On 6/6/05, Roger Luethi <collector(a)hellgate.ch> wrote:
* Make the copyvio warning on the edit page more
visible. I notice that
the German WP comes with a warning in a fat box with a red border. It
is so cheap I am positive it will pay for its cost.
Scroll to the bottom of this page to see how it looks like:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Saint-Cloud&action=edit
This is great, we also need to make it a practice of asking uploaders
if *they* are the copyright holder.
* Clarify policy: WP:CP works quite well for pages
that started as
copyvio, at least if they are caught early. The page also gives
instructions for dealing with pages "where the most recent edit is a
copyright violation, but the previous article was not".
However, what if a copyvio added material several months ago, and
many editors kept working on the article afterwards? I say the article
remains a derived work and must be reverted to the last clean state,
but others disagree.
Either way, there are too many conflicting opinions scattered all
over WP and meta.
I'm in your camp.
* Be strict: I contend that a key reason for the
epidemic is that many,
even experienced editors are both too lenient and too careless. Large
contributions of perfect prose from unknown editors do not trigger
suspicion and checks nearly as often as they should. And unlike
vandalism or personal attacks, copyvios are often met with a cavalier
attitude which sends the wrong message.
This is related to the above, if the cost of a violation is just
clipping out some text later then people aren't likely to be strict
about it. People do not account for the huge potential liabilities
copyright violation places on the project, users of our content, and
the cost in terms of negative publicity if we are branded a bunch of
theves. Once the quality of the vast majority of our content becomes
unquestionably good, the next obvious way to knock us is to say we got
there via theft...
I think we need to get much more strict on material submitted by
someone other than it's copyright holder. The issues are too complex
for us to expect anyone to get it right, at least the "I made this"
case is simple enough that we should only go afoul with bad
intentioned people and complete idiots. Our community is now big
enough that we can reasonably expect it to generate the vast majority
of the media we need of any type.. Exceptions should obviously be
granted for logos, historic images, etc but they should be handled as
exceptions and not the norm. On the plus side this will get us more
works which are very well targeted to our needs, rather than
misapproiated stock photography which is only partially what we want.