The three-word edit changing "subject consent for the use of such media" to "subject consent for the use of such media in Wikimedia Commons" is significant.
Let me explain why.
There seems to be a fundamental difference of opinion as to whether assumed consent to an upload to Flickr's adult section implies consent to an upload to Wikimedia Commons or not.
Present practice in Commons is that if an adult image is present on Flickr under a free licence, then it is fine to upload it to Commons, without making any effort to ascertain whether the model and the Flickr uploader are happy for the image to be on Wikimedia Commons. Neither the model nor the Flickr uploader are notified of the Commons upload.
A number of people have been saying that before an adult image is uploaded to Commons, models should be asked whether they agree specifically to an upload to Commons, as the presence of their adult image on Commons has very different implications than the presence of such an image in Flickr's restricted section.
To me the wording of the board resolution is clear as is stands. Erik has further clarified it. However, present practice in Commons does not follow it. So if these three words help make the intended meaning clearer, then they will help to bring Commons practice in line with the intent of the board resolution. That is all for the good, is it not?
I am sure further improvements to the wording of the board resolution can be made. But if this change alone makes that part of the intent clearer, then why wait?
Of course, if we want the scraping of adult images from Flickr to continue, without verification of consent, then we can just sit on our hands. And talk and talk until everybody is tired of the discussion and wants to talk about something else, leaving everything exactly as it was.
YouTube and Flickr would strongly disagree with that assertion. (They have staff.)
If you look at the upload stream, they come up quite regularly, including images of minors, uploaded again and again under different user names, according to a mail I received from Philippe a couple of months ago. I'm told Flickr delete those within two hours; if true, that is significantly faster than the Wikimedia response.
The cucumber ladies still have their pictures on Commons, even though the Flickr account the images were scraped from has long been deleted:
The image pages concerned show no evidence that consent was ever asked for. All they say is this:
Maybe it would be time to nominate the set of images in "Category:Sexual penetrative use of cucumbers" for deletion, given that the Flickr account is gone, and there is no evidence that the women ever consented to the Flickr upload, let alone the Commons upload?
When one of the set was up for deletion a while ago, consent was not even mentioned:
Nobody took note of the "Photographed by Heinrich" logo in the bottom right corner either. It seems their eyes were elsewhere. :)
There is not even a personality rights warning. And on top of it, the images come with precise, pinpoint geolocation, with helpful links to Google Maps, Google Earth and OpenStreetMap, so you can see which house they were taken in. It's nuts.
Andreas
