On 3/23/06, "Matt Brown" <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/23/06, jkelly(a)fas.harvard.edu <jkelly(a)fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > I think that this is largely true. My suggestion was meant to be more
> > conservative, in that it would only expedite deletion of media where we are
> > saying "This is fair use", and it is being used in an article, but we have no
> > rationale whatsoever.
>
> Fair enough. Is it required that the original uploader provide the
> fair use rationale, or can someone else? If we require the original
> uploader, that might be a problem. If you're not the original
> uploader, but provide a rationale, are you thereby assuming
> responsibility for a copyright lawsuit?
>
> -Matt
I've done a bit of thinking on this, and I believe that whoever
includes the image tag in the article would be responsible for
preparing a work containing the fair use material. If User A uploads
the image, B puts it in the article, and then C breezes by and puts a
fair use justification, then B would probably be responsible; but if D
comes by and corrects a typo in the article and leaves the image tag
in, then D could become responsible.
But this is all hopelessly speculative. My opinion is that the purpose
that the source, tag, and fair use justification serve is allowing
downstream consumers of the image database (future editors and also
those who download the wikipedia database to build fork sites) to make
a solid determination of whether they want to include the image in
their work. It's a form of "rights clearance" database.
Legal arguments about the fair use rationale are hopeless. Any lawyer
qualified to give advice on the matter would not give it for free on
the Internet without that famous disclaimer, "this does not constitute
legal advice, contact a licensed professional...", q.v.
[[Wikipedia:Legal disclaimer]]. I think my own opinion is pretty good
just as an average US citizen with an interest in the law, but I won't
bore anyone with it unless upon request. Therefore the bottom line is
anyone who's concerned about themselves should talk to a lawyer about
their specific case.
The decision is quite simply: "if I decide to take this article and
edit it, and there is an image included in the previous version, do I
want to include it in my version? Do I feel comfortable with the
source and fair use justification? Would I feel better if I removed or
replaced it, and why?" Life's much easier when you consider it in that
light.
[[User:Kwh]]
[[Triumph of the Will]] has a gallery of fair use pictures. The gallery
itself violates fair use under American law, which requires that the
subject of the images be critically discussed by the article using those
images. As if that were not enough, the images are *high-resolution*. It
has been suggested that the images are public domain, but this has not
been conclusively proven, and the images are currently marked with a
copyright of 2005 by the uploader, who also wrote much of the article.
It would be bad enough if this is any ordinary article, but...
1. It's a featured article, which means it's the best we have to offer
2. It's on the frickin' main page right now
Then again, I suppose this does reflect the condition of how fair use
and copyright law are blatantly ignored/misunderstood by most
Wikipedians...for further information, see [[Wikipedia:Fair use
review]], which has a fuller description of what's going on.
John
Is there such a thing as editors' guides to specific areas?
For example, the Trinidad and Tobago article attracts people all the time
who add "new" information which is already contained in some subarticle.
They don't expect the level of depth of Trinidad and Tobago articles that
exist, so they just add something that's "missing", probably unaware of what
exists.
It would be nice if there was some way to add an "editors guide" - something
like "Interested in editing articles related to Trinidad and Tobago? Browse
our articles on the topic". Yeah, I realise that the "obvious" answer is
"that's what categories are for", but there're two problems with categories
- one is that they are too opaque (there are too many sub-sub-sub
categories) and another is that the category link at the bottom of the page
is too obscure - it's too far down the page and not eye-catching enough. I
am thinking of something that could go in a box like the Sister Links box
(or in that box). Something friendly and eyecatching, something aimed at
capturing new editors and pointing them to the type of page they might have
something to add to - or if nothing else, preventing them (maybe) from
adding trivia when we already have a whole article.
Is there anything like this? Do other people see it as something
potentially useful?
Ian
David Gerard wrote:
Seen this?
http://store.britannica.com/jump.jsp?itemID=114
<http://store.britannica.com/jump.jsp?itemID=114&itemType=CATEGORY&iMainCat=
4&iSubCat=114&sort=1&dpid=14>
&itemType=CATEGORY&iMainCat=4&iSubCat=114&sort=1&dpid=14
You can get the full Britannica DVD for US$25!
