Be aware...in his The Word segment 10 minutes ago EDT Stephen Colbert
asked people to go to [[Elephant]] and insert bad information, and
people are already hitting the article.
FYI.
--
John Lyden - rasputinaxp(a)gmail.com
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time..." -Kerouac
They copyright policy adopted by the contributors to Wikipedia is more
restrictive than strictly required by law. This is a good thing for
two primary reasons: The first is that we have a commitment to Free
Content where the law has no objection to us distributing content with
outrageous restrictions, and the second is that a restrictive policy
removes grey areas which make enforcement difficult.
The existence of a strict policy encourages people to create free
images where they are possible and has greatly increased the number of
free images available to the world. An easy example is the articles on
automobile models on enwiki... in the last year substantial progress
has been made in creating and using free images and in many places
this progress was directly driven by editors refusing to accept unfree
images in the articles.
However, there are a number of cases such as the recent thread on the
image of Treanna where common sense would tell us to permit the
image... that it represents no compromise of our goals and no legal
threat. There have been quite a few examples that I've run into...
The challenge is that if we permit this sort of decision making we
find that for almost any image there is someone who will find
inclusion reasonable. This is substantiated by the fact that we
delete over 30,000 images per month on enwiki... after all, at least
the *uploader* thought it was reasonable to inclued the image. A
widespread permission to heed the 'common sense' of individual
contributors in these matters would simply result in chaos and likely
a massive regression in the overall freeness of our content.
I would like to propose a solution:
We should appoint or elect someone to make exceptions to our policy.
Ideally this person would carry a strong commitment to keeping our
content maximally free... but my view is that even if we appointed
someone with poor judgement that the bad calls of one person are
highly preferable to the bad calls of all our contributors.
Much like the arbcom acts as a consensus tool to help us achieve
consensus on bans and other such methods, a person in this position
would help us achieve consensus for exceptions to our image use
policy. They would not exist to make determinations on matters of
policy, but only to permit things which are legally permissible,
obviously non-harmful to our goals, but clearly against our policy.
In this manner the strict 'bright lines' policy can remain, preserving
the sanity of those who work to keep our content free, but we do not
suffer the harm of rejecting material which would be permitted by
common sense.
Thoughts?
Consider [[Image:Magnetowasright2.jpg]]
says it's CC, but, doesn't Marvel holds the rights to mageto character?
I wasn't sure how to proceed, and given the iamge is used almost
exclusively on userpages, I didn't want to upset a lynchmob to get me
later, so ... what should be done here? is that actually a CC image?
Do animated images still qualify for fair use?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:AllYourBaseAnimated.gif is interesting,
though this may qualify as it's a video game. What about TV shows?
--
Joe Anderson
[[User:Computerjoe]] on en, fr, de, simple, Meta and Commons.
On 8/1/06, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote:
> Heh, my productivity machine is botanical gardens. Photo of label,
> whole plant, closeups of leaves/flowers, three steps to the left,
> repeat. :-) UC Berkeley botanical garden sez they have 12,000 taxa
> for instance, I've only racked up about 300 of them so far...
Bastard! I do European castles. I don't have a car. You have any idea how
long it takes to take those "three steps to the left"?
Actually the real problem is getting to the article after visiting the
place, and discovering that someone has already taken a (better) photo of
it.
Amusing case in point:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Rock_of_Cashel_inside_cathedral.jpg
(my image)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Rock_of_Cashel-castle_interior.jpg
(existing image)
Steve
How would people feel about a "Submit review" tab that is only shown
to unregistered users, and that would result in a page showing
a) A brief excerpt (~1000 characters) of the article from which the
user clicked "Submit review", and a link to open the whole article in
a separate window
b) A note that we encourage people to directly correct errors, with
further links on how to get started
c) A form with the following elements
Reviewer's name
Reviewer's e-mail address
Reviewer's professional background / affiliation (if any)
Review text
[ ] You agree that text of your review may be quoted, copied and
otherwise used
under the terms of the GNU FDL
The reviews would be sent to a to-be-created mailing list, e.g.
reviews-l(a)wikipedia.org. Besides the form information, the messages
would include an exact revision ID of the article that was being
reviewed.
Might such a strategy be a way to bridge the gap between experts and
the larger wiki world? One reason why experts may not want to
participate directly is that they simply do not want to waste their
time arguing with Wikipedians about what is right and wrong --
instead, they feel that their expertise should carry some weight. We
could even put out a press release: "Wikipedia solicits experts
reviews."
With a mailing list, volunteers could look at each submission, and act
upon the ones which are legitimate (perhaps posting excerpts to the
talk page etc.). At the same time, such a system would not undermine
the regular community processes. It would also be easier to use than
talk pages, and encourage providing credentials.
Another advantage of such a solution is that it's almost trivial to
code -- in fact Angela wrote a "Contact us" extension that could be
used as a basis for such a form.
To prevent spam and abuse, e-mail confirmation could be required
before a review is processed. But perhaps it should be tried first
without that.
Thoughts?
Erik
[[Wikipedia:Privacy_of_article_subjects]]
We get OTRS requests related to such problems and there is a lack of
consensus in the project for how to deal with them.
>From [[Machu Picchu]]:
In one of the episodes of Seinfeld, Cosmo Kramer enjoys samples of
tortilla chips in an South American clothing store while mumbling
"Mmm! Machu Picchu!".
Steve
I've never much liked sentences that start "Critics argue that...".
Here's an alternative I saw at [[Tied Test]]:
--
Some commentators believed Chappell should have taken Snedden's word
that the catch was good.
--
I find this to be more natural, less contrived, and more NPOV.
"Critics" seems to imply that the people had it in for the subject of
the article for some reason. "Commentators" is much more neutral -
just (presumably somewhat notable) people who expressed an opinion on
the event.
Any opinions? Other alternatives to the infamous "critics"?
Steve
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 7/31/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> While I like that we're debating ways to encourage more
>> copyright-compliant uploads, I'm not sure about this particular idea.
>> Right now, when I happen across an article with a red link for an image,
>> I know to remove it and/or look for a substitute. Do we want to make
>> people wonder whether they should wait around in case there's an upload
>> forthcoming?
>
> That bring around another question... Why do we consider redlinks for
> non yet created articles benificial while we conisder redlinks for not
> yet created illustrations to be a problem that must be fixed? :)
A perceptive cultural observation. Although I would add that red links
prompting the creation of articles are not necessarily always beneficial
- it depends on how good the judgment is of the editor who made the link.
--Michael Snow
