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]]