At that sort of price, I'm tempted to get one myself, not least to say
to journalists that I'm not only a fan but I bought a copy ...
And they're clearing this at US$20:
http://store.britannica.com/shopping/product/detailmain.jsp?itemID=247
<http://store.britannica.com/shopping/product/detailmain.jsp?itemID=247&item
Type=PRODUCT&iProductID=247> &itemType=PRODUCT&iProductID=247
Anyone with dreams of a printed Wikipedia 1.0 should look at this and
think how we can get there.
- d.
Well, the first thing we need to do is to figure out where we are,
especially as we have passed the point where we can just say "We have
1,000,000 articles!" and that gives us more weight. From now on, the raw
number is going to matter less and less and our quality is what will become
the yardstick to measure us.
In an often-neglected corner of the project namespace, the
[[Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team]] has quietly been assessing
articles, and has made several lists of articles that are in great shape and
those that need improvement. Since any encyclopedia should have articles
that comprise a "core", several editors have gone through and assessed all
the articles listed on [[Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Core topics]].
There's a few good ones, but there's some that need vast improvement. An
example would be the [[Toy]] article. Now, who would like to publish on
paper an article that looks more like a list than anything else? That's just
a start. All the articles with a "Start" as their assessment are not usable
in Wikipedia 1.0 and need some tender and caring love.
Then there's also independent WikiProjects. All active WikiProjects have now
been contacted, and have been asked for listings of articles that they
consider to be of high quality. The results we have are available at
[[Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WikiProject full article list]].
However, as you can see, there's still gaps-we need to have some projects
answer, and there's others that we just need to prune. However, the
centralized article list also tells us which projects are active, some of
them dishing out FAs at a constant rate.
That said, this is nowhere even close to being done: there's still quite a
bit of work to do. Look at the lists I've given and those given at
[[Wikipedia:Article assessment]] to look at what's the most urgent to fix.
Better yet, go and help violet/riga with the current topic at
[[Wikipedia:Article assessment/African countries]], as it looks rather
empty. Overall, there's plenty of things to do and too few hands to do it,
and you get the same warm, fuzzy sensation you feel when you're being a
rogue admin...
Titoxd.
> Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 15:13:40 +1100
> From: Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A Solution to the Image Problem
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <44222074.1030207(a)student.canberra.edu.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>
> G'day Mark,
>
> > On 3/22/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >>Can't we just start by asking for a software upgrade that doesn't
> >>accept images without a source? Hiding the link also makes uploading
> >>harder for regular contributors who don't remember links and use the
> >>side bar for easy access and for newbies who do care abou copyrights.
> >
> > All that will do is force users to provide whatever the software is
> > looking for as a "source". We're seeing this already with copyright
> > tags: people are sticking license tags, usually "fair use" and
> > "CopyrightedFreeUse" license tags, on images in a desperate attempt to
> > keep the images safe from the "no license" patrol. You can see this
> > in the responses to OrphanBot's notifications: many are of the form
> > "What license tag should I stick on my image to keep it from being
> > deleted?".
>
> This sort of thing used to irk me terribly, until I stumbled across
> something approaching Enlightenment. If we assume good faith, the
> answer is obvious: the user isn't lying in a desperate attempt to
> violate copyrights and get us in trouble; he's (it is usually a he)
> merely confused and caught up in process fetishism.
>
> Images aren't deleted because they don't have a tag: they're deleted
> because they have no source and their copyright status is unclear, and
> we've decided not to take the risk of keeping such images around for no
> good purpose. But if I, or any other person trying to crack down on
> copyvios, try to explain the situation to a newbie, we say: "you need to
> place a tag on this image". Is it any *wonder* he gets confused? What,
> will any tag do? Any source is appropriate, right, even if that source
> says "all rights reserved, do not steal our images or we'll steal your
> thumbs, and what use will your precious Gameboy be then, eh?"?
>
> We confuse what the tags mean with the tags themselves. I have the same
> problem with other templates, like the {{testn}} warnings: we aren't
> warning people, we're slapping a template on their page
> (congratulations! You're the 100th RC patroller to tag this page this
> year! Has it occurred to you that this talkpage already contains 99
> identical boilerplate warnings, and what effect that has on a growing
> lad?), and likewise with images.
