[WikiEN-l] Uploading images should be a privilige, not a right

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Much of the image deletion policy is based around the fact that there
> are maybe a dozen people on Wikipedia who understand the image use
> policy well enough to enforce it, and are willing to take the time to
> do so.  At the same time, over two thousand new images are uploaded
> each day, adding to the 553,000 images already on Wikipedia.
>
> By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right
> conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal
> with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of
> problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.

I, too, have faced all the challenges that you mention in your
email... I especially 'enjoy' watching someone play license template
roulette. :-/   But I don't believe it would be wise to turn off image
uploads.

What you say about copyright being hard is mostly true, but I think
that what matters more than it being difficult is that it doesn't
match up to people's natural instincts. They think "I got this off a
webpage for free so it must be okay." or "No one will complain".

In any case, I think the worry about copyright is ignoring the real
problem:  WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PHOTOGRAPHERS!  Even if we ignore the
advantages of being able to work with the creator, when the copyright
holder uploads their own content our problems are greatly reduced.

This is why so many of our problems are centered around images and not
text... because while the copyright situation with text is
fundimentally no different, there is little expectation by random
folks that we'll accept text copied from elsewhere... as very little
of Wikipedia text (esp pop culture stuff) is obviously copied from an
outside source, while many of our images (esp pop culture stuff) do
come from outside sources.

Go take a look at featured images on commons... Even most of the
images there are found-on-the-web stuff, although they are (hopefully)
free content found-on-the-web stuff.

So, as a result I'd be hesitant to support any measure which
discouraged photographers from contributing, because I think that our
habbit of using images from outside sources (free or not) is a huge
part of the problem.

Perhaps we could look at doing something to shove new uploaders into a
(web based) chat, which we could staff with half-clueful folks who
could determine if the uploader understands, and set an upload
permission bit?   But the idea has a lot of challeges, such as how to
staff the channel.

We could also replace the upload link in the standard public skin with
an instruction page... and require people to redlink images in order
to upload them. (This would reduce the huge number of images which
spend their whole life orphaned, freeing up our resources.. and would
require new uploaders to read a bit in order to figure it out).