[Commons-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Racism in Commons

[Chris McKenna]

On Wed, 5 Dec 2007, Daniel Schwen wrote:

> We sould apply the same standards to the holocaust-denial cartoons as we do to
> the mohammed cartoons. That means showing them as a fair use version, and
> thus due to licensing issues not on commons but on wikipedia, where they are
> used in an appropriate context accompanied by a critical discussion.

I'm a little out of date with the fair use policy on en.wp (and don't know 
the policy on other wps), but as I understand it, if there is a Free 
version available (which if the image was on commons I presume their 
must be) then the view is that (Wikipedia/the Foundation) cannot claim 
fair use.

If I am correct in this, then if the images have encyclopaedic merit and 
projects want to inlcudem them, they need to be hosted on Commons.

In my opinion, we should not be censoring the Commons or applying double 
standards to any content by removing material that is offensive to one 
group of people and not removing content that is offensive to another 
group of people. Almost every image of a person stands a good chance of 
offending somebody somewhere, so we should either delete all the images 
depicting humans or drawings of humans and anything else that offends 
people or we should allow the inclusion of everything that meets the 
Commons' inclusion policy (basically, anything useful for a Wikimedia 
project that can be legally hosted by Commons).

Either directly or via the "disclaimers" or "About Wikimedia Commons" 
links at the bottom of every page, we should make it clear though that 
Commons is not censored and contains content that may offend. It should 
also make clear that we do not encourage or support racism, sexism, 
religious or any other form of discrimination, but that as such 
discriminations exist, Commons may contain images that depicts them.

Chris

-- 
Chris McKenna

cmckenna at sucs.org
www.sucs.org/~cmckenna


The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes,
but with the heart

Antoine de Saint Exupery