US National Archives Will Upload All Its Holdings To Wikipedia

An anonymous reader writes The U.S. National Archives has revealed to Wikipedia newspaper The Signpost that it will be uploading all of its holdings to the Wikimedia Commons. Dominic McDevitt-Parks told the Signpost that "The records we have uploaded so far contain some of the most high-value holdings ... However, we are not limiting ourselves ... Our approach has always been simply to upload as much as possible ... to make them as widely accessible to the public as possible."

Re:Are they safe there?

[Anonymous Coward]

So far the comments have been nothing but ignorant.
Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free (as in freedom) media. Mostly photos, but lots of other stuff too.
The National Archives and Records Administration, according to Wikipedia, "is an independent agency of the United States government charged with preserving and documenting government and historical records and with increasing public access to those documents".

These are federal government records and documents, so automatically in the public domain. Wikimedia Commons is the perfect place to mirror them.

Re:why?

[rgmoore]

They do already host this on their own, but putting it on Wikimedia Commons makes it easily accessible to people who want to use it for articles in any of the Wikimedia sites (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikiquote, etc.). Also, by doing an official upload, they reduce the chance of somebody claiming the files are illegitimate. This is basically a courtesy to Wikimedia.

{{PD-USGov}}

[tepples]

I'm under the impression that a lot of the "holdings" are works of the United States Government, which enter the public domain upon publication [wikimedia.org]. Works created by a government contractor still have a copyright, but I'm not sure to what extent the "holdings" include those.