>
> > When trying to solve the image problem, there are some fundamental
> > things you need to keep in mind:
> > *Joe User doesn't care about "correct"
> > *Joe User doesn't care about "copyright"
> > *Joe User doesn't care about "source"
> > *Joe User doesn't care about "policy"
> > All Joe User wants is pictures in his article.
>
> Bingo. And he's not being malicious in that; he's being human (or
> possibly a magpie). We need to explain to him *why* he can't have his
> picture; "because it hasn't got the right tag" just doesn't cut it.
>
> When we say "that's policy", what we're *really* saying is "because I
> and a few other people said so". Learning the *reason* why we do
> things, so that a) we can do them properly, and b) we can explain them
> to others, is vital.
>
Spot on, but I would add - Joe User /can/ have an image in /his/
article. The thing is, you or anyone else can replace that version of
the article with your version, sans image. And if it's "fair use",
then someone else can delete the image which is orphaned. So the deal
isn't "put a tag and a source on it, and you can keep it". It's
"thanks for adding a piece to our collective work, but I'd like to
know if it's your work or someone else's."
And you're dead-on in that {{testn}}, {{nothanks}}, and other
template-based communications fail when they seem too much like
"mechanical" communication; like a syntax error from a program. The
average Windows user spends all day clicking off mindless "OK, Cancel"
dialogs, or deleting machine-generated emails. I find that people's
brains tend to turn off as soon as something seems to be "canned" - if
it's in the way of what I want to do, it's like the old DOS error
message - "Abort, Retry, Ignore".
An example would be someone calling a 1-800 customer service number.
While on hold, the recording wants to tell you about all the great
things the company does and how sorry they are that you have to hold,
but it's all in-one-ear-and-out-the-other until an actual human voice
comes on the line. Even then, it's the customer service
representatives "humanity" that connects. If that person is simply
reading me a series of boilerplate scripts with little affect, I don't
necessarily feel that they've done anything for me, and perhaps I feel
a bit disrespected.
This is not to say that other editors are our 'customers' to be
served, but more distinctly, they are fellow human beings, and deserve
perhaps greater respect than would a customer.
And nobody needs to be enforcing a policy that they don't understand,
or personally believe in - people often have to do this if they work
in a service job, but that's a condition of getting paid. In the Wiki
sense, citing policy should not mean "your work needed to be removed
because of policy", but "I removed your work. This 'policy' explains
why I felt the need to do that." and perhaps "after reading that
'policy', if you have any questions about why I did that, you can ask
me."
[[User:Kwh]]
David Gerard (dgerard(a)gmail.com) [060323 12:16]:
> For those who missed it, I've put my segment up:
> http://static.rocknerd.org/david/radiowales-q0-mono.ogg
> Ogg Vorbis, 2,311,827 bytes.
Apparently there's no mailing list for cy:. But I chatted with Telsa on IRC
about this a coupla nights ago and she says she'll shop the URL around the
Welsh Nationalist-inclined bloggers, which may help recruitment for cy:.
Telsa also says the big problem with cy: is that it's really badly written
for the most part ... basically, that it needs some native speakers who are
good writers to give it a top-to-bottom revision and set the standard.
Which is actually quite feasible with 4,000 articles, if the editors can be
found. I know no Welsh myself or I'd dive in ...
- d.
I've come across a report of a 7-year old pool player who's winning in
tournaments against adults and who's also able to perform several pool
trick shots. It wouldn't make for an incredibly large article, but I'd
like to get a general feel about what most people feel about such an
article.
Would it make any difference if I first saw him in "Ripley's Believe
it or Not"? I hope not, as I'm sure I can find other sources.
Mgm
Alright, here's what we do:
1. Disable image uploads across all projects.
2. Move all images to somewhere else until they are verified.
3a. Only allow administrators to upload images, and hope that admins
have a decent grasp of copyright law.
3b. Have all images be handled by the Wikimedia Office and/or the
permissions queue of OTRS.
Would it fix anything?
--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP