Rich Holton wrote:
It's tough to beat no image as an incentive
to find one. And it's easy
to ignore a frame or a notice. How ugly and intrusive a frame or notice
would you be willing to accept?
Yes, I agree that making the encyclopedia less useful is the most
dramatic spur to making it more useful.
Must it be ugly and intrusive? If the notion is that people care about
free images, I'd think a simple and reasonable notice would be enough.
We could try that theory, anyhow, and see how it works.
The alternative theory seems to be that even the people who want free
images believe that most people don't care, and so making things ugly is
a way to force everybody else to conform to their standards, avoiding
the hard work of persuasion, or the even harder work of actually taking
the photos they want. That's not the theory, is it?
I may be
going out on a limb here, but I've always thought our primary purpose here was to make
an encyclopedia for people to use, and that free content is the mechanism by which we do
that, not the main point of the project.
As I and others have stated elsewhere, the primary purpose is to create
a *free encyclopedia*.
Ok. That's not inconsistent with what I said. I see a public
encyclopedia as a goal, and Gnu-style freeness as the mechanism.
Is there
some practical purpose to what I gather is a recent wave of
image deletions? And by practical, I mean described such that a named
group of people will experience near-term benefits. I've only seen it
explained in terms of ideological compliance or technical license
compliance, which has always left me underwhelmed.
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge."
Every non-free image we have makes that goal more distant.
Perhaps I was unclear, but you didn't answer my question. You gave me an
ideology, not a practical reason to do this. And personally, I think
"freely share" is not strongly related to Richard Stallman's particular
definition of freedom. Let me try again:
Would you please name a group or groups of people who are prevented from
learning from Wikipedia because of the not-completely-free nature of
some images?
Thanks,
William
Your question could just as easily be "What group or groups of people
are prevented from learning from Wikipedia when blatant copyright
violations are included?" Many authors would not care, and can always
issue a take-down notice if they do.
Of course, with "fair-use", if the author would prefer we not use it, we
can safely ignore their preferences.
Yes, this is a bit silly, because there is an underlying assumption that
we are really about more than just letting people learn from Wikipedia.
We are also here to encourage the use of free licenses in the process of
building a free encyclopedia.
The Mission Statement of the Wikimedia Foundation
(
) states:
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people
around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free
license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and
globally.
When we allow people to use non-free images where a free option exists,
we are "preventing" them from using Wikipedia in the way that the
mission of the foundation explicitly states is a goal. We are not
educating our editors in the use of free materials.
I am not educated in all the legal issues, but I understand that "fair
use" images creates more legal issues than free licensed images,
especially when you go to distributing to those who do not have access
to the internet. Is distributing to non-internet connected users not
also part of our goal?
-Rich Holton