On 06/11/2007, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 06/11/2007, Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Because of some rather legalistic interpretations
of the policy, the
template you applied to the image which has *all appearances of a
rationale* and which probably says exactly what you would say for a
rationale if you spent a long time thinking about it .... isn't
actually considered a rationale.
I sometimes wonder if this is an elaborate trick
to put people off
using non-free images, simply by making it such a hassle that it's not
worth their time...
There's probably a bit of that. The problem is that we have a firehose
of nonfree stuff being uploaded under the hitherto-unknown "I wanna!"
clause of US fair use law. So cleaning it up is getting a bit harsher.
I'm a big fan of fair use when encyclopedically useful (and we could
get away with *FAR* more than we do), but the floods of crap and the
whinier flooders are really quite, um, annoying.
David really hit on the primary reason here: It's the firehose of "I
wanna!"s.
It's a lot easier for people to clean up rubbish if they can avoid
waisting their lives with never ending arguments by relying on simple
bright line bureaucratic rules. "Oh you used blue ink. The form
clearly says black ink. I'm going to rip this up and you're going to
have to start over".
Invested parties don't want to lose the tools that make their lives
easier. ... and if you don't stand back and look at the bigger picture
it doesn't sound too unreasonable. And then there is the fear...
"what if this requirement is the only thing holding back a tidal
wave?!".
I'd actually feel better if Andrew's suspicion were true, at least
that would imply that someone thought through the effects. I don't
think thats the case.
The process has been minting a whole generation of highly invested '"I
wanna" attornies' who are now actively working to change the English
Wikipedia project policy to permit anything they can get away with
('free' as in we haven't been caught yet). :(
Of course, this is also relevant to commons... both in terms of the
risks of following in English's footsteps, and that fact that we catch
no small amount of fallout from their actions.