On 12/10/06, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)earthlink.net> wrote:
> Let's paraphrase into parable language:
>
> "The explicit goal of the project is to acquire a collection of
> apples. Therefore, every time someone gives us an orange, this is
> harmful to our project."
Except that we have people who argue that the project is really to
acquire a collection of fruit, and see no reason to
acquire apples
because "we already have the oranges, and they taste better anyway".
There is currently very little community acknowledgement or support for any
largescale effort for people to go take and donate free images to the
project.
I'm all for changing that, but I have zero bandwidth to try to drive such a
thing right now.
I have spent several dozens of hours taking photos, making graphics, and
working with some museums trying to get specific images created or get
permission to come take specific images (the latter mostly frustratingly not
succeeding), when I had more time available to help. I've contacted dozens
of companies trying to get them to free-release images, mostly
unsuccessfully.
Pictures aren't just worth a thousand words; you can write those thousand
words in the time it takes to accomplish getting the picture done, on the
average.
A number of people on the fair use policy pages have explicitly declared
that they consider the free content goal to be
secondary at most. I
suppose it's fortunate that they haven't started lifting text from other
websites en masse...
Wikipedia stripped of all the fair use images at the moment would suck
rather badly.
Making Wikipedia worse, in order to try and convince people to put more time
in and eventually make it better, seems like a bad tradeoff to me.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com