On 28/06/06, Berto <albertoserra(a)ukr.net> wrote:
Unfortunately,
I believe, trying to set a policy could be interpreted
as the Wikimedia Foundation taking responsibility for it too, rather
than leaving the responsibility for copyright infringement on the
uploading users, as it should be.
It's okay 4 me. Let's give the cops the guy's IP and that's it...
I'll
propose to pms to publish a guide telling people in BIG black capitals that
whatever they do, they do it at their own personal risk. And that they
should better get themselves a lawyer before uploading pics :) The rest will
simply be a translation of the @ en.wiki policy. Since it's the bigger
edition, it's also got to have the huger amount of pics. And if they
survived with their policy so far, it means that we can survive, too.
I would strongly encourage /not/ doing that... in fact I would
strongly encourage going the other way and disallowing fair use and if
possible, gaining community support to turn off local uploads (only
use Commons images). Quite a few projects have done this, the most
recent being Spanish Wikipedia. This is a trend I like. Are we here to
provide 100% free content or what? If so, what are we doing with these
stupid unnecessary crutches and disclaimers like "fair use"? Fair use
is not at all necessary for a Wikipedia to be decent.
Also, having a more restrictive policy makes it far easier to police.
You might not be aware, but en.wp has a huge problem at the moment
with trying to sort through literally thousands of images that have
been uploaded with wrong or incomplete information. Save your admins
the headache and just disallow them from the start!
I also find the notion of passing all responsibility onto the uploader
pretty bogus. If we want to say our content is FREE, not just pretty
free, or mostly free, or /probably/ free, then we as a community have
to be vigilant about educating users and verifying image sources and
licenses. What is a Wikipedia riddled with copyvios worth? To me, not
very much.
Brianna