[Foundation-l] A letter to Wikipedia collides with the non-free content policies

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 27, 2008 12:35 AM, Remember the dot <rememberthedot at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm hoping for clarification by the foundation on whether or not
> by-permission-only works like this may be used.
[snip]
> It's not that I'm whining that the foundation come to the rescue and tell us
> what to do. It's that the foundation has given us an ambiguous statement on
> when it is and is not OK to use non-free content.

This issue has been explained to you on multiple occasions:  As far as
project content goes "with permission" is nether sufficient, nor
relevant to the acceptability of content on the projects.

Checking in at [[Wikipedia_talk:Non-free_content]] I do not see any
indication of widespread concern or confusion.

If there is a genuine confusion on the intention of the foundation's
policy and specific guidance I suspect that someone will be able to
get a detailed explanation so long as they don't waste everyone's with
trifles and absurdities.

For future reference, when privately peppering foundation folks over
and over again fails to get you the results you want forum-shopping
your way to foundation-l is also unlikely to bring you satisfaction.

> This has actually happened in
> the past:
[snip]
> and I would really like for it to not happen in the future.

In this instance [1] and several times in the past you have found
bizarre corner cases of EnWP's rules and have gone around enforcing
these straw-man rule interpretations, which you don't agree with, in
order to incite people into relaxing the content policy.

This sort of disruptive behavior is expressly forbidden on Enwiki by
its [[WP:POINT]] policy.

If you'd like to avoid this in the future you can simply discontinue
your own disruption.


I've specifically avoided giving any suggestion or input here on the
case you are complaining about. I'm quite confident that the rest of
the enwiki community can find a reasonable enough way to handle that
matter.


Cheers


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion/2008_January_22&diff=prev&oldid=187192145