to mention a particular photographer who this story reminds me of. I ran into User:ROY KLOTZ during the 2012 Wikipedia Loves Monuments contest. His photos go back to the 1970s, perhaps earlier. He continues to photograph and upload new pix mostly of historic sites, about 3000 so far in total. He does have a few quirks, such as typing in all caps, and needing help in categorizing and placing his photos. If anybody wants to help, please see his uploads at Commons - he's wearing me out! As I said, just a few photographers like this can work wonders. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:30, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Piling on here. Thank you for writing this; I've already emailed it to my own father. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 05:07, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
And another piler on! It's great to see that some very able photographers such as your grandfather and father have given us the privilege of seeing their collections. The period is, in terms of free media, sadly underdocumented. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 08:15, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Makes me want to go and get my parents to pull out the tins of family photos to see if we've got any gems in there too! Great op-ed. Miyagawa (talk) 11:46, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks so much for the positive feedback, everyone! If I may, I'd like to add a quick story from a couple of months after the digitization project, when my Dad took me to Joliet Union Station for a little railfanning of our own. Over fifty years after his trip there with his father, it felt like we had come full circle, and I have the photos to prove it: strikingly, this photo I took of a BNSF freight in Joliet is from almost the exact same place of a train heading the same direction as this ATSF freight that was shot (probably by my grandfather) 51 years prior. I honestly didn't try to create a parallel image intentionally, so I got a real kick out of it when I discovered the similarity upon comparing my photos to my father/grandfather's images. Michael Barera (talk) 14:55, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

My photo of a BNSF freight in 2014
My grandfather/father's photo of an ATSF freight in 1963, from almost exactly the same location

My father has a collection of slides going back to the 50s and the entire collection is of short line railroads, his preference as a railfan. He's actually considered the expert on certain lines. One interesting thing about his collection, it had a purpose. My father took specific photos so that he could go back home, take measurements, and then build scale replicas of the rolling stock. He turns 80 today, I'll have to show him this story and see what he thinks of doing the same with his collection. --Scalhotrod (Talk) ☮ღ☺ 19:10, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What a great story! Thank you. — SMUconlaw (talk) 14:59, 28 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Michael, I'm a railfan who has digitized and uploaded to commons a number of train slides I took in my home country, Australia, in the 1980s. In addition to having similar motivations to those of your dad, I wanted to use my old slides to illustrate Wikipedia articles I had created. Some of my digitized slides are now displayed on Wikipedia, and at least one of them has been published in a railfan book, under the creative commons licence. Up until now, I've digitized my slides only by scanning them on a small scanning device I purchased at an electronics store. However, I'm planning to have my next batch digitized by a professional service provider, who would be able to produce a better quality scan. My own dad has some other slides, of other subject matter, from the 1960s and earlier, and recently we've been discussing digitizing them, too. So I'll probably also be showing him your story. Bahnfrend (talk) 02:25, 29 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]