[WikiEN-l] Re: permission

[Timwi]

Matt Brown wrote:
> Good point. I also have had several ... not-quite-fights ... with users who
> either attempt to replace free-licensed pictures with supposedly 'better'
> "fair use" pictures, or who object to my removing a fair-use picture in
> favor of a free one. They complain that the free ones look 'amateurish'
> because they're not studio shots.

That /is/ a valid argument, you have to admit. Aspiring to be a serious 
encyclopedia project, many of our contributors feel that the quality not 
only of the text but also of the pictures is a more important goal than 
some obscure (in their mind, not mine) copyright concern. As long as 
"fair use" means "we can use it legally", to most people it meets that 
goal better than an inferior-quality image with free licensing does.

The primary reason we want freely-licensed images is not because they're 
more beautiful but because they make our content as a whole more 
reusable. So maybe there should be a feature whereby an article can have 
two images, but if you visit wikipedia.org you will only see the 
better-quality-but-fair-use one, while the database dumps will contain 
only the ugly-but-freely-licensed one.

Obviously, there will be varying opinions on how this should be designed 
and implemented, so it's probably not going to get done.

Timwi